Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 29

Beethoven’s romantic fatalism

Reprising this post on a fascinating and oft-debated issue: Beethoven’s sense of life. To start — three sensitive commentators on the meaning of Beethoven’s music. * Hermann Hesse, the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, in Steppenwolf, contrasting Mozart to Beethoven (and to Kleist, who committed suicide at age 34): “You have lent a deaf ear to those that […]

How great artists become great

Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven: “Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters […]

Price gouging at Walmart

Sample data for 2023 * Walmart net profit: 2.13% * City of Chicago sales tax on WalMart purchases: 10.25% * US federal government tax rate on Walmart: 29.1%.

Critical Rationalism and Objectivism—on the Theory of Anything podcast

On their Theory of Anything podcast, Bruce Nielson and Peter Johansen discuss epistemology with me. One big question we take up: Before doing high-level philosophy of science—logic, math, experiment design, theory-formation—how important is it to have good accounts of base-level cognition—perception, conception, proposition-formation? Another: What are the similarities and differences between Critical Rationalism (launched by […]

How do we educate young people for jobs that don’t exist yet? Season 2 of Open College launches

In the first episode of the new season of Open College, my question in this episode is for my fellow parents and educators in this era of accelerating robotics and artificial intelligence: How do we prepare young people to work at jobs that don’t exist yet? “Artificial Intelligence Means Entrepreneurial Education Now“ Episode Number: 56 […]

PREMODERN, MODERN, and POSTMODERN. Lecture 8 of Postmodern Philosophy [Peterson Academy course]

Lecture Eight: What are the lessons of 20th-century philosophy? Has the Enlightenment been a success or a failure? Do we need to build on the Modern world’s successes — or return to a better, Pre-modern intellectual and cultural world — or, rejecting both, accept a disquieting Postmodern future? Themes: History as “philosophy teaching by example.” […]

Do the Woke Want the Lesser to Succeed — Or the Successful to Fail?

Answering the question in their own words: Two photos of flyers posted on university bulletin boards as I’ve traveled around giving campus talks. Related: My talk this year in Washington, DC, on the “social justice”, postmodern, and critical-theory roots of this generation’s Wokism:

Philosophy’s longest sentence: Kant over Kierkegaard

Alert philosophical reader Matthias Brinkman found this latest winner in the revived contest: What is the longest sentence ever written by a philosopher? It’s a 438-word behemoth from Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason—that’s in the original German, but it becomes 489 words in this rough English translation: “How mystical enthusiasms in the […]

“Does Immanuel Kant Still Matter?” [new Open College podcast]

Kant died in 1804 — yet contemporary cultural warriors continue to cite him explicitly as grounding their ideologies — for example Dinesh D’Souza on behalf of the conservative right and Jean-François Lyotard on behalf of the postmodern left. Why is Kant’s influence so long-lasting? “Does Immanuel Kant Matter?” Episode Number: 57 Date: October 2024 About […]

Audio edition: What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship

An audio edition [mp3] of my 2009 essay “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” [pdf], first published in Journal of Private Enterprise. Or listen to it at YouTube: Abstract: Entrepreneurship is increasingly studied as a fundamental and foundational economic phenomenon. It has, however, received less attention as an ethical phenomenon. Much contemporary business ethics […]