Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 9

Pakistani edition of *Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault* published

I’m happy to announce that my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault has been published in Pakistan. An Urdu edition, translated by Dr. Nazir Azad, was published in India in 2023. Urdu is the first or second language of 230 million people in Pakistan and India, so I am happy that it […]

TRAC 2014 art panel on Nerdrum’s Kitsch and Scruton’s Beauty

Blast from the past: At the Representational Art Conference in Ventura, California, I participated in a panel focused on the aesthetic theories of Odd Nerdrum and Roger Scruton. My remarks are from the 42:30- to 58-minute mark or so. Also on the panel are editor Peter Trippi, painters Jan-Ove Tuv, Alan Lawson, and Julio Reyes, […]

Heidegger calling for a leader “capable of instilling terror”

From philosopher Martin Heidegger’s lectures in the winter semester of 1929-1930 on “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.” The Great War (1914-1918) had ended over a decade before but, Heidegger argued, its world-historical significance must not be lost. So the professor is explaining to his students what Germany needs: “We must first call for someone capable […]

What the pagan Lithuanians got right

I’ve always admired the Greeks — one must admire a culture that has a god for drinking and partying — but now the Lithuanians of old have risen in my affections. The Baltic pagans had not one but three deities devoted to beer and beer production: Raugutis, the god of beer; Raugutiene, Ragutis’s consort who […]

Kant and socialism, according to Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a leading neo-Kantian philosopher. He trained under Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), a founder and leader of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, which was perhaps the most dominant school of philosophy in the German academic world in the 19th century. Here is Cassirer’s assessment of why Kant matters to the history of socialism: […]

What Is Conservatism? James Orr (Cambridge Univ.) debates Stephen Hicks (Rockford Univ.)

James Orr defends “the conservative’s instinct for the particular over the universal, the empirical over the rational, the concrete over the abstract, the pragmatic over the ideal.” That is from Dr. Orr’s opening essay in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. Orr advocates and defends Conservatism; Hicks does the same for Liberalism. […]

Interpreting Picasso — amusing anecdote from Stravinksy

When composer Igor Stravinksy met Pablo Picasso in Italy in 1917, Picasso drew Stravinsky and gave him the portrait as a gift. But when Stravinksy tried to cross the border with it, he was suspected of attempting to smuggle secret plans out of the country. As Stravinsky tells it in his autobiography: “I shall never […]

Orwell: “To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. …”

George Orwell in 1944: “To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, […]

Literacy Rates in Early Modernity

Year 1500 context: 50 years earlier Gutenberg had developed his printing press, eight years earlier Columbus had crossed the Atlantic, Michelangelo had just finished his Pietà, Luther was in school, and Copernicus was in university. Fewer than 10% of Europeans were literate. Source: Robert C. Allen, Global Economic History, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 26. […]

Liberal Education vs. Indoctrination (quotation from J.S. Mill when younger)

“The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of […]