Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 7

Kierkegaard: A Christian must “relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.”

Defending Christianity—and the legacy of Abraham in particular—Søren Kierkagaard concludes (approvingly) that one’s accepting it means “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.” Source: Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling [1843]. Related: On the fuller context of Kierkegaard’s provocative claim: Related: On Kierkegaard’s place in the historical […]

Syllabus for *PHILOSOPHY of POLITICS: From the French Revolution to World War II*

In this eight-lecture course, Professor Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern political philosophies, from the cataclysm of the French Revolution to the Second World War. Major thinkers covered include: Edmund Burke, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, William James and John Dewey, Giovanni Gentile and Benito […]

Is Woke “liberalism on steroids”? James Orr (Cambridge Univ.) debates Stephen Hicks (Rockford Univ.)

Professor James Orr: “I am convinced where he {Hicks] is not that wokus pokus is liberalism on steroids.” That is from Dr. Orr’s third essay, “Conservatism: Final Thoughts,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. Orr advocates and defends Conservatism; Hicks does the same for Liberalism. Links here: Conservatism or Liberalism? A Debate […]

Nietzsche on his contemporary Germans

[This is Section 29 of Stephen R.C. Hicks’s Nietzsche and the Nazis.] 29. On contemporary Germans: the world’s hope or contemptible? While the Nazis put the German-Aryan racial type first, Nietzsche is almost never complimentary about his fellow Germans. In Nietzsche’s view, Germany has slipped into flabbiness and whininess. Germany once was something to be […]

Socialism in practice: “Private land was 32.4 times as productive as public land in the Soviet Union”

 An economic historian on socialist Russia after WW II:  “The only sector of the economy which showed vigor was private farming: the 33 million private plots belonging to collective farm households, averaging 0.6 acre and constituting 1.5% of the country’s cultivated area, furnished the postwar Soviet Union with nearly one-third of its foodstuffs. In 1979, […]

Must Liberalism Fail? James Orr (Cambridge Univ.) debates Stephen Hicks (Rockford Univ.)

Professor James Orr: “The atomisation of modern society, the tectonic contradictions of identitarianism, the shattering of civic and economic harmony, are not puzzling aberrations of liberalism but the outworking of its inner logic.” That is from Dr. Orr’s second essay, “A Conservative Critique of Liberalism,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. […]

Lewis Thomas’s classic-fun “Notes on Punctuation”

Notes on Punctuation By Lewis Thomas There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation […]

Juneteenth is day of honor

Juneteenth celebrates a great achievement. Slavery had existed for thousands of year in pretty much every culture in the world. But a few brave and lonely voices began to challenge it in the 1700s and within a century—almost a blink of an eye in historical time—it had been eliminated in the civilized parts of the […]

Studio audience invitation for live recording of two new courses

I’m delighted to announce my return to Peterson Academy. I will be teaching two separate courses, Philosophy of Education, on how major thinkers—from Socrates and Plato to Montessori and Foucault—shaped teaching and schooling, and Logic, on how to analyze arguments, spot fallacies, avoid bias, and understand reasoning. Filming in person in Phoenix, AZ. Spaces are limited. Apply […]

How great artists become great — Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky

From Igor Stravinky’s Autobiography: “For me, as a creative musician, composition is a daily function that I feel compelled to discharge. I compose because I am made for that and cannot do otherwise. Just as any organ atrophies unless kept in a state of constant activity, so the faculty of composition becomes enfeebled and dulled […]