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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completely different but extraordinarily influential modern moral philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them. So it goes back to people like David Hume wrestling with the is-ought problem and Immanuel Kant with his strong duty focus, John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, and so on in through the 20th century up to very contemporary times. So that's one course, modern ethics.
And all of these people are giants, they all disagree with each other, but that's the contemporary landscape within which people who are doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves. The other two courses are 16 lectures in total, but it's called The Philosophy of Politics.
And here what I'm interested in is, obviously we have political science, we have political theory, political ideology, practical day-to-day understandings of politics. But what I'm interested in is the philosophers' contributions to those debates. And one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics, they're not actually disagreeing about politics.
They're disagreeing about something more fundamental. I think that's become evident to everyone. That's right. And in many cases, it doesn't get brought to the core. So I don't want to talk about the recent election, but really it's about culture more fundamentally and not about many particular issues and underlying culture.
Right. So one, though, picks up with the French Revolution, which is perhaps the landmark event in European or at least continental European history. Why that political revolution happened. And there's a lot of philosophy that matters there. But then also. an important theoretician, Edmund Burke, and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism in response to that.
But then we go through all of the big-name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics. So we go through Hegel and Marx, and as we get into the 20th century, we talk about the fascists, Mussolini and Gentile, who was a PhD in philosophy, and Heidegger and the National Socialists, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, and that one ends with World War II.
So French Revolution to the World War II. The next course picks up at the end of World War II and the Cold War, and it starts with Rand and Robert Nozick. At the height of the Cold War, how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context? So it starts with them, goes on to John Rawls. We also talk about James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for public choice economics.
We also do some international, because we're living in a global society, that cliche and so on. But the Islamist revolutions and the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher, Said Qutba, whose brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden, extraordinarily influential. Ayatollah Khomeini had Qutba's works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.
We go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugin in that framework as well. And then we end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism, Roger Scruton's meaning of conservatism, which came out a few years before he died. So the idea here is to say these are the big names.
political theories you need to know, but they're all big name ones because they have philosophical bite behind them by some very deep people and integrating that with the history in each case, how some of them are urging history in a certain direction or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the Cold War or the attacks in 9-11.
That's my ambition.
Fair enough.
I will dive into it. Thanks.
Thank you.
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