Will the real Communists please identify yourselves? One reads of … * Communism as atheist scientific materialism. “The iron laws of historical development.” * Communism as fanatical religion: “The exploited shall inherit the Earth!” * Communism as angry envy-psychology: “Kill the rich!” My podcast at Open College: Related: “The Crisis of Socialism,” Chapter 5 of […]

By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 7: What did the great Idealist philosophers believe and how did they apply it to education? The associated reading excerpts are here: Plato (https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/plato_republic-poe.pdf) and Kant (https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/kant_immanuel-poe.pdf). Previous lectures in the series: Part One: Introduction: What is the purpose of education, and what is philosophy’s relevance?

“We naturally, even from our cradles, love liberty.” Lecture One: What Is the Meaning of Life? Themes: Traditional Hierarchy? Liberty and/or Equality. Six Deep Questions about Ethics. What is ‘Modern’? Texts: Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality About the Instructor Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy

He did say: “The majority of men … are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and … are not accessible to reason, but only to authority” (Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851) [Alternative translation here: “For the average man has no critical power of his own, and is absolutely incapable of appreciating the difficulty of

In this eight-lecture course, Professor Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern moral philosophy, from the Enlightenment to the 21st century. Major thinkers covered include: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ruth Benedict, A.J. Ayer, and Philippa Foot. For each,

“The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.” Source: Georg Hegel, Philosophy of History [1830/1831]. Related: On the fuller context of Hegel’s provocative claim: Related: On Hegel’s place in the historical course of philosophy: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (print or e-book), or audiobook: