Stephen Hicks – Page 182 – Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

True Believers against Leftist Responsibility — Kolakowski versus Thompson

[Revised from this earlier post.] When the great Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009) published “My Correct Views on Everything,” he was responding to Edward Thompson’s attack in “Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski.” Kolakowski is best known for Main Currents of Marxism, his huge survey of Marxism from its neo-Platonic and Hegelian roots, on through Marx […]

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Speed Reading — a joke

2 Comments / Humor / Stephen Hicks

The latest in cognition research: Accordion to several studies, replacing words with the names of musical instruments in a sentence often goes undetected.

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The Moral of Two Scandals — Enron and Ontario

1 Comment / Business Ethics, Economics, Politics / Stephen Hicks

Ontario’s financial debts, as of 2018: “Ontario’s debt has ballooned to $312 billion, the biggest debt held by a subnational government anywhere in the world. Ontario owes twice as much as California, which has a population bigger than all of Canada.”[1] Enron’s debts as determined by its bankruptcy proceedings: “The company paid its creditors more

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Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany

Leave a Comment / History, Politics / Stephen Hicks

I’m reading Daniel Guérin’s The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Duke University Press, 1994), based on the French journalist’s trips through Germany in the early 1930s. Guérin was then a young leftist whose thinking later evolved in a communist-anarchist direction. Germany both attracted and appalled him with its extremist politics. From

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Hicks on Pronouns and Peterson — transcript

1 Comment / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

In 2016, Mark Michael Lewis interviewed me on a variety of topics, including the pronoun wars. At that point, Professor Jordan Peterson had recently taken a strong public stand against being required to use some newly proposed pronouns, and that refusal had generated controversy. Here is the transcript of my four-minute opinion on Peterson and

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Spanish Libertarian interview on pomo, Jordan Peterson, and red-pilling SJWs

Leave a Comment / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

Ignasi Boltó, a.k.a. the Spanish Libertarian, asked me eleven questions (below or at YouTube): 1. What’s your intellectual evolution? 2. Why do you say that postmodernism is the evolution of Marxism? 3. What values define Western Civilization? 4. Why does the New Left fight nihilistically against individual rights and capitalism? 5. Does philosophy matter to

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Was Magritte an artist — or a philosopher?

3 Comments / Art / Stephen Hicks

In my “Why Art Became Ugly,” I claimed that modern art’s trajectory was to abandon art for philosophy. In modernism, art becomes a *philosophical* enterprise rather than an *artistic* one. The driving purpose of modernism is not to *do* art but to *find out* what art is. Here’s a new-to-me datum about René Magritte, from

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When Altruism becomes Pathological [Good Life series]

5 Comments / Ethics / Stephen Hicks

Who is more likely to cheat — those who play individual sports or those who play team sports? A fascinating experiment by Professor Sharon K. Stoll and reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education compared athletes in individual sports such as golf or singles tennis with those playing teams sports such as basketball or doubles

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