Stephen Hicks on "Postmodernism and Its Discontents"

Postmodernism is a sprawling set of beliefs and attitudes in the arts and among opinion-shapers and scholars — and it has been the most vigorous intellectual movement of our generation.

Why do its skeptical and relativistic arguments have such power in the contemporary intellectual world? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant portion of the political Left—the same Left that traditionally promoted reason, science, equality for all, and optimism—now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism?

In this lecture, Stephen Hicks will discuss postmodernism’s themes and origins and its disquieting prospects for the future.

Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, and Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of three books: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault , which has been translated into Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, and Persian; Nietzsche and the Nazis ; and co-editor with David Kelley of The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis.

He has published in academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Teaching Philosophy, and Review of Metaphysics, as well as other publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun.

He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, and Senior Fellow at The Objectivist Center in New York.

More information about Dr. Hicks’s courses, publications, and blog can be found at his website: www.StephenHicks.org.