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

Conservatives on the ‘right’ will say “Statecraft as soulcraft,” by which they mean that a function of government is to shape or instill moral virtue in its citizens so that they will live according to the government’s laws.[1] Note the parallel with the ‘left.’ Here is one of the original ‘left’ activists, St-Just: “The legislator

By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 4: Free Will and Determinism, Reason and Emotion, the Mind and the Body. How are anthropology, biology, and psychology important to education? 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 Five: Science and technology have accomplished wonders since the Enlightenment. But, as Karl Popper asks, how do we “distinguish between science and pseudo–science“? Thomas Kuhn suggests that scientists are less-than-objective and more “like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984.” Themes:  Logical Positivism and Analytic philosophy’s aspirations and travails. Scientific method. Science and pseudo-science. Falsifiability.

John Dewey: “we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time, Kant’s philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular the regeneration