Josh Spiegel (11:43)

Hey, I'm Josh Spiegel, host of the podcast Lunatic in the Newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking, and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the Newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You're, you'll laugh, you'll cry. And gasp in horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable lunatic in the newsroom. Listen today.

Alex Kanchrowitz (12:13)

Hi, this is Alex Kanchrowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Philosophy Lecturer (12:48)

So prior to them, we'll look at in a minute. Homer, Hesiod, these playwrights, these oral tradition storytellers. For them, virtue and vice is essentially known via mythic or mythopoetic storytelling. It's not primarily known through abstraction. This is going to be a huge step that a lot of these pre Socratics are going to take away from myth towards reason, rationality, abstraction, and stepping away from myth and storytelling. Now, this is not to cast aspersions on myth and storytelling. We're not making judgments either way. We're simply understanding the course of philosophy as it progresses historically. Because again, this, I have to stress this because a lot of people don't know how to approach philosophy, right? They just pick up David Hume and start reading him. And you can't understand David Hume if you don't understand the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, right? Because Hume comes on the scene and the Enlightenment and says, as a skeptic, right, we need to throw out all the metaphysics that came before. Well, if I don't know what the metaphysics came before were, I don't know what he's talking about. Likewise, I can't understand Kant without understanding David Hume because Kant's whole philosophy is a reaction to Hume. And we're going to see that throughout the history of Western philosophy. It's a constant position, reaction, interchange. And sometimes this is referred to as dialectics. Now, dialectics, I'm going to have more, I'll have more definitions later on on screen for you guys. But as we get into more of the precise terminology, we don't have to really worry about dialectics tonight. But I do want to bring it up because it's going to be recurring themes. I want you guys to pay attention to Themes that will recur throughout this lecture series. Dialect. This will be one of them because we're going to see, especially in the Greeks and throughout the whole history of Western philosophy, dialectical tension. And remember, dialectics means different things in different contexts. Sometimes dialectics means just the methodology of teaching to back and forth, question asking, dialogue. Right. Sometimes dialectics means something more metaphysical, which in the sense of like actual principles in the world that are in tension with one another. Is there a stark war between determinism and free will? Right. That's a dialectical characterized question. Right. The setting for that is already kind of set up as dialectical. Are you a determinist or do you believe in free will? Well, that assumes that there's not some form of compatibilism. Right? Now I'm not saying which of those is correct or wrong. I'm just saying that you can see that a lot of times questions can be framed in a dialectical way. And I want you to pay attention to that because as we go through a lot of these, especially these pre Socratics, you're going to notice that they really are operating on a lot of these kinds of assumptions. So we want to pay attention to that. We want to have some of those things in mind. But before we get to that, after we've looked at some of these course materials, rough course syllabus, this is what we're looking at doing here. We're going to do this introductory class. This is. Then we're going to move to Plato. I'm going to try to squeeze Plato into one talk. These could easily. Each of these people, as we know, could easily be an entire course. They're very difficult, especially the pre Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. But we're going to tackle it. I have a lot of friends that are in academia that are also solid people that I think you guys would really like, you guys really benefit from. So I'm going to have a couple of guests, expert lectures come in to also co teach and do a little Q and A with me on the epistemology class. I'm going to do the metaphysics class. We're going to lump aesthetics with ethics. I'll bring a guest expert in as well for that, probably somebody who's a Renaissance expert. Then we're going to look at the Stoics and the Neoplatonists together for the early non Christian philosophy of the meditations of, for example, Marcus Aurelius. And we'll look at some of the Roman philosophers. Then we're going to move to the what's called the Patristic period, which means the Church Fathers. Again, regardless of what you think of Christianity, you know, I'm not really here to, to get into that with you tonight, unless you guys want to talk about those things. I'm happy to, but that's not really primarily the focus of this course is not going to essentially be Christianity. It's just going to be the history of Western philosophy. However, what everyone thinks of Christianity or religion. We do have to treat this very crucial, very influential period in the history of the west. And we're not going to restrict it to Latin or Western Church Fathers, as many college courses do. We're going to look at figures who were crucial and very influential in other civilizations like Byzantium, particularly the Cappadocians, John Damascus, very famous Patristic Church Fathers, as they're called, who were heavily philosophical. So Augustine, a towering figure obviously in the early Church, had many, many, many thousands of pages of philosophical writings. And we're going to look at those. And he's crucial as well because he's very influenced by the Neoplatonists, right? As are the Cappadocian Church Fathers, Basil Gregory and Gregory Basil and two Gregory's. Basically we're going to look at them in terms of their metaphysics, their approach to how the world is structured. And as you can see, I mean, this encompasses, you know, at least this isn't even all of them. You got third, I've got 38 volumes up here and probably half of these volumes deal with Augustine, Cappadocian, John Damascus. So I'm going to compact all of that into one long course. Then we're going to get into medieval philosophy in general, which those guys prepare the way for. And then we have to know this because we're not going to be able to understand the Enlightenment, what it's reacting against, unless we understand some of the medieval scholastic philosophy. So again, that'll be compacted. We won't go super deep into all that because that could be its own course. Right. People get their PhD in even just one of the thinkers in any of these domains. So we want to shoot for an overview. Like I said, when we get to Descartes and the Enlightenment, we're going to look at that as its reaction to the medieval period. Again, this is not to demolish or destroy all the Enlightenment philosophers. In fact, they're going to have a lot of good arguments against medieval philosophers. So we want to try to look for good arguments is another thing to try to train yourself to do in terms of Philosophy, we want to look for good arguments irrespective of the man, irrespective of the person making the argument. Do they have a good argument? Because guess, guess what, even the worst philosopher, I don't care who you think is the worst, he's probably got one good argument here or there and it's kind of on a spectrum. Right. I'm not a big fan of Hegel, but I think Hegel has some really interesting insights here and there. Same with Immanuel Kant. Right. I'm not a Kantian, I'm not super into Kant, but I think Kant has some really fascinating insights that we're going to talk to when we get to number 11 there, which is the Enlightenment empiricists and Kant's transcendental idealism, that is the Hume, Kant, Berkeley, Locke period and then modern collapse of philosophy. And yes, I will argue that it has pretty much collapsed. And by that I mean what we classically thought of the doing of philosophy as doesn't really exist anymore. Then that's not to say that in the academic world or in the academic setting there aren't people doing philosophy. There are, there are, but this is. But what we thought of as philosophy in terms of the ancient and medievals has collapsed in the sense that we don't do that anymore. Now philosophy has turned into postmodernism, which is essentially an anti philosophical movement. It's actually ironically reverted back to storytelling. That's a. The irony here is that what the pre Socratics there in part one are going to be reacting to in Homer and Hesiod, ironically, we're going to notice that the modern collapse of philosophy has basically returned in terms of postmodernism has returned to myth and storytelling. Because of course they will say that really every philosopher and everything is just myth, storytelling or power relations. Right? Power oppressor narratives and so forth. And certainly, you know, we could include Marx and so forth in all of these modern figures or this modern era, but it's just really difficult to put everything into one course. And so like Richard said, you know, if everything works out, we'll probably just do a second season of covering modern stuff, you know, and then we can do a class on Darwin, we can do a class on Marx, we can do a class. And you might think, well, Darwin, oh yeah, you're going to notice tonight, just like with what I just said about postmodernism being a return of an ancient view, you're going to notice quite a few things that are normative popular views today. We're already in the Presocratics and in the ancient philosophers. Again, I'm not here to try to convince you either way on these things. I have my views. I'm happy to give my takes. But again, what we want to stress and what we want to really strive for, because this is very difficult for a lot of people, I don't think this audience will be too difficult. I'm sure you guys are a sharp crowd. I'm sure you're striving to achieve objectivity. That's what we want to do. We want to understand these people no matter what we think. Even if we think it's the stupidest thing, right? That is even I think that dude is retarded, right? I think if we think, you know, Aristotle is the most retarded of all the philosophers, right? He was like riding the short bus to the Athens Academy, right? Whatever you think, I at least want you to understand Aristotle and be able to give the basics of what he thought to the. To the appeasement of me or anyone else who knows a decent amount about aerosol. Right? If you can do that, then you have achieved what I'm after in this course, which is to give you the ability to speak to these topics fluently and you're going to understand again how it relates to your life. A lot of this again, will seem obscure and weird, but again, you're going to notice some of the most prominent views that people have in the world today.

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Philosophy Lecturer (24:21)

that are thought of as new, aren't really new. They're just repackaged, resurfacing, and they kind of represent similar debates. Copy and pasted, actually, almost from 2500 years ago. So what is philosophy? Yeah, obviously probably many of you already know this. I won't spend too much time on the basics, but we do need to have just a little bit of overview of what the basic terms are, what they're referring to, because we may have some people that are brand new. Love of wisdom. Philo Sophia Love of wisdom. Socrates famously said, the examined life is the only life worth living now, technically. So the unexamined life is not worth living. But I'm paraphrasing to say, look, basically he's just telling you that if you're just going through, through your emotions day to day, if you've never sat down to contemplate, what is life? Who am I? What's the meaning of all this? Is there a point to life? Does the universe have a beginning? Right. If you've never thought about those things, then you're kind of like a boring ass rock. And literally, that's how I think. You know, some of the Greek philosophers would sort of, especially the ones that kind of had disdain for the masses, right? Some of these guys would just be like, these people are really no different than rocks. And they're even going to liken some of the people to rocks because they're weighed down by the cares of this world and the material possessions and pleasures, right? The base passions or whatnot. They keep people focused not on the here and the now. Excuse me, not on the transcendent or on the ideal or on the true or whatever, but on the here and the now. And so they're kind of like determined NPCs. This is the ancient Greek idea of the NPC. And I think if we were to think of somebody like Socrates, who will be the teacher of Plato, he would definitely resonate with the NPC meme, right? He would probably be etching it out on tablets, right? And showing it to his, his fellow philosophy students in his class. And so the idea here is that we want to not just go through the motions, but want to understand the world and not just have knowledge. This is an important distinction that will come up in the early Greek philosophers. Not just having a bunch of data, right? Clearly there's a difference between, you know, some Guy who's just a spurg and like memorizes sports statistics. Right. What's the Dustin Hoffman character? Rain Man. Right. Would you call Rain man wise? No, he's just a sort of weird savant, you know, spurg. Right. But what about a situation where, you know, take the. Again, whatever you think of the Bible, think the character of Solomon, Solomon in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, he's touted for his wisdom and certainly he, according to the Bible, knew a lot of things. But he wasn't just a key figure in history because he knew facts and could list them on a spreadsheet or whatever. Right. Ancient Hebrew spreadsheet, but because he had the application of that knowledge in the right way at the right time. And that's kind of what we're shooting for, for wisdom. So again, not just love of bare knowledge, but love of wisdom, the appropriate virtuous application of that knowledge at the right time and in the right way. Those are going to be some of the key questions that come up for philosophy and what a philosopher is what. So what are we after here? What do we do? What is a philosopher? What do they do? There's some of the basic questions they're going to be looking at. Philosophers do things like cross examine. We want to know is what's being said to me coming from a rational, reasonable place? Is somebody lying to me? Are they trying to scam me? Are they duping me? Am I watching movies that are full of propaganda? Right. Maybe I want to analyze this movie and say, hey, wait a minute, this is Raytheon Boeing trying to sell me on some new Pentagon war that has, you know, the face of Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon on it or whatever. Right. So I'm cross examining a piece of art or a piece of propaganda in that case. Right? You're going into law, you're going into business. You want to cross examine to see if this is a good deal. I don't know, is it? So what you might have thought isn't really the domain of philosophy. For philosophers it is philosophy. Right. We're engaged in cross examination. Obviously you could apply the law court. I mean, I think hopefully the law court example is obvious there, self evident. Have to go into that really. But you know, cross examination can come into anything. It could come into a conversation that you're having at Thanksgiving dinner. Right. You're trying to convince your family members of their they're terrible politics. Right. And how they're, you know, idiots for believing the normie Story of 9 11. Who knows, right? So let's say you're having that and you want to cross exam, you want to analyze their bad arguments. So that's something philosophers are interested in. Philosophers are analytical. That means they do analysis. Now, not every philosopher is always engaged in this, but it's certainly part of what philosophers do, and that's obviously very valuable. It's valuable in today's world, obviously, a lot of what we do, whether it's economics, whether it's the arts, whether it's computer programming, whatever you're into, you're going to need the skills and tools that allow you to be highly analytical. As we get into modern philosophy, this actually becomes its own branch of philosophy, analytical philosophy, which sometimes contrasted with continental philosophy in the modern period. It's not exactly what we're talking about here. We're just speaking in a more general sense, but it will actually become its own kind of school, so to speak, of philosophy. So philosophers are definitely engaged in analysis, and primarily we're engaged in analysis of what? Those three things that we talked about at the beginning, that subdivision, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. That's in philosophy. But again, this is one of the unique things about philosophy, is that philosophy can be a philosophy of anything. That might sound weird at first, but if you think about it, if you think about some of the famous modern philosophers, there is, of course, the character of Iek. If you've seen Zizek, he does the philosophy of the toilet. Now, that seems ridiculous, but that's exactly what I does. He's one of the most famous living philosophers out there today, one of the few existing, still explicitly sort of Marxist philosophers. And I, who recently debated Jordan Peterson, for example. No, no, no. Zizek does analysis from a Marxist vantage point of things like toilets. And on the one hand, that's kind of ridiculous, but at the same time you think, well, toilets are part of our lives, aren't they? We spend quite a bit of our time on the toilet. Right. So is it theoretically possible that you could do a analysis of toilets? Sure. Because didn't they say at one point that, I don't know, Trump has a golden toilet? I don't know if that's true, but does Trump have a golden toilet? What does that signify in terms of the figure of Trump? Saudi princes with golden. Golden toilets. Right. So this is sort of beautification of a ritual that is very mundane, but also sort of, you know, base and gross. Right. Shitting. Right. So a philosophy of shitting. Now I'm being kind of, you know, silly here, but I'm also kind of making a point that it really is the case that you can do a philosophy of anything. For example, in some of my grad classes, we were getting into some of the guys who had done. I forget the guy's name, but he's a semiotician guy who had done a analysis of comedy, philosophy of comedy. What is it that makes us laugh? What is it that makes this thing funny versus absurd and not funny? What is it that makes, you know, faces? You could do a philosophy of anything is my point. So it will. It's broad in its scope, and that it will range from a philosophy of things in the domain of philosophy, knowledge, metaphysics, ethics, to weird and sort of fanciful figures and characters in philosophy who do philosophies of anything. We can do the philosophy of literary theory. We can do the philosophy of music, do the philosophy of comedy, as I said. So again, there's potentially a philosophy of anything, an analysis of anything from this kind of perspective. Philosophers are not just analytical, however, they are also intuitive. There's a lot of creativity, actually, that goes into the process of philosophy. Some mathematicians, for example, I think Roger Penrose, and if you read Paul Davies book Mind of God, he will talk about how there's actually a creative element that goes into even things like mathematics and geometry, right? I mean, some of the great philosophers and thinkers and mathematicians, they have the flashes of insight that don't come from some obvious source. We don't really know where they get these flashes of insight, right? I mean, they. For example, you know, the story about Nikola Tesla is that he would get a lot of his insights into these, you know, elaborate engines that he would build through these just visions that he would sort of pass out or whatever. That's the story, at least, right? So philosophers are intuitive in that we are not just analytical robots. We also have a will, an intention, a creativity that we bring to the analysis. Again, we can be analyzing anything. It doesn't matter. Philosophers are constructive. In other words, they don't just focus on the particulars. Now, they may in certain cases, if they're doing their dissertation on the particular. And that will actually be something very important in philosophy. But generally speaking, the philosopher is not just concerned with that. He also wants to get a big picture. He wants to construct a total picture about what's going on, what's our situation in the world, what does life mean, et cetera. Is there meaning and order in the world? Is there any order to be found? These are the kinds of questions that we're going to be asking. And so philosophers are constructive in that they seek to build a total picture. Now, there's limits to that. Obviously we don't mean it in a literal sense of like, I'm going to build a total picture of everything in reality and everything that exists. Now, some of the technocrats might think that with total information awareness and, you know, this kind of Internet of things, they might think that. But typically speaking outside of these sort of maniacal mad scientist positions, like the technocrats, typically philosophers, the people that we're going to be analyzing and looking at, are seeking a total picture within some fixed domain or within some general framework, okay? They're not looking for or attempting to create omniscience. However, we're going to see in some cases where they actually do try to reach that right. We're going to see with, for example, Descartes. Descartes is going to try to find this indubitable, infallible reference point. Hegel will try to find this sort of omniscience or pseudo omniscience within his process philosophy, for example. But typically that's not what we're doing. However, many of them will try to build world systems right from scratch. And that's something that we want to pay attention to. So you guys want to jot down your questions and just save those for the end. And you can feel free when we get to the end to come back to questions at any point. So just, just jot down if you want to, that you want to ask a question about sort of stuff early on. But it might be better to wait until we get through some of this preliminary stuff before we start taking any questions. Philosophers. Thus, in my. And this is sort of. This is more so my approach, because some people would disagree with this, but I think that philosophy, and what philosophy is really about is worldview thinking. This is the attempt to characterize and systematize man's knowledge and experience and show how these things are interrelated. That man's knowledge is not totally fragmentary, it's not totally disconnected, discrete from other pieces of knowledge, other facts and other humans and their experience, but that there is a commonly experienced world and our experiences and the facts that we experience and the. The knowledge that we obtain from the world is interrelated. There is a world historical, we might say there is a worldview from which man can build a system and posit right facts about the world, predicate things about the world, world. And lastly, philosophers are concerned, in my view, with presuppositions now, this is specifically what the philosopher will be doing as he does philosophy, right? As we go through the history of philosophy, you're going to notice that each philosopher kind of does this thing where he reads the guys before him, and especially maybe the generation right before him, and he critiques. Philosophy doesn't have to be relegated to only critique, but critique is going to be crucial to the entire process of philosophy in the history of the West. Each guy will be critiquing the guy before him pretty much across the board. There might be a few outliers here and there who try to do different things, and maybe they pop up and, you know, they just focus on maybe literary theory, philosophy of aesthetics, something like that. But most of the big people that we're going to be focusing on are the ones that are known as the big philosophers. They're typically concerned with critiquing the presuppositions, the basic commitments and assumptions of the guys that came before. So that's what we're going to be doing as well. And keep in mind that a lot of what you see there on that page is also what you, as a philosopher, will begin to do. Now, you might think, well, I'm not a philosopher. I didn't take all these classes. Well, guess what? You have a philosophy, and you are a philosopher even if you don't know it. Even if you know nothing about philosophy. If I ask you simple questions in the domains of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, you might even know what those words are. But if I ask you basic questions, you're going to have a view on some of this. You're going to have some idea about knowledge. Even if you think that we can't have knowledge, that's still a position, right? That's an agnostic position, but it's still a position in epistemology, right? That you don't believe anybody has knowledge or you don't have knowledge, or nobody can have knowledge. If I asked you a question about ethics, right? Well, I think it's wrong to kill people. Okay, well, then, so now you have a philosophy of ethics, right? Of virtue and vice, right away, whether you know it or not. So everybody is a philosopher even if they don't know it. Everybody has a philosophy because they have a worldview, even if it's a commitment to agnosticism, because everybody has basic commitments or beliefs or presuppositions when it comes to what are the three branches? Epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. All right. Why? One more point here. I'll try to go through this kind of quick because I don't want to spend too much time on. This is kind of a restatement of kind of what we talked about before. A lot of times people hear about philosophy and they'll say philosophy is useless and impractical. Word sell it. I can't tell you how many times in the last 20 years I've heard this. And my most oft repeated boomer phrase. When I chose to study philosophy, every boomer, oh, the philosophy corporations hiring around you. They thought that was the greatest joke ever, right? I never thought it was funny. That was dumb the first time and I still hear it. Still dumb. But these are common objections that most people have to this whole domain. And it's why, for example, people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson a couple few years ago, if you guys remember, basically said, don't waste your time. Philosophy is a useless enterprise. I wonder why he was so emphatically opposed to philosophy. Well, it might be because he doesn't fare very well when asked philosophical questions. So that might have something to do with maybe more of a personal motivation. But what are the some of the pros Then again that what does philosophy help us do, right? So maybe you're not so interested in what philosophers do. How does it help you? What is it? What do I get out of this? Philosophy helps us to think creatively because it makes us better at analysis, as I said, of anything. You're not going to fall for bad arguments. You're not going to fall for fallacy. You're not going to fall for dumb stupid arguments. For example, emotional appeals. Now I know that one of Richard's buds has taught a really excellent logical fallacies course, right? And one of those logical fallacies that comes up all the time, for example, is something like emotional appeal, right? Oh, you don't want to support the war effort in XYZ country. I guess you hate the kids in those countries, don't you? I guess you want the kids to die, right? You want Saddam to kill the kids. These are all ridiculous emotional appeals, right? In other words, only a person who adopts their position cares about kids. Well, that's a fallacy, right? So understanding philosophy helps us to think critically, makes us better at analysis of anything. It doesn't have to be politics. It's going to help you analyze again, business situations, right? Business deals. It's going to help you analyze the crypto market, right? For example, crypto deals a lot with human emotions and human psychology, right? If whales are dumping, you know that people are going to follow the whales and dump. So it's going to make you better at analysis. If you know, the modus operandi of human operation in markets, for example, and that's involved that. That involves philosophical critical thinking. Even if we don't know these terms, philosophy helps us think creatively. As we said, we have new approaches and angles to things. I remember one of my philosophy professors made a good point when I was first coming into philosophy and I met with him and I said, I don't know if I should choose this as a profession. I said, because I just don't know if I'll be able to get a job and make money and do this. He said, well, I know a really famous guy who studied a lot of philosophy that you might have heard of. And I said, who's that? He said, steve Martin. So Steve Martin used a lot of his philosophy, philosophy to go on into the world of comedy. So I'm not guaranteeing you, you know, that I'm going to teach you to be some great comedian if you study philosophy. But he's an example of a person who studied philosophy. And I don't know if he just did undergrad or if he went further than that, but he utilized that to kind of give him a unique approach to comedy. And although we look back on Steve Martin as kind of a typical, you know, boomer, 70s, 80s comedian, when Steve Martin came out in the 70s, he was very unique and very weird and odd in his approach. And I think that, as my professor was arguing, that had to do with his taking of a lot of philosophy classes when he was a younger guy. So philosophy does help us to think creatively because it gives us new angles and new ways to approach questions and things in the world. Philosophy helps us systematize and particularize knowledge. Again, a classic example of this is that the taxonomy that we still use today for animals, kingdom, phylum, species, etc. Genera, that's from Aristotle. Aristotle, the great philosopher of, of Greece, the student of Plato, gives us that taxonomy that we still use.