Stephen Hicks

My 1991 article in The Wall Street Journal (full version here) takes up the sometimes-well-meaning (and often-not) teaching that shades into indoctrination and overwhelming children with problems they’re not yet equipped to handle intellectually or emotionally. A core question for parents and teachers: How do we work with children to build up their confidence, resilience, […]

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