Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 21

E-book version of *Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics*

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 […]

Autonomy as a human need

To be fully human is to make one’s own decisions and initiate one’s own actions in life. In this essay at The Creativity Post, physician Alan Lickerman writes: “restrictions on our autonomy may lie at the heart of a great deal of our unhappiness. Studies show, for example, that one of the greatest sources of […]

Reformation-era extremes, Alexander VI version

Pope Alexander VI really knew how to throw a party. Rodrigo Borgia became Alexander VI in 1492 and livened things up at the Vatican. As reported in William Manchester’s excellent A World Lit Only by Fire, p. 79: ‘Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he […]

Rick Walker interviews Stephen Hicks: What recent history teaches us about the culture wars

From high theory in the 1960s to applied education in the 1980s to woke activism in the 2000s. Sub-topics: Woke, Critical Theory, Pomo, National Socialist philosophy. Related: The ‘Galt’s Gulch’ lecture mentioned in the interview:

Victor Hugo on the power of the mature writer

From a later preface to Hans of Iceland, originally published anonymously in 1823: “When a man’s prime is past, when his head is bowed, when he feels compelled to write something more than strange stories to frighten old women and children, when all the rough edges of youth are worn away by the friction of […]

Duchamp’s urinal & Kant’s sublime, according to Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine

Jerry Saltz, a senior art critic for New York Magazine, makes a strong connection between Duchamp and Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime in art. Writing in the Village Voice, Saltz says: “Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical […]

THE PHILOSOPHES and THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT: VOLTAIRE. Lecture 4 of Modern Philosophy [Peterson Academy course]

“Who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, Cromwell, &c.?Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled them all.” Lecture Four: The Philosophes and the French Enlightenment. Voltaire Themes: Deism. Toleration. Anti-superstition. Anti-torture. Irreverence. Who are the greatest humans ever? Augustine. Montaigne. Montesquieu. Diderot. de Gouges. Condorcet. The new “trinity”: Bacon, Locke, Newton. Text: Voltaire: Letters […]

Peterson interviews Hicks — excerpt on philosophy of mind, epistemology, skepticism

In the following excerpt from his interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson, Dr. Hicks explains why he sees Cognition as an ongoing scientific enterprise — that it’s early days in a complex field — and why he is not a skeptic. Here’s the full interview, with timestamps for sub-topics, filmed in Arizona in November 2024: Related: […]

I don’t understand population fears

We’ve gone from “Too many people!” a generation ago to “Not enough babies!” now. I don’t get either worry. Let’s take Europe as an example. Currently its population is about 740 million, and one projection is that by the year 2100 its population will decline to 600 million. And some commentators go “Yikes!” Why? Possibility […]

Heidegger’s anti-humanism and the Left

Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009). Some key quotations from […]