Stephen Hicks

Tyson Popplestone interviews Dr. Hicks on how cultural and political ideologies shift over time, with an emphasis on how intellectual movements and academia have influenced society’s values and further downstream, political movements. Dr. Hicks criticises several major movements but expresses a cautious optimism for the near future, emphasizing the potential for cultural renewal through entrepreneurism, […]

I’ll be speaking on philosophy’s role in the free-speech battles to this MIT organization on Monday, February 3, 2025. It’s an open meeting, so any interested party can listen in. Link to register here. Related: The MIT FSA’s coverage of the Dorian Abbot cancelation. Related: John Stuart Mill on the social requirements of free speech

By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 2: If education is about basic facts and truths about reality, then what is reality? Is it the natural world—or also a world beyond nature? Is it cause-and-effect—or random or sometimes miraculous? Is it finite in space and time—or infinite spatially and eternal? Previous lectures in

Suppose that God really is dead. Then, Sartre says “there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it.” Camus asks whether we are then like Sisyphus, “the absurd hero.” Themes: The decline of religion? The reality of war. Depression and the Depression. The pointlessness of existence? Existence precedes

A Short Story about the (or a) Conservative Reaction to the Enlightenment Two children grew up in a cave. They were taught that the outside world is and dangerous and sinful and that the Cave God protected them. Yet as growing children and curious about the rest of the world, they asked their elders many

In his book on Kant, philosopher Roger Scruton writes that without Kant’s Critique of Judgment, writes “aesthetics would not exist in its modern form.”* While it’s initially shocking to think that the priggish and uptight Kant has anything to do with the often-nihilistic modern art world—Kant is arguably the most influential philosopher in the last