I re-read some of Sidney Hook’s autobiographical Out of Step. I disagree with Hook about most things philosophical — he was a pragmatist and a Marxist of varying sorts — but I do respect that Hook was one of the first to reject and criticize the lockstep Party-mentality and slavish following of all things Soviet […]
Sidney Hook on growing up poor in New York Read More »
[This is Appendix 3 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.] Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism Martin Luther (1483-1546): “The Jews deserve to hang on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.” And: “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.”[189] Immanuel
Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism [Nietzsche and the Nazis] Read More »
From Richard Osborne’s biography Herbert von Karajan, on an event in war-torn Vienna as it was struggling back to life after a cold winter in the last stage of World War Two: “Then the Russians arrived. For three weeks in April 1945, Russian soldiery ran amok in and orgy of pillage and rape, before Stalin
Music-loving Soviets in Vienna, 1945 Read More »
Episodes: The full playlist. Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, USA, and has had visiting positions at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the University of Kasimir the Great in Poland, Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College in England, and Jagiellonian University in Poland.
Reprising this amusing item (via Roger Donway), from a brief obituary in The New York Times, August 2, 1927, page 21: “Emil C. Kant, last German relative of Emmanuel Kant, famous philosopher, was buried in Corozal Cemetery, Canal Zone, yesterday … . While a student at the University of Dorpat, Emil was conscripted by the
Kant’s wayward relative Emil Read More »
The Greeks, according to Cassius: “They are an arrogant people, I’ve always found. I remember one of them telling me they had invented everything, from gods to sex. I pointed out that Romans took their ideas and improved upon them. Ares became Mars, Zeus became Jupiter. And of course, although we could not improve on
Cassius on Roman versus Greek superiority Read More »
Reprising this fascinating short article in the British Journal of Medicine by Robert N. Proctor, professor of the history of medicine at Penn State University: “The anti-smoking campaigns of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-1945” [pdf]. The campaign was mounted despite the arguments that (1) taxes on tobacco were
Famous anti-smoking activists from history Read More »
When did slavery end? Intellectual historian Zeev Sternhell makes the following observation: “But it is above all the French Revolution that is overlooked. Slavery was in fact abolished by the French Revolution. The slaves, like the Jews, were liberated, and for the first time in history, all men living within the frontiers of a single
The French Revolution and the ending of slavery Read More »