When little Sigmund saw his mother kissing Santa Claus: “I saw Mommy kissing Santa ClausUnderneath the mistletoe last night.It surely was a dream,I thought, brought on by curdled cream.Now therapy is called forPsy-cho-a-nal-y-ti-cly. (With apologies to the Jackson Five.) Related: My annually reposted “Scrooge’s Hero’s Journey.”
Now is the winter of our content — but not for these philosophers Read More »
“I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” Lecture Six: Awakening from the Dogmatic Slumber. Immanuel Kant Themes: The sorry fate of metaphysics. Limits to reason. Phenomenal versus Noumenal realities. Saving religion and saving science? Duty ethics. Hume. Rousseau. King Frederick William II. Locke. Sulzer. Texts: Kant: Critique of
Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) on why innovation requires failure. “Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment. If you don’t experiment you won’t innovate, and if you don’t innovate you won’t succeed.” So a question for educators: How do we teach successful failing? Especially since kids often learn to fear failure, knowing
Nvidia CEO Huang on failure Read More »
[The English text below was also translated into Polish and published in the education journal Przegląd Pedagogiczny.] Educating for Entrepreneurship Stephen R.C. HicksDepartment of Philosophy and Center for Ethics and EntrepreneurshipRockford UniversityRockford, Illinois, USA Introduction: Japanese visitors to American schools Recently a team of Japanese investigators come to the United States to study its school
“Educating for Entrepreneurship” — published in English and in Polish Read More »
Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery is fascinating but not for the squeamish. The key figure is John Hunter, an 18th-century anatomist and revolutionary surgeon of volatile temperament, with a hunger for knowledge that drove him to rob thousands of graves, record the tastes of corpses’ bodily
My essay on “Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics” is available in e-book format. The essay has gotten very good mileage, so to speak, since being first published in The Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy. It has been translated into German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean, and in English it is available at the
*Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics* — e-book version Read More »
A key exchange between 3:AM Magazine and scholar Frederick Beiser, author of The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte: 3:AM: But this is the question that German philosophers in the last decades of the eighteenth century started asking: as you put it, they asked, ‘what is the authority of reason?’ They were
Beiser on why the Counter-Enlightenment still matters today Read More »
“Nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics.” Lecture Five: Counter-Enlightenment. David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau Themes: Skepticism, Passions, Fideism. Critiquing the Enlightenment. French Revolution. Lafayette. Voltaire. de Gouges. Robespierre. Texts: Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature. Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality. About the Instructor