More on how great artists become great: Liszt
Some fascinating glimpses of Franz Liszt, the virtuoso pianist and composer. Biographer Alan Walker writes:
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau’s five children
In an earlier post I asked, Who is the most loathsome philosopher in history? I suggested that Rousseau and Heidegger be considered top candidates. Some more data relevant to Rousseau: He made his common-law wife leave all five of their infants at foundling hospitals, on the grounds that they’d be better off there and that
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Double insult — Rousseau and the French
Hugh Trevor-Roper was known for his biting polemical style. In a youthful essay he described Rousseau’s Confessions this way: “a lucid journal of a life so utterly degraded that it has been a bestseller in France ever since.“[1] Of course, Confessions has also sold well in the English-speaking world (I see at least eight editions
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Appendix 2: Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism [Nietzsche and the Nazis]
Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism. Excerpt from Nietzsche and the Nazis.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropology, and postmodernism
When the expanded edition of Explaining Postmodernism: From Rousseau to Foucault was being published, I re-read several transition figures, i.e., those twentieth-century intellectuals who were important in preparing the groundwork for postmodernism. One is anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), whom I first read as an undergraduate. Lévi-Strauss formally studied philosophy and law, but because the bulk
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Emile, or Education | Book 1 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Philosophers, Explained by Stephen Hicks
Episodes: The full playlist. Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, USA, and has had visiting positions at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the University of Kasimir the Great in Poland, Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College in England, and Jagiellonian University in Poland.
Hegel on worshipping the state
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault] Hegel on worshipping the state While a student at Tübingen, Hegel’s favorite reading had been Rousseau. “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man.”[88] As discussed in Chapter Two, Hegel was
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau on censorship [from Explaining Postmodernism]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau said: “Considering the awful disorders printing has already caused in Europe, and judging the future by the progress that this evil makes day by day, one can easily predict that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to banish this terrible art from their States as they once took to establish
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