Dr. David Butterfield

speaker

616 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Dr. David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

TRIGGERnometry · What The Odyssey Is Actually About · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

Not that the only thing I know is that I know nothing.

More importantly, he said the unexamined life is not worth living.

It's unlivable.

And what that means is if you will not interrogate the nature of your character and the flaws within it, you're not living.

You are not actually being human.

You're not a human being if you can't address, as difficult as it may be, the awkward and difficult parts of your own human soul.

And the Greeks understand that, and it motivates almost everything they do artistically.

Other cultures do the same, but it won't surprise you for me to share my opinion with you, which is that despite this constant narcissism of talking about the self in our modern age, we're actually acutely uninterested in interrogating our own personal and societal problems.

Your podcast exists in order to have the conversations which we deem difficult to have.

Well, they weren't difficult for the Greeks.

It was something that needed talking about.

So let's talk about it.

Let's use logos to make progress.

Now, there are lots of barriers to having the kind of conversations and the sort of reflection that needs to happen in order for us to thrive as humans.

Correct.

So in terms of myth and those inherited tales,

Tragedies baked in and there's no escape.

However, from the fifth century onwards, from the dawn of ethics with Socrates and Plato, and then to the emergence of different rival philosophical schools, the Academy, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, all of these groups actually come up with different ways of responding to the challenge of being human.

And they have very, very different views about whether things are fatalistic and predetermined, or whether life is what you make of it.

so although i agree with you when it comes to the myths and the great tales actually the greeks as a people evolve evolve intellectually into realizing that actually actually you have much more agency over your life than uh the great tales might might suggest

Showing 561–580 of 616 · page 29 of 31