Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 31

Ellsworth Toohey’s five strategies of altruism [repost]

[I use Ayn Rand’s classic The Fountainhead in my Introduction to Philosophy course, analyzing the five major characters as moral-philosophical types. Here is a digest of the novel’s brilliant-manipulator villain, Ellsworth Toohey.] The ethics of altruism holds that others are the standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of […]

James Orr and J.D. Vance

James Orr is professor at Cambridge University, England. In conservative philosophical lineage, Orr is very much in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Roger Scruton. Prof. Orr and I did a one-hour oral debate in London last year, and a more detailed three-round written debate between us has been submitted for formal publication. Here is […]

John Stuart Mill on government capture

John Stuart Mill uses his crystal ball to predict our circumstance — and/or he learned from history: “When nobody, or only some small fraction, feels the degree of interest in the general affairs of the State necessary to the formation of public opinion, the electors seldom make any use of the right of suffrage but […]

Joseph Priestley’s significance

I did not know this about Priestley’s significance to two of the great American founding fathers: “In the 165 letters that passed between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the name Benjamin Franklin is mentioned five times, George Washington three times, Alexander Hamilton twice — and Joseph Priestley, a foreign immigrant, is cited no fewer than […]

John Dewey on education as socialization

John Dewey was one of the top two most influential philosophers of education in the twentieth century. Maria Montessori was the other. Dewey’s influence has been most strongly felt in the American public school system. In America, Montessori’s influence has mostly been grassroots and in privately funded schools. Montessori’s approach is highly individualistic and individualized. […]

Objectivity for Actual Human Beings | Open College No. 50 | Stephen Hicks

Episode 50 in my Open College with Dr. Stephen Hicks podcast series. Many rejections of objectivity assume from the outset an impossible standard for humans to achieve. Don’t do that. “It’s often said that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, that nothing can be known with any certainty, and that we must give up notions […]

John Hale on Themistocles and the Athenian navy

Hale is a powerful writer — his opening two-paragraph description of a trireme's pulsing, relentless approach will make the blood surge in your own veins.

David Kelley new essay on Concepts, Propositions, and Truth

Philosopher David Kelley (Ph.D., Princeton) is author of The Evidence of the Senses, A Realist Theory of Perception (LSU, 1986), a work on foundational issues in epistemology, and The Art of Reasoning: An Introduction to Logic (W.W. Norton, 1st edition 1990, 5th edition 2020), a widely used textbook. He has published a new essay, “Concepts […]

Which important leftist said this?

(No peeking at the answer below.) “I want everyone to keep the property that he has acquired for himself according to the principle: benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual. But the state should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty not to […]

Telecommunications — the FCC’s ‘Fairness Doctrine’ [Business Ethics Cases series]

My video lecture on the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial “Fairness Doctrine,” part of the Business Ethics Cases series. Contents:1. The early days of radio and a tragedy of the commons.2. What is fairness? Two competing answers.3. The argument for the “Fairness Doctrine.”4. The argument against the “Fairness Doctrine.”5. Related issues: whether politics is special, whether […]