Friedrich Nietzsche has a reputation for being an individualist. But note this from his Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The overman is the sense of the earth … . I love those who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman’s.” (Z I.P.3). So: Contrary to individualism, your life is not […]
Was Nietzsche individualist? Zarathustra-overman version Read More »
Plato on Censorship and “the Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry” Excerpt from Book 10 of The Republic. Written 360 B.C.E. [Socrates and Glaucon in conversation] [Speakers: Socrates and Glaucon in conversation] [Socrates:] Of the many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State, there is none which upon reflection pleases me better
WHAT FOUCAULT LIKED TO DO TO ARAB BOYS. Excerpt from Douglas Murray’s The War on the West (2022): It is always unpleasant—as well as unwise—for thinkers to lambaste each other because of the habits of their personal lives. The personal is not always political and is certainly not always philosophical. Yet in March 2021, a
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A prominent Cyrenaic named Hegesias, author of a book called *Death by Starvation*, lectured in Alexandria. He taught the doctrine of withdrawing from a malevolent world. The only way to avoid pain is suppress and/or rid oneself of desire. The goal of life is to pain avoidance—to the point that death is preferable to life.
When Hegesias the Cyrenaic was “cancelled” in Alexandria Read More »
A discussion between Dr. Stephen Hicks and vlogger Ryan Faulkner-Hogg on the life and times of Friedrich Nietzsche: Evolution and Darwin, Schopenhauer and pessimism, Wagner and music as metaphysical, whether life is suffering, and more. Understanding Friedrich Nietzsche’s Life & Philosophy Part 1 | Stephen Hicks & Ryan Hogg Stephen Hicks’s other publications and posts
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A plug for what I found to be a useful discussion of this philosopher. Linking again as Kant and his complicated relationship to the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment are again being hotly contested. “Immanuel Kant is a famously difficult philosopher, but also undeniably an important one. It isn’t hard to argue that he belongs somewhere in
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The connections between philosophy theory and political practice are often long-term. Here are three juxtapositions of quotations from philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and philosopher Gentile and politician Mussolini in the 1930s. On what’s good for the species versus what’s good for the individual: Kant,: “For all of that, this path that for the
3 paired Kant and Mussolini quotes on individuals, reason, war Read More »
From MIT professor Leo Marx, who was a student at Harvard University in the 1930s. In those years many students were drawn to the Left. As an undergraduate I was active in the Harvard branch of the left-wing American Student Union and the editor of its magazine, the Harvard Progressive. For a year or so
On 1930s American intellectuals — quotation Read More »