From Daniel Ellsberg to Henry Kissinger in 1968, as Kissinger is about to become President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor: “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great

I wrote this essay as a graduate student taking a Mediaeval Philosophy course from Professor Paul Vincent Spade (Ph.D., Toronto) in 1988. I recently re-read it with some nostalgia and some pleasure. It won me the award for best graduate student essay that year, but I make no claims to be an expert on mediaeval

Why democratic society is ‘cruel’ to some of its members: Aristocratic society makes people believe their circumstances are inherited destiny and so cannot be helped. But democratic societies encourage people to believe that their destinies depend on their own actions. For some—those who feel themselves to be inferior in some important way—this latter is a

“In the spirit of ancient Athens, where the greatest minds gathered to question the gods, challenge the powerful, and pursue the nature of truth, a new symposium rises. “Four disciplines. Four extraordinary minds. Two days. One relentless pursuit of truth.“ From the marble halls of ancient Greece to the intellectual battlegrounds of the modern world,

I was on the Canadian Wire program with co-hosts Will Horton and Matt Daco, to discuss what the postmoderns got right, misreadings of postmodernism, and the current state of the culture wars.Topics and times:00:30 Who is Stephen Hicks?03:30 From civil engineering to logic and philosophy10:47 Why Explaining Postmodernism?30:04 What postmodernism is and what its advocates

My 10-year publishing agreement with Ockham’s Razor Publishing has ended. ORM published the expanded edition from 2010-2015 and then from 2015 to 2025. Prior to that, Scholargy published the first edition from 2004 to 2009. We’re thinking about a 25th Anniversary edition, with additional material on developments in postmodernism’s theory and its applied activism. I

I’ve been running an informal contest to find the longest sentence ever written by a philosopher. Chelsea, a reader from the U.K., sends us this phenomenal 174-word sentence from the Critique of Pure Reason (B158-159, Guyer translation): “Just as for the cognition of an object distinct from me I also need an intuition in addition