Dr. Stephen Hicks
speaker
174 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Stephen Hicks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you.
A pleasure.
Oh, yeah.
Two are out.
Right. Well, I'm a philosopher by training. So my intellectual interest is in philosophy. what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like. We've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in, and education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries.
So, in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies, and obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial, So I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing. I had at my university a center for ethics and entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies as things came on, asking what can be done.
uh because in many cases people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or and so forth so what i'm interested in though primarily though is the courses that i have taught over the course of many years having them in a vehicle that's obviously going to be accessible to more people
but also with better production values and in a way that can't, in some cases, be done even in a good in-person classroom. In philosophy, everything is controversial. A big part of education in life is philosophical education. How many beliefs do I have in my mind? How did they get into my mind in the first place? Where did they come from? What's good for you? What do you like?
What are your values? What do you want your life to be? Philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract. Philosophers love their abstractions, their general principles. What we want is to be much more careful. But what happens in politics, economics, business, family, religion, is because of philosophical ideas.
John Locke, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, they were the great geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world. We're philosophers, for goodness sake. What is philosophy all about? It's about a quest for coming to know true reality.
my areas of expertise have been modern philosophy and post-modern philosophy when philosophers and historians we talk about the modern era essentially we mean the last 500 years which has been you know extraordinarily revolutionary not only in philosophy but in how we do religion how we do science how we treat women getting rid of slavery industrial all of that stuff it's been
amazing and philosophy has its fingers in all of those pies and is part of it. So partly what I'm interested in is the giant names in philosophy, right? And they're all giants for a reason. They're all over the map intellectually from Descartes to Locke to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche on into the 20th century. What role they have played in making the modern world and then the postmodern world happen
and in some cases, of course, resisting what is going on in modernity and in post-modernity. So the first two courses that the Academy invited me to teach were on modern philosophy, and essentially that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the giants, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, laying a new foundation, overturning medieval philosophy,
medieval philosophy again much sophistication there had been a kind of dominant framework for a millennium and very quick time things transformed themselves in the 1500s 1600s all of those
uh intellectual cultural transformations uh that we that we study when we do the history and that course ends with the death of nietzsche in 1900 so essentially 1500 to 1900 eight lectures but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically Because in some cases, the philosophers are ones who make the historical revolution happen as their theoretical ideas are applied.
In other cases, the philosophers are responding to what's going on in the culture, what's going on historically, trying to make sense of it and either urge it on or retard it. The second course picks up in 1900 and it's called Postmodern Philosophy.
And the main point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers started to react against, in a very sophisticated way, much of what had happened intellectually in the modern era. and they in some cases were radicalizing it, in some cases wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually and culturally in the modern era.
And we started to see in philosophy a move to a more skeptical, relativized, even kind of the death of philosophy, the sense that philosophy has for millennia tried to answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a culminating fashion.
But from their more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self-realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions, so it should, in effect, disintegrate. So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.
Here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase, John Dewey and some of the pragmatists to some extent, Martin Heidegger. and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it.
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