History – Page 5 – Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Zeev Sternhell on the Nazis’ pillaging of Nietzsche

Leave a Comment / History, Philosophy, Politics / Stephen Hicks

Refreshing this quotation from Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010), a scholarly study of the most disturbing intellectual trend of the modern world — the ongoing lineage of intellectuals opposed to the Enlightenment tradition of reason, naturalism, individualism, and freedom. Along the way Sternhell asks, of Nietzsche’s place in the trend, an […]

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“Geometric Warrior,” 8th century BCE [Newberry on Great Art series]

Leave a Comment / Art, Education, History, Painting, Philosophy, Sculpture / Stephen Hicks

An Artist’s View: Michael Newberry on Key Works of Art in History Michael Newberry is a California-based artist who has exhibited across Europe and North America. He is the author of books on color theory, philosophy of art, modernism and postmodernism in art, and art history. We invited him into our studio for this series

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Frederick Douglass’s letter to his former master

3 Comments / History, Philosophy, Politics / Stephen Hicks

Reprising this open letter Douglass wrote in 1848 to Thomas Auld, his former master, on the tenth anniversary of his escape from slavery to freedom. TO MY OLD MASTER. Thomas Auld, Sir: The long and intimate, though by no means friendly, relation which unhappily subsisted between you and myself, leads me to hope that you

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The constant decline of civilization?

10 Comments / History / Stephen Hicks

Reprising this series of quotations, collected over the years, on the theme of pessimism about the present in relation to the past: Plato, 360 BCE: “In that country [Egypt] arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as pleasure and amusement. I have late in life heard with amazement

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Franz Schubert’s early death

2 Comments / History, Medicine, Music / Stephen Hicks

Reprising this post about the early death of Franz Schubert, the great lyrical composer of the early nineteenth century. He died at age 31. While his music is usually too melancholy for my taste, what a sadness. Franz was lucky to get that many years. Biographer Christoper Gibbs reports that Schubert’s parents had fourteen children

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Irish peasants and black slaves

5 Comments / History / Stephen Hicks

Refreshing this from Thomas Sowell’s classic Ethnic America: I am struck by this comparison he makes between the desperate state of the Irish peasantry in Ireland and the black slaves in America: “A French traveler in the early nineteenth century returned from a trip that included America and Ireland and wrote: ‘I have seen the

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Galileo’s modern compromise: Letting science work with religion

11 Comments / History, Philosophy, Religion / Stephen Hicks

In his open letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), Galileo offered a defense of science against the prevailing heavy hand of religious orthodoxy: “But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other

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Why did Portugal become a great exploring nation?

9 Comments / History, Philosophy of History / Stephen Hicks

Reprising these reflections from reading Eric Axelson’s Congo to Cape: Early Portuguese Explorers. Always an interesting question to ask how great ventures begin: Why did they start when and where they did? Why were they initiated by those individuals or groups and not others? The circumnavigation of Africa was a great achievement over many decades.

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