“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:

George Orwell in 1944: “The thing that strikes me more and more—and it strikes a lot of other people, too—is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time.” A perennial lesson: Useful political commentary is as much a matter of character as it is of informed intelligence. Source: George Orwell, “As I

It would have taken me 30 minutes to write this. Grok did it in 20 seconds: Q: What is Stephen Hicks’s position on postmodernism? A: Stephen Hicks, a Canadian-American philosopher, is a prominent critic of postmodernism. In his book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2004), he argues that postmodernism is a

Here are the 10 countries with the highest average salaries (2025): 1. Luxembourg: $89,767/year​2. Iceland: $87,421/year​3. Switzerland: $83,332/year​4. United States: $80,115/year​5. Belgium: $73,206/year​6. Norway: $71,972/year​7. Austria: $71,167/year​8. Netherlands: $70,185/year​9. Denmark: $69,525/year​10. Australia: $67,101/year​ ​Impressive. Yet consider also their population sizes: Luxembourg: 763 thousand. Iceland: 393 thousand. Switzerland: 8.9 million. United States: 340 million. Belgium: 11.8 million.