Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 23

Rock band Boston’s music: on the integration of science, engineering, and art

A common trope is that art and science are opposed to each other. That, despite the long list of artistic innovators—from Leonardo, Michelangelo, Monet, and others—who self-consciously applied science and the fruits of technical engineering to make their independent visions real. Leonardo and mathematics, Michelangelo and anatomy, Monet and the chemical industry’s new pigments, and […]

Christians against Christmas?

Reminds me of past extended-family debates over whether Christmas is a legitimate Christian holiday: * One faction argued that we need to put the Christ back in Christmas.* Another faction argued that Christ never was properly in it so Christians should boycott.* A third, semi-pagan faction just got on with enjoying the good food, presents, […]

J.S. Mill on American culture and politics

In the following two passages, with a nod to Tocqueville, Mill makes two strong claims. First he praises American culture: “Almost all travellers are struck by the fact that every American is in some sense both a patriot, and a person of cultivated intelligence. … No such wide diffusion of the ideas, tastes, and sentiments […]

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 […]