Stephen Hicks, Ph.D. – Page 4

“Educating for Entrepreneurship” — published in English and in Polish

[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 […]

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The Knife Man

5 Comments / Fruits of the Enlightenment, Medicine, Science / Stephen Hicks

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

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Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics — e-book version

1 Comment / Business Ethics / Stephen Hicks

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

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Beiser on why the Counter-Enlightenment still matters today

2 Comments / History of Philosophy, Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

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

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COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT: DAVID HUME and JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU. Lecture 5 of Modern Philosophy [Peterson Academy course]

2 Comments / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

“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

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Autonomy as a human need

1 Comment / Ethics, Human Nature, Psychology / Stephen Hicks

To be fully human is to make one’s own decisions and initiate one’s own actions in life. In this essay at The Creativity Post, physician Alan Lickerman writes: “restrictions on our autonomy may lie at the heart of a great deal of our unhappiness. Studies show, for example, that one of the greatest sources of

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Reformation-era extremes, Alexander VI version

4 Comments / History, Religion / Stephen Hicks

Pope Alexander VI really knew how to throw a party. Rodrigo Borgia became Alexander VI in 1492 and livened things up at the Vatican. As reported in William Manchester’s excellent A World Lit Only by Fire, p. 79: ‘Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he

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Rick Walker interviews Stephen Hicks: What recent history teaches us about the culture wars

2 Comments / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

From high theory in the 1960s to applied education in the 1980s to woke activism in the 2000s. Sub-topics: Woke, Critical Theory, Pomo, National Socialist philosophy. Related: The ‘Galt’s Gulch’ lecture mentioned in the interview:

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