Philosophy

“The Moral Equivalent of War” | William James | *Philosophers, Explained* by Professor Stephen Hicks

Who are the great philosophers, and what makes them great? 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

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Why did Professor Beck say Kant is Counter-Enlightenment?

Philosopher Lewis White Beck was selected to write the entry on “German Philosophy” for The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He wrote: “Immanuel Kant was to put almost every fundamental concept of the Enlightenment in jeopardy.” That is a striking claim, as it goes against a standard interpretation of Kant as a paragon of the Enlightenment. Immanuel

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On Socialism | George Orwell | The Road to Wigan Pier | *Philosophers, Explained* by Stephen Hicks

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.

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My Philosophy of Education course online

Why education is a philosophical enterprise — taking a child and instilling the knowledge, character, and skills necessary for adult life. How major philosophies — Plato’s, Locke’s, Marx’s, Dewey’s, Rand’s, Foucault’s, and others’ — lead to dramatically different goals and strategies for education In real life the course is a 15-week lecture course, so the

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Bertrand Russell: Is Philosophy Valuable? | Philosophers, Explained by Stephen Hicks

The 20th century’s most famous philosopher addresses this question: Why do philosophy, if none of its questions are answerable? Related: Others in the Philosophers, Explained series: Catharine MacKinnon on censoring pornography as violence.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on overthrowing capitalism. John Stuart Mill on free speech. Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile on the philosophy of

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Marx’s three failed predictions [EP]

[This excerpt is from Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault] Marxism and waiting for Godot First formulated in the mid-nineteenth century, classical Marxist socialism made two related pairs of claims, one pair economic and one pair moral. Economically, it argued that capitalism was driven by a logic of competitive

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Peter Watson on *The German Genius*, 1754-1933

I’m re-reading Peter Watson’s The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (Harper Perennial, 2011). It’s a powerful history of the intellectually most powerful nation in Europe in the last three centuries. Watson introduces his theme and its scope this way: Between the publication of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s groundbreaking

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