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 […]
What Foucault liked to do with Arab boys — excerpt from Murray’s book Read More »
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
Understanding Friedrich Nietzsche’s Life & Philosophy Read More »
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
Cato series on Kant and the Classical Liberal Tradition Read More »
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 »
In collaboration with Sprouts educational videos, here is our three-part series on Nietzsche’s provocative account of traditional morality and the need to go beyond good and evil. Part 1: God is Dead. (7 minutes) Part 2: Sheep and Wolves. (6 minutes) Part 3: Master and Slaves. (7 minutes)
God is dead, Wolves and Sheep, Masters and Slaves — all three Nietzsche animation videos Read More »
Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School: I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp in Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity
Viktor Frankl: On the original preparation for the gas chambers Read More »