Other episodes in the series include: 3. Plato on the Allegory of the Cave 4. Galileo Galilei on Reconciling Science and Religion 5. Ayn Rand on Individual Rights 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7. René Descartes on Radical Doubt 8. Jean-Paul Sartre on Existentialism as a Humanism 9. Socrates on Defending Philosophy 10. Martin Heidegger on Why Being Exists 11. Arachne and Athena and Divine vs. Human Justice 12. Aristotle on Ethics and Virtue 13. Albert Camus on the Myth of Sisyphus

Nietzsche’s thinking is so twisted and so clearly influenced by a Darwinian perspective that he failed to understand that meekness is power on check. In the second half of the 20th century, we saw great leaders like Dr King and others employ a Christian character in order to effect social change, without firing a single shot. The early Christian church, though persecuted mercilessly by the Romans, flourished and extended its influence over society, as the Romans dwindled into the pantheon of history.

Ironically, Nietzsche was fascinated by Dostoevsky, even though the latter’s ideas are antithetical to Nietzsche and his nihilistic philosophy. So interesting that Roskonikov, the main character in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, both wrote and spoke of Ubermensch-like men, whom he glorified and even tried to emulate.

The nazis believed they had the scientific authority to behave the way they did. Darwin and his theory of natural selection also served as an ideological pillar for nazism, as it turns out, and the author correctly points out the influence of Darwinism on Nietzsche as well.

The fact that he gets referred to as Cuck throughout this video is funny and I’m not mature enough to pretend that it’s not.

Excellent

13:07 - Carl Schmidt is first mentioned. His influence, through Aleksandr Dugin, on the modern Russian foreign policy ideology of Eurasianism ought not to be ignored. The invasion of Ukraine has its origins in the thought of this enthusiastic Nazi supporter.

utter nonsense for the...

In Essence Kuhn was say shift from Linear paradigm to non- linear paradigm because nature herself is non- linear ❤

I hate all these things

Thank you professor Hicks for providing us with the interpretations of the philosophers’ text that is the closest to the actual intentions of the writers.

Just because next-level genius, pseudo-psychopath Nietzsche, amazingly managed to predict in some form, perhaps almost 75% of what behavioral geneticists discovered a century later, and also many fundamental claims made by 'Mill & Co.' are defensible only as operational heuristics, or useful fictions for a governable and prosperous society, doesn't mean Nietzsche had all the answers. After all, couldn't the most 'uber' of all 'mensches' be considered, those Classical Liberals who managed to lay the functional groundwork for an all-encompasing, species-promoting society? Nietzsche maintained that Liberals are weak, and promoters of dysgenics. But it looks to me as though, it's been only via the paradigm of "liberal society" that humans have achieved something like the kind of "greatness" that Nietzsche envisioned.

Thank you

The 30 in the first series include: 1. Introduction to Philosophers, Explained 2. Immanuel Kant’s ‘Copernican’ Revolution in Philosophy 3. Plato on the Allegory of the Cave 4. Galileo Galilei on Reconciling Science and Religion 5. Ayn Rand on Individual Rights 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7. René Descartes on Radical Doubt 8. Jean-Paul Sartre on Existentialism as a Humanism 9. Socrates on Defending Philosophy 10. Martin Heidegger on Why Being Exists 11. Arachne and Athena and Divine vs. Human Justice 12. Aristotle on Ethics and Virtue 13. Albert Camus on the Myth of Sisyphus

This guy is talking about the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industrial complex, not the producers of apricot seeds. The medical industrial complex is a predatory organization that preys on people's desperation and charges them ridiculous amounts of money for treatments that don't work most of the time or oftentimes cause more harm than good. They killed my mother with chemotherapy a year ago. She died from complications and the side effects as a result of the so-called treatments. The government works hand in hand with a medical industrial establishment and the pharmaceutical industry the profit off of cancer and other illnesses. Anyone who has been involved in this and done research and has a brain and a clue knows how idiotic the medical establishment is. The government isn't protecting anybody. And it's not a legitimate government anyway. It's a corporation located in the district of columbia. It is foreign to the American Union states. It is controlled by foreign interests and profit-oriented.

Fascism’s ideology came from Genitle’s Actualism. In actuality, it has vacillated between the left and right political cultural spectrum: prime example was Perón’s Argentina which within his own party, Justicialism, both were present.

Dr. Hicks thank you for directly responding to these critics.

good work

Praise the meek and condemn the strong? Does the author really need someone to define the word meek? He is conflating it with the word weak. 1hour 57 minutes in

This is a very good audiobook though one can tell the authors bias through the misrepresentations perpetrated through the author's misunderstanding of the fundamental judeo-christian beliefs.

good work

The way that intelligence evolves over centuries/millennia, is that certain environmental, geographic circumstances make problem solving either more, or less adaptive. The two most important environmental variables to select for intelligence, are agriculture, and cold weather climate. These both involve, figuring out how (in a cooperative fashion with other people) to discover new ways of surviving against the elements, (instead of feuding with people amidst abundant, accessible food and resources,) and/or figuring out how to develop new ways of growing the maximum amount of food, or optimally specializing in certain crops in certain places, while trading with neighbors for foods that grow better on their land, etc. So, traits agreeableness and conscientiousness tend to combine with increased general intelligence, in the RELATIVE MAJORITY of ethnic group members, for example in West Africa where agriculture has long been present, or in approximately Central and Northern Europe, with either cold weather, agriculture or both, same for Northeast Asia, Eurasia. This topic becomes contentious, if one fails to emphasize, that these trends only generalize to relative majorities, at the group level. There are however, many variations in individual cases, within sizable local, minority groups, all over the world. India is an excellent example, of how such an enormous population, produces lots of variation in psychometric profiles. Two specific cases relevant for this Voltaire episode, are Britain and Japan. Also, another important variable over the centuries is defensibility of nation-states. And, a particularly important point for the advancement of society, involves the profile and origin, of genius intelligence. In terms of defensibility, Japan and Britain are both islands. The 'natural motes' around both nations, were enormously beneficial relative to the adaptive dynamics described above. However, the remaining variable is a complicating factor, which is genius intelligence. While neuroticism and decreased intelligence are correlated, as are conscientiousness/agreeableness and increased intelligence, outlier high intelligence is actually correlated, once again, with increased neuroticism. Additionally, outliers are more likely to be born from within an increased intelligence, conscientious/agreeable population. These considerations created a kind of specific equation, evolutionarily, historically, whereby a 'conservative' intelligent population needed to be, not only unusually defensible and advanced, but also have an evolved cultural practice of maximizing the number of children born from within an intelligent population, to sufficiently increase the chances of numerous geniuses being born, to ultimately facilitate unprecedented societal advancement. Medieval Japan came close to meeting these criteria, so did the late Roman Empire. However, only Britain ultimately met all these criteria, and the result was the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of the modern world. Fortunately, the 'cultic' Christian practice of outlawing abortion, happened to prove importantly adaptive in the specific case of Victorian Britain, because never before had such an intelligent population so consistently maximized the number of children born. Thus, the odds were in their favor. Ultimately, with the benefit of hindsight and the clarity of modern science, we can see that Voltaire was correct. Why was England 'special'? Is there some chauvinist nationalist, or permanent immutable ethnic reason? No, the island and cultural idiosyncrasies, just happened to match the 'perfect laboratory conditions,' to facilitate the optimal neurological function of the human species. No people, or country, permanently 'owns' the template for a healthy nervous system (like copyright infringement, lol). With our modern knowledge, we want to recreate these optimal conditions and accompanying, adaptive societal conventions, for as many people, in as many places as possible, for our mutual benefit. Edit: we could say that, it was not so much due to some 'forced eugenic policy,' but rather due to a sincerely held belief among the majority of the intelligent populace, that Victorian England maximized childbirths under advantageous circumstances. Today, superstitious religious notions seem hardly practical, with our modern knowledge. However, a comparable humanist sentiment certainly seems viable, wherein intelligent populations CHOOSE to increase childbirths, for their own betterment, and for the health of the human species.

1:01:15 This definitely describes me from ages 20-24. Hicks is right on the money. It's almost embarrassing how accurately he describes my psychology when I was Marxist.

Watched a few interviews with Stephen Hicks and I find myself repeatedly blown away by his extreme lucidity and presence of mind. You can ask this man ENORMOUS questions and it seems his mind is almost instantly able to systematize that question and break it down into its components, present a clear outline of said components, and then delve into each one in depth without losing track of the entire question. This man has the ability to speak casually in the format of an organized essay. Absolutely fucking genius. Thanks for this upload!

Abstracting and mystifying the origins of it to a philosopher that died before its rise and whose sister and her husband deliberately edited his work to appeal to nazi biases. Anglophone scholarship on Nietzsche is generally poor but this is the height of that garbage pile. I've only had luck finding decent translations in spanish (made after 1960 when the Nietzsche archive started to distinguish manuscripts from the edits).

Loved the book. Helped me understand the leftist progressives and democrats.

If I were a woman I would have a crush on Stephen. But I am not a postie.

Thanks for the documentary

Great uploads. Thank You.

Please stop saying he is the greatest philosopher! His genius is a mirage, a case of people having convinced themselves in what has no foundation in reality!

Great lecture. I have yet to finish but I wanted to say that the same thing has happen in parallel fashion with classical music. The complete negation of western tonality into a disgusting mess which hasn’t changed it’s tune since the 1960’s. Really starting around WW1. Theodore Adorno was even one of the atonal music theorists of the second viennese school of Arnold Schoenberg. I find it to be a poison. Beauty itself was attacked. It’s like the world itself is ugly and schizophrenic so the music and art looks and sounds ugly and schizophrenic.

Rand is not a philosopher, I’m sorry… calling her drivel “philosophy” diminishes the whole discipline. She is a good case study for clinical psychiatrists because her behaviour exhibits psychopatic traits. But philosophy… you can only call it that in the palest, broadest meaning, like in, the philosophy of NASCAR. Rand was picked up by the emerging PR industry in the US and then the Californian ideologists. She’s a psyop.

When was this film made?

Decades ago, I remember an LSD experience leading me to a sense that the incidents and phenomena of life that we normally take for granted seemed so arbitrary, absurd--but more, that my encounters with them were taking place against the background of an unseen, deeper fountain of existence from which they poured forth. This perception strikes me as having a lot in common with Heidegger's ideas of beings and Being.

“What doesn’t kill you actually makes you weaker and next time will probably kill you” -Norm MacDonald

I'm not sure if I understand the point about the prohibition of naturalistic art in some religions. From what I know some religions don't allow to do that not because "the divine world is so perfect and material world so imperfect". It was about making idols and worshipping them. In ancient times gods were ritually invoked inside statues.

*Promo SM* 😅

1:20:31 quotable

COMPLETE 🐴💩!!! 🇺🇸

0:00 Connecting epistemology to politics 1:57 Unmasking and rhetoric 9:30 When theory clashes with fact [Quote full section!] 11:29 Kierkegaardian postmodernism Contrasting the attitudes of the rationalist/scientific truth-seeker vs the blind dogmatist (secular or religious): "Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth." - Aristotle vs “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” - Cardinal John Henry Newman “If anyone had written to me that the truth was outside of Christ, I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky "With his unparalleled capacity for confession, Rousseau generalized [the above bias] point to all philosophers: “Each knows well that his system is no better founded than the others. But he maintains it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came to know the true and the false, would not prefer the lie he has found to the truth discovered by another”" 17:25 Reversing Thrasymachus: From "Might Makes Right" to "Weakness Makes Right"

Learn alot from Stephen

The analogy of a free market of a plethora of religions is a very important idea. Voltaire always brings me solace as I find works like Candide and Zadig are excellent at showing a world filled with irrationality and corruption and those few trying to survive it.

Great discussion. Hopefully academia might still be saved.

Thank you for these excellent lectures!

When I started off listening to this, all I heard were a long series of unsupported assertions that were nonsensical on their face. But as things went along I was drawn to Kuhn's new paradigm for what I can only describe as thinking-without-thinking. With the application of a bit of faith, I decided to make the "jump" to a new historical community abandoning those old worn out paradigms of facts, truth and objectivity. Tossing them aside, I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders and I "saw the light" so to speak. So now I'm off to the janitor's closet to grab the tools I'll need on my bold new journey! Anyone else in the group want to grab lunch? I'm a bit peckish and my forehead is warm. I may be feeling yet another paradigm shift coming on. But how would I know?

Other episodes in the series include: 2. Immanuel Kant’s ‘Copernican’ Revolution in Philosophy 3. Plato on the Allegory of the Cave 4. Galileo Galilei on Reconciling Science and Religion 5. Ayn Rand on Individual Rights 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Educating Children 7. René Descartes on Radical Doubt

00:00 Marxism and waiting for Godot 2:08 Marxism's Three Failed Predictions 5:28 Socialism Needs an Aristocracy 11:58 Good News for Socialism: Depression and War affect Liberal Capitalist Nations 14:52 Bad News for Socialism: Liberal Capitalism Rebounds 17:47 Worse News for Socialism: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary 26:18 Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard 28:22 From need to equality (From "capitalism fails to eradicate poverty" to "capitalism fails to eradicate inequality.") From wealth is good to wealth is bad 39:51 Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology 46:06 Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression 49:33 Sigmund Freud and it's application to Marcuse's understanding of Capitalism Understanding the ideology behind the leftist-woke-socialist mode of operation today: "Marcuse concluded, capitalism’s repression of human nature may be socialism’s salvation. Capitalism’s rational technocracy suppresses human nature to the point that it bursts out in irrationalisms-in violence, criminality, racism, and all of society’s other pathologies. But by encouraging those irrationalisms the new revolutionaries can destroy the system. So the first task of the revolutionary is to seek out those individuals and energies on the margins of society: the outcast, the disorderly, and the forbidden-anyone and anything that capitalism’s power structure has not yet succeeded in commodifying and dominating totally. All such marginalized and outcast elements will be “irrational,” “immoral,” and even “criminal,” especially by capitalist definition, but that is precisely what the revolutionary needs. Any such outcast element could “break through the false consciousness [and] provide the Archimedean point for a larger emancipation." “Marcuse’s reign as the pre-eminent philosopher of the New Left signaled a strong turn towards irrationality and violence among younger Leftists. “Marx, Marcuse, and Mao” became the new trinity and the slogan to rally under. As was proclaimed on a banner of students involved in closing the University of Rome: Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword.” 1:01:20 The rise and fall of Left terrorism 1:09:05 From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism "In 1974, Herbert Marcuse was asked whether he thought the New Left was history. He replied: “I don’t think it’s dead, and it will resurrect in the universities."

Being raised pretty culturally Catholic, despite being a lifelong Atheist, did not make me weird or repressed *blinks asynchronously and laughs erratically*

46:30 Kant on Collectivism and War 54:00 Johann Herder on multicultural relativism 1:00:30 Johann Fichte on education as socialization 1:15:05 Hegel on worshipping the State 1:23:43 From Hegel to the 20th Century 1:26:30 Right vs Left Collectivism in the 20th Century 1:36:30 The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the Real Socialists?

Love Stephen Hicks ❤️