Open College with Dr. Stephen Hicks

Hosted ByDr. Stephen Hicks

Dr. Stephen R.C. Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher who teaches at Rockford University, Illinois. He has had visiting positions at Oxford University (England), Kasimir the Great University (Poland), and has lectured at universities across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He specializes in modern European philosophy and politics, and has written extensively on Kant, Marx, including his two books, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault and Nietzsche and the Nazis.

EP #21 | Censor The Hitlers

Extreme cases always test our commitment to a free society. A free society depends on our general confidence in the power of reason, that people have intelligence and good judgment enough to handle the cognitive demands of living freely. Yet now our current concerns with social unrest, triggers, and inflammatory language and images has led some social-media giants curating speech. Some history teachers have found their online course lessons on German history blocked because they contain archival footage of Hitler giving a speech or a Nazi parade. Thus the censorship debate has now become main stream. We must decide as a society, should dangerous ideas always be allowed so that they can be confronted openly? Is sunlight the best disinfectant?