René Girard on bringing Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida to the USA in 1966: “When Freud came to the USA, he said, as he approached New York: ‘I’m bringing the plague to them’; but he was wrong. Americans digested and Americanized psychoanalysis easily and quickly. But in 1966 we really brought the plague with Lacan […]
On Derrida: “We really brought the plague” Read More »
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues for metaphysical subjective relativism: “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” In part, this is because scientists are not educated so much as brainwashed: “the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character in Orwell’s 1984, the victim of
Thomas Kuhn in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
Mark Michael Lewis interviewed me on a variety of philosophical topics. Below is an excerpted transcription, from 26:55 to 36:05, on the evolution of postmodernism. The transcription is by Walter Evans-Wenz. PDF here. Mark Michael Lewis interviews Stephen Hicks Hicks: Right now we are with respect to that phenomenon—that’s third generation postmodernism. What you have
Three Stages of Postmodernism–From Foucault and Rorty to Now [transcript] Read More »
The poet Thomas de Quincey said: “Here I pause for one moment to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to
Thomas de Quincey in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
Wisdom from a giant of the nineteenth-century — Frederick Douglass (circa 1818-1895): “Everybody has asked the question … ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the
Black History Month: Frederick Douglass Read More »
In The Wall Street Journal, she asks: “Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson?” “What could a grown-up, seemingly stable professor (former associate professor of psychology at Harvard, full professor for 20 years at the University of Toronto) stand for that would make a journalist want to annihilate him on live TV—or, failing that, to diminish him
Peggy Noonan on Jordan Peterson’s morality Read More »
Historian Thomas Nipperdey on one reason why German philosophy came to prominence in American intellectual life: “Until 1830 it was the general rule that talented and curious young minds gravitated to Paris; but from then on they came, in ever-increasing numbers (American students, for example) to Germany, to Berlin.” For more on the meaning and implications
Thomas Nipperdey in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk