Professor Stephen Hicks will teach a new course this fall 2008 semester at Rockford College: Entrepreneurship and Ethics. The purpose of this course is to integrate entrepreneurship, business history, and business ethics. It will consist of case studies of major entrepreneurs in modern history, e.g., Commodore Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Insull, John Johnson, Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, and others. Part of each case study involves learning the entrepreneur’s business practices and how he or she achieved business success. What traits and practices did they have: intelligence, risk-tolerance, leadership, ambition, ruthlessness? And part of each case study will involve learning about the ethical controversies their activities generated: Were they “predatory competitors,” “monopolists,” “robber barons”—or were they extraordinarily productive individuals who benefited both themselves and their customers? Students read and analyze business histories and biographies by both proponents and detractors. See the Entrepreneurship and Ethics course flyer.

Philosophy Professor Matt Flamm, author of the essay on George Santayana in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and co-editor of Under Whatever Sky—Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, will be speaking in Indianapolis on “The Impious Naturalism of the New Atheists.” The conference is sponsored by the Santayana Seminar Series and The Institute for American Thought.

Philosophy Professor Shawn Klein, co-editor of Harry Potter and Philosophy, will be speaking at a colloquium at Tufts University in Massachusetts, his alma mater, on the theme Why Take Harry Seriously?

Update: Here’s a Tufts Daily article about the talk and Professor Klein’s web log entry.

Rockford College philosophy professor Stephen Hicks’s essay entitled “Ethics and Economics” was published in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David Henderson, Ph.D. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is the second edition of The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, which was published to acclaim in 1993, and includes essays by “Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and George Stigler, former presidential economic advisors, financial columnists, and economists such as Armen Alchian, Don Boudreaux, Deepak Lal, Anna Schwartz, Lawrence Summers, and Murray Rothbard.”

Philosophy professor Stephen Hicks gave two invited talks this month. On November 13th, he spoke at the University of Texas, Austin, on the impact of Galileo Galilei and John Locke; the title of his talk was “Philosophy and the Early Modern Revolution in Religion.” On November 15th, he spoke at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia on the topic of the fiftieth anniversary of Ayn Rand’s philosophical novel, Atlas Shrugged; the theme of the conference was “The Continuing Relevance of Atlas Shrugged.”

The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship is proud to announce its guest speakers for the Fall semester:

September 19th—Dr. David Schweickart

September 26th—Dr. David Kelley

October 31st—Dr. Alexei Marcoux

Each speaker has a different expertise and opinion about Capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses.

Dr. Schweickart is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He will be speaking on “Marx’s Democratic Critique of Capitalism and Its Implications for a Democratic Socialism.” Dr. Schweickart holds Ph.D. degrees in both mathematics and philosophy. He is the author of Against Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and After Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

Dr. David Kelley (Ph.D., Princeton University) is a former professor of philosophy at Vassar College and is currently Senior Fellow at the Atlas Society in Washington, D.C. Dr. Kelley will be speaking on Ayn Rand’s moral defense of capitalism. Dr. Kelley is the author of The Evidence of the Senses, The Art of Reasoning, and The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand.

Dr. Alexei Marcoux (Ph.D., Bowling Green State University) is Associate Professor of Business Ethics at Loyola University Chicago and a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute. He will be speaking on the social philosophy of Friedrich A. Hayek, the 1974 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Each talk will be held in Scarborough 4 at 6 PM, in connection with Professors Hicks and Rezazadeh’s Capitalism in the Modern World course.

We are hoping for a lively and controversial semester, and we welcome you to join us for any of the talks you are interested in.

In the meantime, please contact us at if you have any questions or would like more information.