By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 5: If education is to prepare students for living the best possible life, what is that? Which values and virtues are essential? Previous lectures in the series: Part One: What is the purpose of education, and what is philosophy’s relevance? Part Two: Reality: Metaphysics and Education.

Lecture Six: Do claims to knowledge and morality merely mask power? Foucault argues that sex rhetoric has “a tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power.” And Derrida asserts that “the revolution against reason can be made only within it.” Themes: Power as substrate. Structuralism and Post-structuralism. Dekonstruction. Postmodernism. Alexis

“Reason is the ultimate language of madness.” Source: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1965, 95. Related: On the fuller context of Foucault’s provocative claim: Related: On Foucault’s place in the historical course of philosophy: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (print or e-book), or audiobook:

A nine-minute video review of Modern Philosophy. The course comes to an end with the death of Nietzsche in 1900, and the Postmodern Philosophy course then covers developments and dead-ends during the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen Hicks guides us through the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, including philosophers Francis

“Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae or aims. Its essence is inarticulate and its expression, when compelled, skeptical.” My close reading of Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism, first published in 1980 and then in an updated edition in 2014, a few years before his death. In the Philosophers, Explained series: Related: John Stuart