Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 20

Why did the editor of *British Journal of Aesthetics* say Kant is key to Modernist Art?

Kant is “rightly regarded as the founder of modern aesthetics.” That is Harold Osborne, longtime editor of the scholarly British Journal of Aesthetics. Osborne further claims that Kant’s “theory is the most important anticipation of the modern aesthetic outlook in any philosopher before the twentieth century”. While it’s initially shocking to think that the priggish and […]

Now is the winter of our content — but not for these philosophers

When little Sigmund saw his mother kissing Santa Claus: “I saw Mommy kissing Santa ClausUnderneath the mistletoe last night.It surely was a dream,I thought, brought on by curdled cream.Now therapy is called forPsy-cho-a-nal-y-ti-cly. (With apologies to the Jackson Five.) Related: My annually reposted “Scrooge’s Hero’s Journey.”

The Meaning of Life and Scrooge’s Hero Journey

What explains the appealing transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge? My annual reposting, in audio and text form below. The many interpretations of Scrooge // Robin Hood analogy // Scrooge as villain of Socialism // as anti-Christian // as Savvy Investor // as Environmentalist // as Malthusian // as anti-Commercialization // Scrooge’s Aristotelian hero’s journey By Stephen […]

AWAKENING FROM THE DOGMATIC SLUMBER: IMMANUEL KANT. Lecture 6 of Modern Philosophy [Peterson Academy course]

“I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” Lecture Six: Awakening from the Dogmatic Slumber. Immanuel Kant Themes: The sorry fate of metaphysics. Limits to reason. Phenomenal versus Noumenal realities. Saving religion and saving science? Duty ethics. Hume. Rousseau. King Frederick William II. Locke. Sulzer. Texts: Kant: Critique of […]

Nvidia CEO Huang on failure

Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) on why innovation requires failure. “Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment. If you don’t experiment you won’t innovate, and if you don’t innovate you won’t succeed.” So a question for educators: How do we teach successful failing? Especially since kids often learn to fear failure, knowing […]

“Educating for Entrepreneurship” — published in English and in Polish

[The English text below was also translated into Polish and published in the education journal Przegląd Pedagogiczny.] Educating for Entrepreneurship Stephen R.C. HicksDepartment of Philosophy and Center for Ethics and EntrepreneurshipRockford UniversityRockford, Illinois, USA Introduction: Japanese visitors to American schools Recently a team of Japanese investigators come to the United States to study its school […]

The Knife Man

Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery is fascinating but not for the squeamish. The key figure is John Hunter, an 18th-century anatomist and revolutionary surgeon of volatile temperament, with a hunger for knowledge that drove him to rob thousands of graves, record the tastes of corpses’ bodily […]

*Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics* — e-book version

My essay on “Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics” is available in e-book format. The essay has gotten very good mileage, so to speak, since being first published in The Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy. It has been translated into German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean, and in English it is available at the […]

Beiser on why the Counter-Enlightenment still matters today

A key exchange between 3:AM Magazine and scholar Frederick Beiser, author of The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte: 3:AM: But this is the question that German philosophers in the last decades of the eighteenth century started asking: as you put it, they asked, ‘what is the authority of reason?’ They were […]

COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT: DAVID HUME and JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU. Lecture 5 of Modern Philosophy [Peterson Academy course]

“Nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics.” Lecture Five: Counter-Enlightenment. David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau Themes: Skepticism, Passions, Fideism. Critiquing the Enlightenment. French Revolution. Lafayette. Voltaire. de Gouges. Robespierre. Texts: Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature. Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality. About the Instructor […]