Philosophy – Page 154 – Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

True Believers against Leftist Responsibility — Kolakowski versus Thompson

[Revised from this earlier post.] When the great Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009) published “My Correct Views on Everything,” he was responding to Edward Thompson’s attack in “Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski.” Kolakowski is best known for Main Currents of Marxism, his huge survey of Marxism from its neo-Platonic and Hegelian roots, on through Marx […]

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Hicks on Pronouns and Peterson — transcript

1 Comment / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

In 2016, Mark Michael Lewis interviewed me on a variety of topics, including the pronoun wars. At that point, Professor Jordan Peterson had recently taken a strong public stand against being required to use some newly proposed pronouns, and that refusal had generated controversy. Here is the transcript of my four-minute opinion on Peterson and

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Spanish Libertarian interview on pomo, Jordan Peterson, and red-pilling SJWs

Leave a Comment / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

Ignasi Boltó, a.k.a. the Spanish Libertarian, asked me eleven questions (below or at YouTube): 1. What’s your intellectual evolution? 2. Why do you say that postmodernism is the evolution of Marxism? 3. What values define Western Civilization? 4. Why does the New Left fight nihilistically against individual rights and capitalism? 5. Does philosophy matter to

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When Altruism becomes Pathological [Good Life series]

5 Comments / Ethics / Stephen Hicks

Who is more likely to cheat — those who play individual sports or those who play team sports? A fascinating experiment by Professor Sharon K. Stoll and reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education compared athletes in individual sports such as golf or singles tennis with those playing teams sports such as basketball or doubles

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Immanuel Kant in Explaining Postmodernism

3 Comments / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

Immanuel Kant said: “Everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.” For more on the meaning

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Uncompromised Talk — discussion with Ron Renaud

2 Comments / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

My hour-long discussion with the energetic Ron Renaud: “Hang with me and super-hero philosopher Stephen Hicks talking about…” 0:00 minutes: Introduction 2:19: The evolution of socialist strategies and our culture wars 3:52: What a university should be 5:19: Rousseau, Marx, and one disaster after another 6:30: Feeling and rhetoric or logic? 7:50: Is Marxism a

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My Postmodernism and the Verdict of History public lecture

3 Comments / Free Speech and Censorship, History of Philosophy, Politics / Stephen Hicks

Professor Stephen Hicks’s public lecture, “Postmodernism and the Verdict of History,” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, March 9, 2018.

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So how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

16 Comments / History, History of Philosophy, Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

The old philosophy question — How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? — has gotten a bad rap.* Yet three important answers contest for dominance: 1. An infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin. As purely spiritual beings, angels do not take up physical space, so

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