Self responsible people do not always seek expert decisions. In fact, experts are often wrong because the expertise assigned to those individual are very exceedingly biased and in many cases, are driven by factors that are well beyond what individual freedom represents.

Moral arguments have nothing to do with who has the better wisdom. You are completely missing the essence of individual freedom. Very smart people make very stupid mistakes and very dumb people can make some very smart decisions.

This is a very simple logical argument and doesn't really need a 2 sided perspective. The simple and clear fact that the government's role is protect individual right to live and be free is the only measure required. There is no government view needed due to the fact that preventing something a person willfully chooses to take is an automatic violation of his rights. If at any point that person commits some heinous act against another is the only time when government should be realized as some arbiter.

Excellent documentary. Worth watching again. The determination of loyalists to Heidegger to see his connection to N€zism as nothing more than a “mistake” or “personal failure” continues. See: Heidegger, German Idealism, & the Fate of Philosophy with Dr. Robert Pippin kzbin.info/www/bejne/mofHh3xmareUbrs - What is the Heideggerian Dasein of the German regime from 1933-1945 and its most notorious actions? This was of no concern to Heidegger who had plenty of time to consider the issue and give his opinion. He was either a willing collaborator with it or silent.

Audio 😍BOOKS 😪

Imo this is the most important philosophical concept in accordance to life and nature.

I hope everyone listening to this realizes that this is a “Personal view” and not a history verbatim. Please do your research because some of the information in this book is false and are the author’s opinions. This is the author view on history not the actual history of how things happen.

Would a view that work is dirty or shameful indicate a mind body dichotomy that hasn’t integrated the practical necessities of man’s life?

Free societies in the west controlled by rich foreign interests, powerful international lobbyists and an everlasting war weapons barons. This is worse than the East.

I wonder how she would feel about feminists championing drag shows where exhibitionist acts are performed in front of children. Also, wasn’t it Dworkin who claimed all intercourse (even consensual) was “r*pe”. Seems unhinged

The porn industry needs to be better regulated, I think that's pretty uncontroversial. However, should the minority subset of women high in sociosexuality, someone like Aella, be legally permitted in a free society to do things like porn? Yes, there's free society on the one hand, and there's functional society on the other hand, we obviously want both. I'm not exactly knowledgeable enough to compare/contrast how, for example the Netherlands (Amsterdam) handles this kind of problem, more or less effectively than for example the US or UK. But, (for the most part in the Anglosphere,) we allow certain kinds of drugs to be bought and sold, but do not allow "open drug scenes" (except recently, in woke dystopian downtown urban areas). We allow certain kinds of sexual transactions, but do not allow public prostitution, or sex trafficking. Also, I just heard Jonathan Haidt discuss in relation to regulating (or not regulating) smartphone usage for early adolescents, how children are a different case from adults in various ways. Haidt says, the cases where even Libertarians tend to agree that lines should be drawn legally, for restricting materials and activities available to children, involve sexual content and addiction (developing brains are different, we cannot have responsible, mature citizens, if they are psychobehaviorally damaged during adolescence). Personally, I'm mostly a consequentialist, pretty much Civil Libertarian, mostly Classical Liberal, and approximately a centrist. And, I think there's one important caveat, related to Haidt's summation: I think things involving sex and sexual content, and also PHYSICAL addiction, should not legally be available to children. Although neuroscience shows that lots of influences, can "nudge" people of all ages, and therefore that SOME of what the social constructivists say, has SOME validity, these observations do not constitute a justification for restricting all content, or suspending all liberties. I maintain that the ultimate defense for a free and liberal society, is that the public sphere is its own laboratory, and involves a massive experiment that's being run all the time. This includes the way in which formal education is 'administered,' as one important variable. The truth is, assuming the ultimate arbiters are human health, and replicable empirical observation, while Nietzsche and the pragmatists respectively, were wrong about which methods work best at the macro-level of society, and the micro-level of formal education, nevertheless their fundamental observations about humans and behavior, are largely being proved correct. Blank slate is wrong, the existence of "individuals" on the traditional definition is wrong, and Sapolsky and others explain how determinism is essentially being proved correct. So, why should we not all become Nietzschean pragmatists? In what sense is Classical Liberalism still defensible? Well another question is: since blank slate was disproven, should we have immediately adopted a "guilty until proven innocent" legal precedent, whereby all defendants are convicted or not, based primarily on immutable characteristics? The ultimate question to address this predicament is: what is philosophy? Answers might differ, but if it's essentially: the most adaptive set of heuristics by which people typically engage with the world, and also seek to develop and maintain a functional society, then Classical Liberalism is entirely defensible. Liberalism's claims cannot be proven literally correct, in a neuroscience research lab, just the opposite. But, as a set of adaptive heuristics, there's hardly any argument to be made AGAINST Liberalism. I'm not a philosopher, not sure if I have this part exactly right, but it seems to me that (perhaps strangely,) it's effectively been through the process of proving Liberalism's epistemology to be false, that we've proven its ontology to be all the more accurate, and have thereby ultimately strengthened the paradigm.

Does MacKinnon address that her definition of porn as a powerful male exploiting a weak female would potentially exclude gay and lesbian sex? Or even heterosexual sex if the power dynamics are equal or inverted in the future, which her social constructivist views imply is entirely plausible?

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