Dr. Stephen Hicks

Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Two are out.

Two are out.

All right, already we're into heavy-duty epistemology, neuroscience, history, psychology, value sets, including motivation issues and so on. Okay, so just hold on to that for a moment. So I'm going to say you're right. Traditional empiricism has had problems. Traditional rationalism has had problems. And that we cannot accept in...

All right, already we're into heavy-duty epistemology, neuroscience, history, psychology, value sets, including motivation issues and so on. Okay, so just hold on to that for a moment. So I'm going to say you're right. Traditional empiricism has had problems. Traditional rationalism has had problems. And that we cannot accept in...

post-analysis sort out all of the elements and that's a big part of what the scientific project goes on. But let me start by defending the empiricists for a moment. So what I just did on the table, right, shocking.

post-analysis sort out all of the elements and that's a big part of what the scientific project goes on. But let me start by defending the empiricists for a moment. So what I just did on the table, right, shocking.

G.E. Moore. Yeah, but also earlier when he was talking about the ideal. I refute you thus. Yeah, that's right. Which is in the right track, but still too naive. But just reflect on that experience if we start to try to defend the empiricists for a moment. So I smacked the table completely out of the blue. But for anybody who's listening or watching, that was sense data.

G.E. Moore. Yeah, but also earlier when he was talking about the ideal. I refute you thus. Yeah, that's right. Which is in the right track, but still too naive. But just reflect on that experience if we start to try to defend the empiricists for a moment. So I smacked the table completely out of the blue. But for anybody who's listening or watching, that was sense data.

You had no motivational set. You had no story in mind. You had no behavioral preconditions to set for you. There was an experience, and you were aware of the experience. Now, what you then go on to do with that experience is going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing. And all of the things that you are laying out are exactly right.

You had no motivational set. You had no story in mind. You had no behavioral preconditions to set for you. There was an experience, and you were aware of the experience. Now, what you then go on to do with that experience is going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing. And all of the things that you are laying out are exactly right.

So the empiricist's commitment, I think, if it's going to be properly done, has to be

So the empiricist's commitment, I think, if it's going to be properly done, has to be

that there are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that ultimately, when we get all of the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do this in laboratories where we have isolated all of the variables, there is a residual direct contact with empirical reality that we can put things to the test.

that there are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that ultimately, when we get all of the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do this in laboratories where we have isolated all of the variables, there is a residual direct contact with empirical reality that we can put things to the test.

No, but even there, the language becomes very important because we don't want to say that it's subjective, at least as philosophers use the term, because that then is to say it's not in relationship to what is out there. So, again, we have to get into the technical epistemology very carefully.

No, but even there, the language becomes very important because we don't want to say that it's subjective, at least as philosophers use the term, because that then is to say it's not in relationship to what is out there. So, again, we have to get into the technical epistemology very carefully.

Right. Well, I'm a philosopher by training. So my intellectual interest is in philosophy. what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like. We've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in, and education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries.

Right. Well, I'm a philosopher by training. So my intellectual interest is in philosophy. what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like. We've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in, and education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries.

When philosophers talk about the subjective, sometimes they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side. But if we were doing epistemology,

When philosophers talk about the subjective, sometimes they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side. But if we were doing epistemology,

or knowledge then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is is set by the subject and the external reality has nothing to do with it the opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it instead just reality smacks that person in the face and as you put it uh the story doesn't need to be told it wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is

or knowledge then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is is set by the subject and the external reality has nothing to do with it the opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it instead just reality smacks that person in the face and as you put it uh the story doesn't need to be told it wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is

What I think is the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those. We have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality. It's an inherently relational phenomenon. And you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality.

What I think is the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those. We have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality. It's an inherently relational phenomenon. And you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality.

What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject is involved, then there's no way for us to be aware of reality. They retreat to some sort of

What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject is involved, then there's no way for us to be aware of reality. They retreat to some sort of

representationalist model or they start going internal and then they start talking about motivations and theory ladens and other beliefs that you have and once you make that divide there is no way to get out subject out of the subject and back to reality on the other hand if you try to react to that and say the subject has can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge

representationalist model or they start going internal and then they start talking about motivations and theory ladens and other beliefs that you have and once you make that divide there is no way to get out subject out of the subject and back to reality on the other hand if you try to react to that and say the subject has can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge

then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject right to pretend the subject doesn't exist to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject but that also is an impossible model so what i want to say is the empiricist commitment and historically the empiricists have struggled to work with uh work this out this is this is the ongoing project

then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject right to pretend the subject doesn't exist to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject but that also is an impossible model so what i want to say is the empiricist commitment and historically the empiricists have struggled to work with uh work this out this is this is the ongoing project

In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem. And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models.

In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem. And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models.

What I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how sophisticated it starts. But that, as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You can't do

What I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how sophisticated it starts. But that, as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You can't do

the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to reality. And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon. And that's a philosophy of mind claim. Let me just say, it's not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality.

the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to reality. And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon. And that's a philosophy of mind claim. Let me just say, it's not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality.

It's not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself. It's a response mechanism. And all of these other things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more thing. I think we talk a lot about epistemology and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project.

It's not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself. It's a response mechanism. And all of these other things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more thing. I think we talk a lot about epistemology and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project.

And I think that's fine to... You should define that for people, epistemology. The theory of knowledge. So we try to figure out... So the ology part is to give an account of something or an explanation of. In this case, it's the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge. When do I really know something? We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around.

And I think that's fine to... You should define that for people, epistemology. The theory of knowledge. So we try to figure out... So the ology part is to give an account of something or an explanation of. In this case, it's the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge. When do I really know something? We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around.

So, in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies, and obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial, So I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing. I had at my university a center for ethics and entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies as things came on, asking what can be done.

So, in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies, and obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial, So I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing. I had at my university a center for ethics and entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies as things came on, asking what can be done.

But the difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and... Falsehood. That's right. And just having been conditioned to do certain things. So how do I really know that I know something? And when should I say that I don't really know something? And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge.

But the difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and... Falsehood. That's right. And just having been conditioned to do certain things. So how do I really know that I know something? And when should I say that I don't really know something? And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge.

And this involves some reflection on sense perception, as we're starting to talk about now, a good understanding of language and grammar, logic. And then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do, in some sense, inform us, and we can really learn about the world through story. What's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework?

And this involves some reflection on sense perception, as we're starting to talk about now, a good understanding of language and grammar, logic. And then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do, in some sense, inform us, and we can really learn about the world through story. What's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework?

We've been thinking through those things very systematically. Now that though is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge, all of that language is epistemological. But I think we can't do epistemology in isolation. We always have to do it in context with metaphysics.

We've been thinking through those things very systematically. Now that though is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge, all of that language is epistemological. But I think we can't do epistemology in isolation. We always have to do it in context with metaphysics.

That is to say, we have to also be talking about the nature of reality.

That is to say, we have to also be talking about the nature of reality.

That's right. What's the furniture of the universe, so to speak? What's real and what isn't real? So the question is, anytime I want to say, you know, this is true or this is real or this is a fact, right, or whatever, that's to make a claim about reality. And then the follow-up claim always is, well, how do you know that? So you're making the claim, but you're also making a justificatory claim.

That's right. What's the furniture of the universe, so to speak? What's real and what isn't real? So the question is, anytime I want to say, you know, this is true or this is real or this is a fact, right, or whatever, that's to make a claim about reality. And then the follow-up claim always is, well, how do you know that? So you're making the claim, but you're also making a justificatory claim.

So reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics. The special sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology, but if we can step back and say, Are, for example, space and time features of the universe as a whole? Is the universe eternal or infinite in various dimensions? Does a god exist or not?

So reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics. The special sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology, but if we can step back and say, Are, for example, space and time features of the universe as a whole? Is the universe eternal or infinite in various dimensions? Does a god exist or not?

Those are all metaphysical questions. So to come back to, and this is just one more point that I wanted to make, is that all of the things that we talk about, when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics,

Those are all metaphysical questions. So to come back to, and this is just one more point that I wanted to make, is that all of the things that we talk about, when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics,

all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind that is to say what is this thing that we call the mind and one of the things that early modern philosophy now this is 1400s 1500s on into the 1600s was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being.

all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind that is to say what is this thing that we call the mind and one of the things that early modern philosophy now this is 1400s 1500s on into the 1600s was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being.

And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries, let's say a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body but also a soul, or a physicality plus a spiritual element, and that these are two very different metaphysical things. One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal.

And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries, let's say a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body but also a soul, or a physicality plus a spiritual element, and that these are two very different metaphysical things. One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal.

And that they have different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate destinies. Then on the metaphysics side, how do those two come together? How do they work together? How do they fit together? What's the proper understanding of those two? But that... metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go.

And that they have different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate destinies. Then on the metaphysics side, how do those two come together? How do they work together? How do they fit together? What's the proper understanding of those two? But that... metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go.

So if you are, say, an empiricist and you want to say, well, we start in, say, the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other, but somehow I have to get that across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind,

So if you are, say, an empiricist and you want to say, well, we start in, say, the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other, but somehow I have to get that across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind,

which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various things that we think we're going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth. And that metaphysical gulf, if you can't bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you problems epistemologically. And so one reason why...

which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various things that we think we're going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth. And that metaphysical gulf, if you can't bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you problems epistemologically. And so one reason why...

we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later, I think is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth. It wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends.

we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later, I think is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth. It wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends.

But at the same time, we were struggling with the metaphysical problem, as I'm thinking of it, the mind-body problem. And once we said, or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are non-physical realities, or stories are non-physical realities, and they're in a mind, and we're conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world,

But at the same time, we were struggling with the metaphysical problem, as I'm thinking of it, the mind-body problem. And once we said, or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are non-physical realities, or stories are non-physical realities, and they're in a mind, and we're conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world,

uh because in many cases people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or and so forth so what i'm interested in though primarily though is the courses that i have taught over the course of many years having them in a vehicle that's obviously going to be accessible to more people

uh because in many cases people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or and so forth so what i'm interested in though primarily though is the courses that i have taught over the course of many years having them in a vehicle that's obviously going to be accessible to more people

as a non-physical world, it's very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world. So I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology, it's interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s. And so we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline.

as a non-physical world, it's very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world. So I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology, it's interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s. And so we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline.

We have the early Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900.

We have the early Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900.

and one of the things that said they're both trying to do is to say well finally we can start to study the mind scientifically we can have a science of the mind but what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the mind somehow didn't fit into nature it was an extra natural thing it was a ghost in the machine and the the fitting of the ghost in the machine we don't have a theory that that works this out

and one of the things that said they're both trying to do is to say well finally we can start to study the mind scientifically we can have a science of the mind but what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the mind somehow didn't fit into nature it was an extra natural thing it was a ghost in the machine and the the fitting of the ghost in the machine we don't have a theory that that works this out

And both of them were, of course, reflecting on Darwin and Darwin's more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being, that we're going to see the mind not as a ghost that's in the wet wear or in the biological wear, but as a some sort of emergent phenomenon or a byproduct.

And both of them were, of course, reflecting on Darwin and Darwin's more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being, that we're going to see the mind not as a ghost that's in the wet wear or in the biological wear, but as a some sort of emergent phenomenon or a byproduct.

But it's only when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a machine, to use that metaphor, or a spirit plus a body as two different things, as much more of a naturalist integrative, then we start to think that we can do psychology scientifically. Now, the Freudians and the behaviorists, I think they were both disasters in various ways. And useful.

But it's only when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a machine, to use that metaphor, or a spirit plus a body as two different things, as much more of a naturalist integrative, then we start to think that we can do psychology scientifically. Now, the Freudians and the behaviorists, I think they were both disasters in various ways. And useful.

They were genius, but this is, again, the early steps of science. But what they are starting to do, though, is say, we're not going to study the human being. We are going to study the human being as part of the natural world. But notice that this is now into the 1900s, and psychology is a very new science.

They were genius, but this is, again, the early steps of science. But what they are starting to do, though, is say, we're not going to study the human being. We are going to study the human being as part of the natural world. But notice that this is now into the 1900s, and psychology is a very new science.

And this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over, in a sense, by the epistemologists and had worked their way into a very skeptical form. So my hope is, if we're talking about where the future has to go, psychology has been online for a century now, a little more than a century now. extraordinarily complex stuff, as we all know, but we're making progress there.

And this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over, in a sense, by the epistemologists and had worked their way into a very skeptical form. So my hope is, if we're talking about where the future has to go, psychology has been online for a century now, a little more than a century now. extraordinarily complex stuff, as we all know, but we're making progress there.

But I think it's still early days, and what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology. It has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition, the best from the rationalist tradition, and so on. So, that's my summary story of how we ended up where we are, and why I'm not a thoroughgoing skeptic on any of these issues.

But I think it's still early days, and what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology. It has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition, the best from the rationalist tradition, and so on. So, that's my summary story of how we ended up where we are, and why I'm not a thoroughgoing skeptic on any of these issues.

I see it as an ongoing scientific project.

I see it as an ongoing scientific project.

but also with better production values and in a way that can't, in some cases, be done even in a good in-person classroom. In philosophy, everything is controversial. A big part of education in life is philosophical education. How many beliefs do I have in my mind? How did they get into my mind in the first place? Where did they come from? What's good for you? What do you like?

but also with better production values and in a way that can't, in some cases, be done even in a good in-person classroom. In philosophy, everything is controversial. A big part of education in life is philosophical education. How many beliefs do I have in my mind? How did they get into my mind in the first place? Where did they come from? What's good for you? What do you like?

Let me just interrupt. Are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it? Because I came in with a pre-intention in that case. And yours was a different passive surprise response. Let's get to that. Exactly.

Let me just interrupt. Are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it? Because I came in with a pre-intention in that case. And yours was a different passive surprise response. Let's get to that. Exactly.

What are your values? What do you want your life to be? Philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract. Philosophers love their abstractions, their general principles. What we want is to be much more careful. But what happens in politics, economics, business, family, religion, is because of philosophical ideas.

What are your values? What do you want your life to be? Philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract. Philosophers love their abstractions, their general principles. What we want is to be much more careful. But what happens in politics, economics, business, family, religion, is because of philosophical ideas.

But they still respond.

But they still respond.

John Locke, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, they were the great geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world. We're philosophers, for goodness sake. What is philosophy all about? It's about a quest for coming to know true reality.

John Locke, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, they were the great geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world. We're philosophers, for goodness sake. What is philosophy all about? It's about a quest for coming to know true reality.

Humans too.

Humans too.

Let me say, all of that is great, all of it is beautiful, all of that is directly relevant. So, to tie that back into what our philosophical intellectual predicament is now, if we want to say postmodernism,

Let me say, all of that is great, all of it is beautiful, all of that is directly relevant. So, to tie that back into what our philosophical intellectual predicament is now, if we want to say postmodernism,

As a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project that we're learning more and more, that's going to give us a better and better epistemology. All of that is great. So I'm a kind of empiricist, but what I would say is that... Everything that you have said was, in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the empiricists.

As a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project that we're learning more and more, that's going to give us a better and better epistemology. All of that is great. So I'm a kind of empiricist, but what I would say is that... Everything that you have said was, in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the empiricists.

So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth.

So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth.

And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level, but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing project.

And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level, but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing project.

The other thing I would say, or actually there's two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves. We are making realist claims. There really was a slap. There really are structured energy patterns.

The other thing I would say, or actually there's two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves. We are making realist claims. There really was a slap. There really are structured energy patterns.

And we really do have in our ears or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy patterns. And all of that, we are making reality claims. And we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being. Some of them, as you say, operate in parallel.

And we really do have in our ears or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy patterns. And all of that, we are making reality claims. And we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being. Some of them, as you say, operate in parallel.

my areas of expertise have been modern philosophy and post-modern philosophy when philosophers and historians we talk about the modern era essentially we mean the last 500 years which has been you know extraordinarily revolutionary not only in philosophy but in how we do religion how we do science how we treat women getting rid of slavery industrial all of that stuff it's been

my areas of expertise have been modern philosophy and post-modern philosophy when philosophers and historians we talk about the modern era essentially we mean the last 500 years which has been you know extraordinarily revolutionary not only in philosophy but in how we do religion how we do science how we treat women getting rid of slavery industrial all of that stuff it's been

They have feedback loops and so forth. I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this, is to say that empiricism only insists that There really is a reality. Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns that we're not making up those patterns, and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.

They have feedback loops and so forth. I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this, is to say that empiricism only insists that There really is a reality. Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns that we're not making up those patterns, and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.

Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond. but they're not making up those structures in reality. So my nose, for example, has no... Or at least sometimes they're not making them up. Well, okay, but the sometimes comes later. Yeah. Okay, and we can come to that.

Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond. but they're not making up those structures in reality. So my nose, for example, has no... Or at least sometimes they're not making them up. Well, okay, but the sometimes comes later. Yeah. Okay, and we can come to that.

So my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there. It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead rotting things.

So my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there. It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead rotting things.

right it's just that if i happen to encounter dead rotting things then certain chemicals will be laughing and then my my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way that's important whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality. And that takes you down the skeptical road versus... Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example.

right it's just that if i happen to encounter dead rotting things then certain chemicals will be laughing and then my my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way that's important whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality. And that takes you down the skeptical road versus... Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example.

Right, versus saying that the structures are there and what we have are just latent reception structures that if those structures happen to be present will be responsive. And that thing is all of the... the empiricists are saying. Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set, I came to the slab with a background set, you came with a different background set.

Right, versus saying that the structures are there and what we have are just latent reception structures that if those structures happen to be present will be responsive. And that thing is all of the... the empiricists are saying. Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set, I came to the slab with a background set, you came with a different background set.

And we start to say, what all goes into that background set?

And we start to say, what all goes into that background set?

Well, I think that's where philosophy is important. And we, as philosophers, I think, articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory, and there is something that physiologically goes on. You know, I have a body and it's all worked out. And that it's going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties, but I think at a very general level.

Well, I think that's where philosophy is important. And we, as philosophers, I think, articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory, and there is something that physiologically goes on. You know, I have a body and it's all worked out. And that it's going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties, but I think at a very general level.

And I think the philosophers have to work hand in hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists because and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy is it's not a very strong complaint but that they uh they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience and 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology.

And I think the philosophers have to work hand in hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists because and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy is it's not a very strong complaint but that they uh they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience and 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology.

So it's a lot of failed experiments, right, along the way, or failed theories along the way. But the other thing, though, I would want to say is as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues into vices, as I think of it.

So it's a lot of failed experiments, right, along the way, or failed theories along the way. But the other thing, though, I would want to say is as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues into vices, as I think of it.

So to say, for example, you know, that we have, and then you talk about the base level, you know, the slap happens or there's something moves low to the ground and there's a direct automated, something that you didn't think about, didn't feel about connection to the spine and your body reacts in a certain way.

So to say, for example, you know, that we have, and then you talk about the base level, you know, the slap happens or there's something moves low to the ground and there's a direct automated, something that you didn't think about, didn't feel about connection to the spine and your body reacts in a certain way.

I want to say that's a good thing that has happened to human beings, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice or a bad thing.

I want to say that's a good thing that has happened to human beings, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice or a bad thing.

And seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place, that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we're not really responding to reality and so forth. Or if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think emotions are positive.

And seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place, that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we're not really responding to reality and so forth. Or if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think emotions are positive.

They certainly have an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life. And we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them.

They certainly have an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life. And we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them.

amazing and philosophy has its fingers in all of those pies and is part of it. So partly what I'm interested in is the giant names in philosophy, right? And they're all giants for a reason. They're all over the map intellectually from Descartes to Locke to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche on into the 20th century. What role they have played in making the modern world and then the postmodern world happen

amazing and philosophy has its fingers in all of those pies and is part of it. So partly what I'm interested in is the giant names in philosophy, right? And they're all giants for a reason. They're all over the map intellectually from Descartes to Locke to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche on into the 20th century. What role they have played in making the modern world and then the postmodern world happen

So emotions come with pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, have said, well, we have emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things. The enemy of reason. That's right. So they're irrational, and we turn something that is a very valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.

So emotions come with pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, have said, well, we have emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things. The enemy of reason. That's right. So they're irrational, and we turn something that is a very valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.

So this is memes in the Jordan, sorry, in the Dawkins sense. Yeah, yeah.

So this is memes in the Jordan, sorry, in the Dawkins sense. Yeah, yeah.

and in some cases, of course, resisting what is going on in modernity and in post-modernity. So the first two courses that the Academy invited me to teach were on modern philosophy, and essentially that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the giants, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, laying a new foundation, overturning medieval philosophy,

and in some cases, of course, resisting what is going on in modernity and in post-modernity. So the first two courses that the Academy invited me to teach were on modern philosophy, and essentially that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the giants, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, laying a new foundation, overturning medieval philosophy,

That's extraordinarily rich, everything that you're laying out there. Let me just start with one thread to pull out. I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative. I understand the attraction of it.

That's extraordinarily rich, everything that you're laying out there. Let me just start with one thread to pull out. I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative. I understand the attraction of it.

No, no, no. If we just start with that formulation. I think that is... I think that's a dangerous formulation. I do think the postmoderns are on board with that. But notice what it says. It says there's a we, there's a me, and then there's a narrative, and then there's reality out there. And that I have to go through this narrative to get to reality. Like a screen. That's right.

No, no, no. If we just start with that formulation. I think that is... I think that's a dangerous formulation. I do think the postmoderns are on board with that. But notice what it says. It says there's a we, there's a me, and then there's a narrative, and then there's reality out there. And that I have to go through this narrative to get to reality. Like a screen. That's right.

And it might have some chinks in it. It might be opaque. But also, what this narrative is, it's got a huge amount of stuff built into it. All kinds of background expectations and theories and slippery terms and so forth. What I would say is, to use this language, is that narratives are things that we use to see reality. If... the narrative is true. So sometimes narratives get reality right.

And it might have some chinks in it. It might be opaque. But also, what this narrative is, it's got a huge amount of stuff built into it. All kinds of background expectations and theories and slippery terms and so forth. What I would say is, to use this language, is that narratives are things that we use to see reality. If... the narrative is true. So sometimes narratives get reality right.

Sometimes narratives are wildly on the basis.

Sometimes narratives are wildly on the basis.

That's for sure. But rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary, it itself is a tool. It's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in when we are relating to reality. That's if we get it right. But if we mess it up, then it does become something that we try to see reality through, and we're in a problematic situation.

That's for sure. But rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary, it itself is a tool. It's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in when we are relating to reality. That's if we get it right. But if we mess it up, then it does become something that we try to see reality through, and we're in a problematic situation.

medieval philosophy again much sophistication there had been a kind of dominant framework for a millennium and very quick time things transformed themselves in the 1500s 1600s all of those

medieval philosophy again much sophistication there had been a kind of dominant framework for a millennium and very quick time things transformed themselves in the 1500s 1600s all of those

But then you've dropped reality out of the picture.

But then you've dropped reality out of the picture.

The scientist who's studying the wolves is creating a story. That's right. No, not creating, I want to say constructing a story. Yes. But it's a story about something that's not happening mediated through stories in the wolves.

The scientist who's studying the wolves is creating a story. That's right. No, not creating, I want to say constructing a story. Yes. But it's a story about something that's not happening mediated through stories in the wolves.

uh intellectual cultural transformations uh that we that we study when we do the history and that course ends with the death of nietzsche in 1900 so essentially 1500 to 1900 eight lectures but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically Because in some cases, the philosophers are ones who make the historical revolution happen as their theoretical ideas are applied.

uh intellectual cultural transformations uh that we that we study when we do the history and that course ends with the death of nietzsche in 1900 so essentially 1500 to 1900 eight lectures but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically Because in some cases, the philosophers are ones who make the historical revolution happen as their theoretical ideas are applied.

Well, I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the table. They're going to be related. I think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say an actor on a screen, putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sorts of things.

Well, I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the table. They're going to be related. I think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say an actor on a screen, putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sorts of things.

I think that's very extraordinarily complicated. And I think the interesting thing there is going to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how much of that is learned, because it does seem to be a highly fallible process.

I think that's very extraordinarily complicated. And I think the interesting thing there is going to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how much of that is learned, because it does seem to be a highly fallible process.

I know, I don't want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I've been in social circumstances, and I think I'm pretty savvy about reading people, but I'll be with my wife, and she will say, after we've had a conversation with someone, Boy, did you notice how upset that person was about blah, blah, blah.

I know, I don't want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I've been in social circumstances, and I think I'm pretty savvy about reading people, but I'll be with my wife, and she will say, after we've had a conversation with someone, Boy, did you notice how upset that person was about blah, blah, blah.

So there may be sex, gender differences that are going on, but also at the same time, it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that. So when we say people are very good at that, I think that's true, but we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that. I think that's going to be a very, very sophisticated story.

So there may be sex, gender differences that are going on, but also at the same time, it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that. So when we say people are very good at that, I think that's true, but we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that. I think that's going to be a very, very sophisticated story.

But then the other example, it takes us back to perceptual cases where you're talking about, are you looking at me or me looking at you, and we're also aware that we're in a room that there are other people in the room who are filling and so on. But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus right on one thing, then it is true that everything else Pales by comparison.

But then the other example, it takes us back to perceptual cases where you're talking about, are you looking at me or me looking at you, and we're also aware that we're in a room that there are other people in the room who are filling and so on. But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus right on one thing, then it is true that everything else Pales by comparison.

Yeah, that's right. And pales is metaphorical. So if we're going to try to then unpack the metaphor, I think we would say we focus and unfocus. And then we can give descriptors of what the state of unfocus is and what the state of focus is. And I would prefer using that language to the language of screen. Because screen really is something that is in the way. It's a thing itself.

Yeah, that's right. And pales is metaphorical. So if we're going to try to then unpack the metaphor, I think we would say we focus and unfocus. And then we can give descriptors of what the state of unfocus is and what the state of focus is. And I would prefer using that language to the language of screen. Because screen really is something that is in the way. It's a thing itself.

That's another obstacle. So if there's a dressing screen between the two of us and I'm undressing for privacy, the whole idea of the screen is that it's blocking. So the metaphor is too simple. Sorry, that would be different from, and I think a better metaphor would be to say to filter. And I think sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter.

That's another obstacle. So if there's a dressing screen between the two of us and I'm undressing for privacy, the whole idea of the screen is that it's blocking. So the metaphor is too simple. Sorry, that would be different from, and I think a better metaphor would be to say to filter. And I think sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter.

They're just attending to some things and not attending to other things. But a filter is different from a screen. But also just to stay on this one issue here, the issue of focus and unfocus, I think it's not a filter either.

They're just attending to some things and not attending to other things. But a filter is different from a screen. But also just to stay on this one issue here, the issue of focus and unfocus, I think it's not a filter either.

In other cases, the philosophers are responding to what's going on in the culture, what's going on historically, trying to make sense of it and either urge it on or retard it. The second course picks up in 1900 and it's called Postmodern Philosophy.

In other cases, the philosophers are responding to what's going on in the culture, what's going on historically, trying to make sense of it and either urge it on or retard it. The second course picks up in 1900 and it's called Postmodern Philosophy.

Okay, remind me what element of the tabernacle... I will, I will, I'll lay it out.

Okay, remind me what element of the tabernacle... I will, I will, I'll lay it out.

It's partly because... So, is this a metaphor for what?

It's partly because... So, is this a metaphor for what?

And the main point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers started to react against, in a very sophisticated way, much of what had happened intellectually in the modern era. and they in some cases were radicalizing it, in some cases wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually and culturally in the modern era.

And the main point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers started to react against, in a very sophisticated way, much of what had happened intellectually in the modern era. and they in some cases were radicalizing it, in some cases wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually and culturally in the modern era.

You live in a dynamical environment.

You live in a dynamical environment.

Yeah, let me try a different, I don't want to use the tabernacle example, I'm not as familiar with it, but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let's say you're walking through, this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, right, at night, and you think it's a slightly dangerous neighborhood.

Yeah, let me try a different, I don't want to use the tabernacle example, I'm not as familiar with it, but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let's say you're walking through, this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, right, at night, and you think it's a slightly dangerous neighborhood.

And so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can.

And so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can.

And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field. It's a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.

And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field. It's a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.

Yes, that's right. And in that case, what I'm trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular. like I might when I'm reading. Then I'm using my visual attention and I'm focusing on this particular thing. Or I'm an artist and I'm trying to do the glint on the eyeball for the finishing touch.

Yes, that's right. And in that case, what I'm trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular. like I might when I'm reading. Then I'm using my visual attention and I'm focusing on this particular thing. Or I'm an artist and I'm trying to do the glint on the eyeball for the finishing touch.

So my eyes are wide open and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field. But that I think is coextensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works as if I am in the bad neighborhood, at night. And what I've tried to do is just expand my attention to encompass this whole field so that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.

So my eyes are wide open and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field. But that I think is coextensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works as if I am in the bad neighborhood, at night. And what I've tried to do is just expand my attention to encompass this whole field so that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.

And we started to see in philosophy a move to a more skeptical, relativized, even kind of the death of philosophy, the sense that philosophy has for millennia tried to answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a culminating fashion.

And we started to see in philosophy a move to a more skeptical, relativized, even kind of the death of philosophy, the sense that philosophy has for millennia tried to answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a culminating fashion.

Now, where I think it immediately gets more complicated, and you psychologists know more about this than I do, is even if we stay with those examples, the question about what happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is another dimension that has to cut across.

Now, where I think it immediately gets more complicated, and you psychologists know more about this than I do, is even if we stay with those examples, the question about what happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is another dimension that has to cut across.

Even if we grant that in both cases, whether I'm focused or whether I'm diffused attention, I'm aware of reality in some Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense. It is true that if in either of those cases, if I'm the artist focusing on the particular dot and my child suddenly screams, then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go to attend.

Even if we grant that in both cases, whether I'm focused or whether I'm diffused attention, I'm aware of reality in some Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense. It is true that if in either of those cases, if I'm the artist focusing on the particular dot and my child suddenly screams, then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go to attend.

Import.

Import.

But then even another interesting case would be you're the artist and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams, but you've given yourself a signal. I'm angry at my kid right now. He's been a brat. I'm going to ignore him when he screams. So I'm focusing, exact same scenario, kid screams, I register it, but my reaction is quite different. I stay focused.

But then even another interesting case would be you're the artist and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams, but you've given yourself a signal. I'm angry at my kid right now. He's been a brat. I'm going to ignore him when he screams. So I'm focusing, exact same scenario, kid screams, I register it, but my reaction is quite different. I stay focused.

But from their more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self-realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions, so it should, in effect, disintegrate. So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.

But from their more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self-realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions, so it should, in effect, disintegrate. So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.

That's right. That's going to be a back-feed loop.

That's right. That's going to be a back-feed loop.

Yeah. To come back to like your pen example and the issue of as sophisticated cognizers, when we are perceiving the world, that we have their use function kind of built into the... The perception. Yeah. I'm going to put that in quotation marks right now.

Yeah. To come back to like your pen example and the issue of as sophisticated cognizers, when we are perceiving the world, that we have their use function kind of built into the... The perception. Yeah. I'm going to put that in quotation marks right now.

And then the action that's going to be embodied in that use also in many cases seems to be built into the perception. I think if we unpack that more, there's still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what is built into the physiological system and the psychological system at birth and how much of it is learned. Definitely.

And then the action that's going to be embodied in that use also in many cases seems to be built into the perception. I think if we unpack that more, there's still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what is built into the physiological system and the psychological system at birth and how much of it is learned. Definitely.

Yeah, because I don't think we want to say that, you know, even in the 21st century where we come into the world born with kind of a precognized understanding of pens.

Yeah, because I don't think we want to say that, you know, even in the 21st century where we come into the world born with kind of a precognized understanding of pens.

And how to use pens. I don't even know if we have that. We have a certain physiological structure that, and a certain conceptual structure that's built on that, such that, and it's going to be very flexible and amenable to different environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things, whatever their intrinsic properties, as potential tools.

And how to use pens. I don't even know if we have that. We have a certain physiological structure that, and a certain conceptual structure that's built on that, such that, and it's going to be very flexible and amenable to different environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things, whatever their intrinsic properties, as potential tools.

Here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase, John Dewey and some of the pragmatists to some extent, Martin Heidegger. and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it.

Here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase, John Dewey and some of the pragmatists to some extent, Martin Heidegger. and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it.

yeah well a lot of that so let me just it's just to try another example to get to uh because i like the the earlier movie example and the male female difference one thing that comes up in couples is how they learn to be tuned to each other's voices and the sound of their own voice. So couples who, before they met each other, would go to a loud party and they would be talking to each other.

yeah well a lot of that so let me just it's just to try another example to get to uh because i like the the earlier movie example and the male female difference one thing that comes up in couples is how they learn to be tuned to each other's voices and the sound of their own voice. So couples who, before they met each other, would go to a loud party and they would be talking to each other.

Yeah, that's a really good example. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, there's just noise and it's a big decibel level, right? But then once they become couples and they have heard each other say their name, say Jordan, Stephen, right, or whatever, they can be in a relatively loud party separated across the room, right? And the guy's wife says, Stephen, right?

Yeah, that's a really good example. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, there's just noise and it's a big decibel level, right? But then once they become couples and they have heard each other say their name, say Jordan, Stephen, right, or whatever, they can be in a relatively loud party separated across the room, right? And the guy's wife says, Stephen, right?

And he can pick that out of that incredible instrument of sounds.

And he can pick that out of that incredible instrument of sounds.

Yeah, because you've automated certain... Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, because you've automated certain... Yeah, that's right.

So that centers now... What the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right? That we can automate all of these things and we can learn to detect various things and focus on this, that, and the other thing. all of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives, they turn them into vices.

So that centers now... What the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right? That we can automate all of these things and we can learn to detect various things and focus on this, that, and the other thing. all of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives, they turn them into vices.

So, what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes, in their language, because they've already got an epistemological theory, a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective.

So, what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes, in their language, because they've already got an epistemological theory, a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective.

But also at the same time, since I don't agree with any of them, but I do give them a fair shot, and we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are coming from, and why these arguments are so powerful, and that we have to take them seriously.

But also at the same time, since I don't agree with any of them, but I do give them a fair shot, and we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are coming from, and why these arguments are so powerful, and that we have to take them seriously.

And the idea for them then is that somehow, if we were going to be actually aware of reality and not through this interpretation, we would have to not have any interpretations at all, that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our minds without any intermediary actions. Or what they will then do is to say, I can choose to prioritize this over that in my visual field.

And the idea for them then is that somehow, if we were going to be actually aware of reality and not through this interpretation, we would have to not have any interpretations at all, that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our minds without any intermediary actions. Or what they will then do is to say, I can choose to prioritize this over that in my visual field.

They will say, and they're right to say this, that's a value judgment. I think this is more important now, and this is more important over that. But then by the time they start using the words value, they're coming at a very sophisticated negative judgment. Evaluative theories that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of external reality.

They will say, and they're right to say this, that's a value judgment. I think this is more important now, and this is more important over that. But then by the time they start using the words value, they're coming at a very sophisticated negative judgment. Evaluative theories that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of external reality.

Well, maybe it's worse than that. So for both of them, it's on the cognition side and on the evaluative side that they're deep into subjective territory and so those then become negative words for them. Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition.

Well, maybe it's worse than that. So for both of them, it's on the cognition side and on the evaluative side that they're deep into subjective territory and so those then become negative words for them. Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition.

All these metaphors of screens and filters and tabernacles and visual fields and so on. That's where we have to get that sorted out, because if we don't get those foundations correct, then we're going to be messed up.

All these metaphors of screens and filters and tabernacles and visual fields and so on. That's where we have to get that sorted out, because if we don't get those foundations correct, then we're going to be messed up.

Nonetheless, there have been many, as I think of them, philosophers who think the earlier traditions, sometimes the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions, still have some bite and can be repackaged for this post-modern era.

Nonetheless, there have been many, as I think of them, philosophers who think the earlier traditions, sometimes the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions, still have some bite and can be repackaged for this post-modern era.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice. Power properly conceived could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice. Power properly conceived could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done.

And our cognitive powers, if we have a good healthy epistemology, should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world.

And our cognitive powers, if we have a good healthy epistemology, should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world.

That's exactly right. But then, if you, however, are skeptical, if you do start with the epistemology, all of the postmoderns do come out of an epistemological training. It's a striking fact, you know, the big-name postmoderns, so we mentioned Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty, right, and the others, they are all PhDs in philosophy, right?

That's exactly right. But then, if you, however, are skeptical, if you do start with the epistemology, all of the postmoderns do come out of an epistemological training. It's a striking fact, you know, the big-name postmoderns, so we mentioned Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty, right, and the others, they are all PhDs in philosophy, right?

They're all doing heavy-duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral level work. And that does come to become the foundation. And because of the time that they are working in, middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy. The revealing theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time. So they came of age.

They're all doing heavy-duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral level work. And that does come to become the foundation. And because of the time that they are working in, middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy. The revealing theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time. So they came of age.

Now, what that then is to say is, if you don't think... that human beings can know the world as individuals, then you don't think of developing your reason, developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for understanding is the most important thing about human beings. So what then is it to be a human being?

Now, what that then is to say is, if you don't think... that human beings can know the world as individuals, then you don't think of developing your reason, developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for understanding is the most important thing about human beings. So what then is it to be a human being?

Well, I think to some extent, yes. So, you would be an example of that. Others who think the Enlightenment project has been a great success, Even though it had some philosophical errors, those can be tweaked as an ongoing scientific project. And so I'm interested in also thinkers like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Philippa Foot, who are not so skeptical.

Well, I think to some extent, yes. So, you would be an example of that. Others who think the Enlightenment project has been a great success, Even though it had some philosophical errors, those can be tweaked as an ongoing scientific project. And so I'm interested in also thinkers like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Philippa Foot, who are not so skeptical.

And to the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we are going to become closer to chimps. And then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world. are going to become more predominant. Or even lower than chimps, baboons. Yeah, it's more of a baboon model.

And to the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we are going to become closer to chimps. And then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world. are going to become more predominant. Or even lower than chimps, baboons. Yeah, it's more of a baboon model.

I think this shows the absolute importance of these cognitive issues that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively. Because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition, that it is efficacious, that it is competent, that our brain, mind is an enormously powerful tool. And if we learn to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as individuals.

I think this shows the absolute importance of these cognitive issues that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively. Because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition, that it is efficacious, that it is competent, that our brain, mind is an enormously powerful tool. And if we learn to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as individuals.

And socially, we'll start to work out the win-win positive, some social things. Otherwise, we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kinds of levels.

And socially, we'll start to work out the win-win positive, some social things. Otherwise, we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kinds of levels.

That's right. They're all left with it. That's right. That's what they're left with. You're getting rid of human cognitive power as a positive thing. Then you ask, well, what's left? If it's not the case that I think my human cognition

That's right. They're all left with it. That's right. That's what they're left with. You're getting rid of human cognitive power as a positive thing. Then you ask, well, what's left? If it's not the case that I think my human cognition

my mind puts me in touch with reality and that i can work out reality and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality and of course maybe we're initially focusing on things we have different frameworks but that we nonetheless have the cognitive tools to talk about these things to do the experiments to you know i can visit you what you've experienced to take each other's position that's right in service of some higher goal

my mind puts me in touch with reality and that i can work out reality and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality and of course maybe we're initially focusing on things we have different frameworks but that we nonetheless have the cognitive tools to talk about these things to do the experiments to you know i can visit you what you've experienced to take each other's position that's right in service of some higher goal

That's right. And that we can work all of these things out to, in effect, have an agreed upon understanding of the nature of reality. Then, if that's not what's going on, that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture. Right. And what the postmoderns then do is either say, well, I make up my own reality.

That's right. And that we can work all of these things out to, in effect, have an agreed upon understanding of the nature of reality. Then, if that's not what's going on, that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture. Right. And what the postmoderns then do is either say, well, I make up my own reality.

That's what's going on here. Or some of them are more passive. All of the influences of more environmental deterministic understandings of human beings. What we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment, your social upbringing, right, and so on. So, again, we don't have an autonomous… The dominant patriarchy.

That's what's going on here. Or some of them are more passive. All of the influences of more environmental deterministic understandings of human beings. What we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment, your social upbringing, right, and so on. So, again, we don't have an autonomous… The dominant patriarchy.

Yeah, or there could be any sort of social structure from their perspective. But that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships, right?

Yeah, or there could be any sort of social structure from their perspective. But that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships, right?

not me in relation to reality and other people are part of reality so i have to work that out but rather the assumption is that i am inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality and so the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be and the word there that becomes most important is the power word It's a kind of social power.

not me in relation to reality and other people are part of reality so i have to work that out but rather the assumption is that i am inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality and so the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be and the word there that becomes most important is the power word It's a kind of social power.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's the social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding of power. But the power for them cannot be the positive sum

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's the social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding of power. But the power for them cannot be the positive sum

In fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.

In fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.

kind of power that we're talking about because that understanding of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way the world works and do science and technology and make the world better place and empower ourselves we can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful i can understand that you're a rational person uh and you can understand that i'm a rational person so i have to treat you a certain way conversationally socially and so forth uh

kind of power that we're talking about because that understanding of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way the world works and do science and technology and make the world better place and empower ourselves we can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful i can understand that you're a rational person uh and you can understand that i'm a rational person so i have to treat you a certain way conversationally socially and so forth uh

So all of the positive, some social stuff is going to come out of that. But the postmoderns have cut all of that away. All you're left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social world. And what they then call power just is the influence or tools, including the tools of language.

So all of the positive, some social stuff is going to come out of that. But the postmoderns have cut all of that away. All you're left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social world. And what they then call power just is the influence or tools, including the tools of language.

And the idea at the end of that course is that we have a sense of what the philosophical and philosophically informed intellectual landscape looks like in our time. Bringing it right up to current times and characterizing it as, in effect, a three-way debate between the moderns, the pre-moderns, and the post-moderns and post-moderns.

And the idea at the end of that course is that we have a sense of what the philosophical and philosophically informed intellectual landscape looks like in our time. Bringing it right up to current times and characterizing it as, in effect, a three-way debate between the moderns, the pre-moderns, and the post-moderns and post-moderns.

that are now understood as to have nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as being socially constructed themselves. And tools of power. That's right. And so it becomes then necessarily a zero-sum, socially influencing and controlling game. And they reinterpret everything in terms of that.

that are now understood as to have nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as being socially constructed themselves. And tools of power. That's right. And so it becomes then necessarily a zero-sum, socially influencing and controlling game. And they reinterpret everything in terms of that.

That can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses, too.

That can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses, too.

i've done five courses yes three are in post-production two are okay and what are the three that are coming up one is on modern ethics uh so uh what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse more global more multicultural and more critical in some ways of traditional models that have come down to us so it's a much more wide open

i've done five courses yes three are in post-production two are okay and what are the three that are coming up one is on modern ethics uh so uh what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse more global more multicultural and more critical in some ways of traditional models that have come down to us so it's a much more wide open

world what's interesting about the modern world is how little we have uh what i think of as kind of homogeneous cultures where everybody by and large on the same philosophical that's the collapse of that meta narrative yeah that particular went away and so we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good what is bad what's right what is wrong what's the meaning of my life how should we organize ourselves socially so what i did was uh chose uh eight

world what's interesting about the modern world is how little we have uh what i think of as kind of homogeneous cultures where everybody by and large on the same philosophical that's the collapse of that meta narrative yeah that particular went away and so we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good what is bad what's right what is wrong what's the meaning of my life how should we organize ourselves socially so what i did was uh chose uh eight

completely different but extraordinarily influential modern moral philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them. So it goes back to people like David Hume wrestling with the is-ought problem and Immanuel Kant with his strong duty focus, John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, and so on in through the 20th century up to very contemporary times. So that's one course, modern ethics.

completely different but extraordinarily influential modern moral philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them. So it goes back to people like David Hume wrestling with the is-ought problem and Immanuel Kant with his strong duty focus, John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, and so on in through the 20th century up to very contemporary times. So that's one course, modern ethics.

And all of these people are giants, they all disagree with each other, but that's the contemporary landscape within which people who are doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves. The other two courses are 16 lectures in total, but it's called The Philosophy of Politics.

And all of these people are giants, they all disagree with each other, but that's the contemporary landscape within which people who are doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves. The other two courses are 16 lectures in total, but it's called The Philosophy of Politics.

And here what I'm interested in is, obviously we have political science, we have political theory, political ideology, practical day-to-day understandings of politics. But what I'm interested in is the philosophers' contributions to those debates. And one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics, they're not actually disagreeing about politics.

And here what I'm interested in is, obviously we have political science, we have political theory, political ideology, practical day-to-day understandings of politics. But what I'm interested in is the philosophers' contributions to those debates. And one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics, they're not actually disagreeing about politics.

They're disagreeing about something more fundamental. I think that's become evident to everyone. That's right. And in many cases, it doesn't get brought to the core. So I don't want to talk about the recent election, but really it's about culture more fundamentally and not about many particular issues and underlying culture.

They're disagreeing about something more fundamental. I think that's become evident to everyone. That's right. And in many cases, it doesn't get brought to the core. So I don't want to talk about the recent election, but really it's about culture more fundamentally and not about many particular issues and underlying culture.

In one sense, we've never lived in better times philosophically because we have self-conscious, articulate, and very able representatives of all of those traditions operating in our generation. So bringing all of that in an eight-lecture series to a hopefully large international audience that can access them online. So that's been my intellectual mission there.

In one sense, we've never lived in better times philosophically because we have self-conscious, articulate, and very able representatives of all of those traditions operating in our generation. So bringing all of that in an eight-lecture series to a hopefully large international audience that can access them online. So that's been my intellectual mission there.

Right. So one, though, picks up with the French Revolution, which is perhaps the landmark event in European or at least continental European history. Why that political revolution happened. And there's a lot of philosophy that matters there. But then also. an important theoretician, Edmund Burke, and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism in response to that.

Right. So one, though, picks up with the French Revolution, which is perhaps the landmark event in European or at least continental European history. Why that political revolution happened. And there's a lot of philosophy that matters there. But then also. an important theoretician, Edmund Burke, and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism in response to that.

But then we go through all of the big-name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics. So we go through Hegel and Marx, and as we get into the 20th century, we talk about the fascists, Mussolini and Gentile, who was a PhD in philosophy, and Heidegger and the National Socialists, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, and that one ends with World War II.

But then we go through all of the big-name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics. So we go through Hegel and Marx, and as we get into the 20th century, we talk about the fascists, Mussolini and Gentile, who was a PhD in philosophy, and Heidegger and the National Socialists, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, and that one ends with World War II.

So French Revolution to the World War II. The next course picks up at the end of World War II and the Cold War, and it starts with Rand and Robert Nozick. At the height of the Cold War, how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context? So it starts with them, goes on to John Rawls. We also talk about James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for public choice economics.

So French Revolution to the World War II. The next course picks up at the end of World War II and the Cold War, and it starts with Rand and Robert Nozick. At the height of the Cold War, how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context? So it starts with them, goes on to John Rawls. We also talk about James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for public choice economics.

We also do some international, because we're living in a global society, that cliche and so on. But the Islamist revolutions and the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher, Said Qutba, whose brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden, extraordinarily influential. Ayatollah Khomeini had Qutba's works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.

We also do some international, because we're living in a global society, that cliche and so on. But the Islamist revolutions and the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher, Said Qutba, whose brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden, extraordinarily influential. Ayatollah Khomeini had Qutba's works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.

We go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugin in that framework as well. And then we end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism, Roger Scruton's meaning of conservatism, which came out a few years before he died. So the idea here is to say these are the big names.

We go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugin in that framework as well. And then we end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism, Roger Scruton's meaning of conservatism, which came out a few years before he died. So the idea here is to say these are the big names.

political theories you need to know, but they're all big name ones because they have philosophical bite behind them by some very deep people and integrating that with the history in each case, how some of them are urging history in a certain direction or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the Cold War or the attacks in 9-11.

political theories you need to know, but they're all big name ones because they have philosophical bite behind them by some very deep people and integrating that with the history in each case, how some of them are urging history in a certain direction or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the Cold War or the attacks in 9-11.

That's my ambition.

That's my ambition.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

I will dive into it. Thanks.

I will dive into it. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No, that's exactly on track. I think a lot of people in our era are more active-minded than people were in previous eras. We have more media, more freedom, more resources to be able to do so.

No, that's exactly on track. I think a lot of people in our era are more active-minded than people were in previous eras. We have more media, more freedom, more resources to be able to do so.

But even the more active-minded people, I think, as you are pointed out, even if you are, to a large extent, independently coming up with ideas, it nonetheless is illuminating many cases to realize that there has been a smart person who thought of that before you, in many cases in a more sophisticated form and integrated that with other ideas.

But even the more active-minded people, I think, as you are pointed out, even if you are, to a large extent, independently coming up with ideas, it nonetheless is illuminating many cases to realize that there has been a smart person who thought of that before you, in many cases in a more sophisticated form and integrated that with other ideas.

So sometimes you can find a thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down. And most of us don't have time to be active intellectuals. We have our full lives. So anything that we can learn from the philosophers who've thought through these issues can accelerate our process down that road.

So sometimes you can find a thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down. And most of us don't have time to be active intellectuals. We have our full lives. So anything that we can learn from the philosophers who've thought through these issues can accelerate our process down that road.

And then, of course, the other thing is that to the extent that you don't think about these things, what you are saying, I think, is exactly right. In many cases, we are unconsciously guided in certain directions. Sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure, so all of the roads and traffic lights and lighting systems and so forth.

And then, of course, the other thing is that to the extent that you don't think about these things, what you are saying, I think, is exactly right. In many cases, we are unconsciously guided in certain directions. Sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure, so all of the roads and traffic lights and lighting systems and so forth.

And we grow up with them and, you know, we're like the fish in the water. We just take it for granted that we're surrounded by these things. And we have automated operating inside a certain kind of infrastructure system. But at the same time, it is illuminating to step back and think that somebody thought through every aspect of that infrastructure system.

And we grow up with them and, you know, we're like the fish in the water. We just take it for granted that we're surrounded by these things. And we have automated operating inside a certain kind of infrastructure system. But at the same time, it is illuminating to step back and think that somebody thought through every aspect of that infrastructure system.

And in many cases, I'm being directed perhaps in ways that are not healthy. And how can we make that infrastructure system better? That's going to take people who are aware that in many cases they are being guided by that infrastructure.

And in many cases, I'm being directed perhaps in ways that are not healthy. And how can we make that infrastructure system better? That's going to take people who are aware that in many cases they are being guided by that infrastructure.

A pleasure.

A pleasure.

Thank you.

Oh, yeah.

Two are out.

All right, already we're into heavy-duty epistemology, neuroscience, history, psychology, value sets, including motivation issues and so on. Okay, so just hold on to that for a moment. So I'm going to say you're right. Traditional empiricism has had problems. Traditional rationalism has had problems. And that we cannot accept in...

post-analysis sort out all of the elements and that's a big part of what the scientific project goes on. But let me start by defending the empiricists for a moment. So what I just did on the table, right, shocking.

G.E. Moore. Yeah, but also earlier when he was talking about the ideal. I refute you thus. Yeah, that's right. Which is in the right track, but still too naive. But just reflect on that experience if we start to try to defend the empiricists for a moment. So I smacked the table completely out of the blue. But for anybody who's listening or watching, that was sense data.

You had no motivational set. You had no story in mind. You had no behavioral preconditions to set for you. There was an experience, and you were aware of the experience. Now, what you then go on to do with that experience is going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing. And all of the things that you are laying out are exactly right.

So the empiricist's commitment, I think, if it's going to be properly done, has to be

that there are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that ultimately, when we get all of the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do this in laboratories where we have isolated all of the variables, there is a residual direct contact with empirical reality that we can put things to the test.

No, but even there, the language becomes very important because we don't want to say that it's subjective, at least as philosophers use the term, because that then is to say it's not in relationship to what is out there. So, again, we have to get into the technical epistemology very carefully.

Right. Well, I'm a philosopher by training. So my intellectual interest is in philosophy. what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like. We've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in, and education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries.

When philosophers talk about the subjective, sometimes they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side. But if we were doing epistemology,

or knowledge then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is is set by the subject and the external reality has nothing to do with it the opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it instead just reality smacks that person in the face and as you put it uh the story doesn't need to be told it wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is

What I think is the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those. We have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality. It's an inherently relational phenomenon. And you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality.

What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject is involved, then there's no way for us to be aware of reality. They retreat to some sort of

representationalist model or they start going internal and then they start talking about motivations and theory ladens and other beliefs that you have and once you make that divide there is no way to get out subject out of the subject and back to reality on the other hand if you try to react to that and say the subject has can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge

then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject right to pretend the subject doesn't exist to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject but that also is an impossible model so what i want to say is the empiricist commitment and historically the empiricists have struggled to work with uh work this out this is this is the ongoing project

In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem. And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models.

What I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how sophisticated it starts. But that, as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You can't do

the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to reality. And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon. And that's a philosophy of mind claim. Let me just say, it's not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality.

It's not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself. It's a response mechanism. And all of these other things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more thing. I think we talk a lot about epistemology and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project.

And I think that's fine to... You should define that for people, epistemology. The theory of knowledge. So we try to figure out... So the ology part is to give an account of something or an explanation of. In this case, it's the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge. When do I really know something? We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around.

So, in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies, and obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial, So I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing. I had at my university a center for ethics and entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies as things came on, asking what can be done.

But the difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and... Falsehood. That's right. And just having been conditioned to do certain things. So how do I really know that I know something? And when should I say that I don't really know something? And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge.

And this involves some reflection on sense perception, as we're starting to talk about now, a good understanding of language and grammar, logic. And then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do, in some sense, inform us, and we can really learn about the world through story. What's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework?

We've been thinking through those things very systematically. Now that though is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge, all of that language is epistemological. But I think we can't do epistemology in isolation. We always have to do it in context with metaphysics.

That is to say, we have to also be talking about the nature of reality.

That's right. What's the furniture of the universe, so to speak? What's real and what isn't real? So the question is, anytime I want to say, you know, this is true or this is real or this is a fact, right, or whatever, that's to make a claim about reality. And then the follow-up claim always is, well, how do you know that? So you're making the claim, but you're also making a justificatory claim.

So reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics. The special sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology, but if we can step back and say, Are, for example, space and time features of the universe as a whole? Is the universe eternal or infinite in various dimensions? Does a god exist or not?

Those are all metaphysical questions. So to come back to, and this is just one more point that I wanted to make, is that all of the things that we talk about, when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics,

all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind that is to say what is this thing that we call the mind and one of the things that early modern philosophy now this is 1400s 1500s on into the 1600s was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being.

And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries, let's say a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body but also a soul, or a physicality plus a spiritual element, and that these are two very different metaphysical things. One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal.

And that they have different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate destinies. Then on the metaphysics side, how do those two come together? How do they work together? How do they fit together? What's the proper understanding of those two? But that... metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go.

So if you are, say, an empiricist and you want to say, well, we start in, say, the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other, but somehow I have to get that across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind,

which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various things that we think we're going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth. And that metaphysical gulf, if you can't bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you problems epistemologically. And so one reason why...

we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later, I think is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth. It wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends.

But at the same time, we were struggling with the metaphysical problem, as I'm thinking of it, the mind-body problem. And once we said, or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are non-physical realities, or stories are non-physical realities, and they're in a mind, and we're conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world,

uh because in many cases people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or and so forth so what i'm interested in though primarily though is the courses that i have taught over the course of many years having them in a vehicle that's obviously going to be accessible to more people

as a non-physical world, it's very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world. So I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology, it's interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s. And so we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline.

We have the early Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900.

and one of the things that said they're both trying to do is to say well finally we can start to study the mind scientifically we can have a science of the mind but what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the mind somehow didn't fit into nature it was an extra natural thing it was a ghost in the machine and the the fitting of the ghost in the machine we don't have a theory that that works this out

And both of them were, of course, reflecting on Darwin and Darwin's more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being, that we're going to see the mind not as a ghost that's in the wet wear or in the biological wear, but as a some sort of emergent phenomenon or a byproduct.

But it's only when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a machine, to use that metaphor, or a spirit plus a body as two different things, as much more of a naturalist integrative, then we start to think that we can do psychology scientifically. Now, the Freudians and the behaviorists, I think they were both disasters in various ways. And useful.

They were genius, but this is, again, the early steps of science. But what they are starting to do, though, is say, we're not going to study the human being. We are going to study the human being as part of the natural world. But notice that this is now into the 1900s, and psychology is a very new science.

And this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over, in a sense, by the epistemologists and had worked their way into a very skeptical form. So my hope is, if we're talking about where the future has to go, psychology has been online for a century now, a little more than a century now. extraordinarily complex stuff, as we all know, but we're making progress there.

But I think it's still early days, and what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology. It has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition, the best from the rationalist tradition, and so on. So, that's my summary story of how we ended up where we are, and why I'm not a thoroughgoing skeptic on any of these issues.

I see it as an ongoing scientific project.

but also with better production values and in a way that can't, in some cases, be done even in a good in-person classroom. In philosophy, everything is controversial. A big part of education in life is philosophical education. How many beliefs do I have in my mind? How did they get into my mind in the first place? Where did they come from? What's good for you? What do you like?

Let me just interrupt. Are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it? Because I came in with a pre-intention in that case. And yours was a different passive surprise response. Let's get to that. Exactly.

What are your values? What do you want your life to be? Philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract. Philosophers love their abstractions, their general principles. What we want is to be much more careful. But what happens in politics, economics, business, family, religion, is because of philosophical ideas.

But they still respond.

John Locke, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, they were the great geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world. We're philosophers, for goodness sake. What is philosophy all about? It's about a quest for coming to know true reality.

Humans too.

Let me say, all of that is great, all of it is beautiful, all of that is directly relevant. So, to tie that back into what our philosophical intellectual predicament is now, if we want to say postmodernism,

As a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project that we're learning more and more, that's going to give us a better and better epistemology. All of that is great. So I'm a kind of empiricist, but what I would say is that... Everything that you have said was, in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the empiricists.

So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth.

And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level, but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing project.

The other thing I would say, or actually there's two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves. We are making realist claims. There really was a slap. There really are structured energy patterns.

And we really do have in our ears or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy patterns. And all of that, we are making reality claims. And we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being. Some of them, as you say, operate in parallel.

my areas of expertise have been modern philosophy and post-modern philosophy when philosophers and historians we talk about the modern era essentially we mean the last 500 years which has been you know extraordinarily revolutionary not only in philosophy but in how we do religion how we do science how we treat women getting rid of slavery industrial all of that stuff it's been

They have feedback loops and so forth. I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this, is to say that empiricism only insists that There really is a reality. Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns that we're not making up those patterns, and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.

Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond. but they're not making up those structures in reality. So my nose, for example, has no... Or at least sometimes they're not making them up. Well, okay, but the sometimes comes later. Yeah. Okay, and we can come to that.

So my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there. It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead rotting things.

right it's just that if i happen to encounter dead rotting things then certain chemicals will be laughing and then my my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way that's important whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality. And that takes you down the skeptical road versus... Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example.

Right, versus saying that the structures are there and what we have are just latent reception structures that if those structures happen to be present will be responsive. And that thing is all of the... the empiricists are saying. Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set, I came to the slab with a background set, you came with a different background set.

And we start to say, what all goes into that background set?

Well, I think that's where philosophy is important. And we, as philosophers, I think, articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory, and there is something that physiologically goes on. You know, I have a body and it's all worked out. And that it's going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties, but I think at a very general level.

And I think the philosophers have to work hand in hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists because and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy is it's not a very strong complaint but that they uh they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience and 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology.

So it's a lot of failed experiments, right, along the way, or failed theories along the way. But the other thing, though, I would want to say is as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues into vices, as I think of it.

So to say, for example, you know, that we have, and then you talk about the base level, you know, the slap happens or there's something moves low to the ground and there's a direct automated, something that you didn't think about, didn't feel about connection to the spine and your body reacts in a certain way.

I want to say that's a good thing that has happened to human beings, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice or a bad thing.

And seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place, that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we're not really responding to reality and so forth. Or if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think emotions are positive.

They certainly have an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life. And we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them.

amazing and philosophy has its fingers in all of those pies and is part of it. So partly what I'm interested in is the giant names in philosophy, right? And they're all giants for a reason. They're all over the map intellectually from Descartes to Locke to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche on into the 20th century. What role they have played in making the modern world and then the postmodern world happen

So emotions come with pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, have said, well, we have emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things. The enemy of reason. That's right. So they're irrational, and we turn something that is a very valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.

So this is memes in the Jordan, sorry, in the Dawkins sense. Yeah, yeah.

and in some cases, of course, resisting what is going on in modernity and in post-modernity. So the first two courses that the Academy invited me to teach were on modern philosophy, and essentially that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the giants, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, laying a new foundation, overturning medieval philosophy,

That's extraordinarily rich, everything that you're laying out there. Let me just start with one thread to pull out. I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative. I understand the attraction of it.

No, no, no. If we just start with that formulation. I think that is... I think that's a dangerous formulation. I do think the postmoderns are on board with that. But notice what it says. It says there's a we, there's a me, and then there's a narrative, and then there's reality out there. And that I have to go through this narrative to get to reality. Like a screen. That's right.

And it might have some chinks in it. It might be opaque. But also, what this narrative is, it's got a huge amount of stuff built into it. All kinds of background expectations and theories and slippery terms and so forth. What I would say is, to use this language, is that narratives are things that we use to see reality. If... the narrative is true. So sometimes narratives get reality right.

Sometimes narratives are wildly on the basis.

That's for sure. But rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary, it itself is a tool. It's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in when we are relating to reality. That's if we get it right. But if we mess it up, then it does become something that we try to see reality through, and we're in a problematic situation.

medieval philosophy again much sophistication there had been a kind of dominant framework for a millennium and very quick time things transformed themselves in the 1500s 1600s all of those

But then you've dropped reality out of the picture.

The scientist who's studying the wolves is creating a story. That's right. No, not creating, I want to say constructing a story. Yes. But it's a story about something that's not happening mediated through stories in the wolves.

uh intellectual cultural transformations uh that we that we study when we do the history and that course ends with the death of nietzsche in 1900 so essentially 1500 to 1900 eight lectures but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically Because in some cases, the philosophers are ones who make the historical revolution happen as their theoretical ideas are applied.

Well, I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the table. They're going to be related. I think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say an actor on a screen, putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sorts of things.

I think that's very extraordinarily complicated. And I think the interesting thing there is going to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how much of that is learned, because it does seem to be a highly fallible process.

I know, I don't want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I've been in social circumstances, and I think I'm pretty savvy about reading people, but I'll be with my wife, and she will say, after we've had a conversation with someone, Boy, did you notice how upset that person was about blah, blah, blah.

So there may be sex, gender differences that are going on, but also at the same time, it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that. So when we say people are very good at that, I think that's true, but we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that. I think that's going to be a very, very sophisticated story.

But then the other example, it takes us back to perceptual cases where you're talking about, are you looking at me or me looking at you, and we're also aware that we're in a room that there are other people in the room who are filling and so on. But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus right on one thing, then it is true that everything else Pales by comparison.

Yeah, that's right. And pales is metaphorical. So if we're going to try to then unpack the metaphor, I think we would say we focus and unfocus. And then we can give descriptors of what the state of unfocus is and what the state of focus is. And I would prefer using that language to the language of screen. Because screen really is something that is in the way. It's a thing itself.

That's another obstacle. So if there's a dressing screen between the two of us and I'm undressing for privacy, the whole idea of the screen is that it's blocking. So the metaphor is too simple. Sorry, that would be different from, and I think a better metaphor would be to say to filter. And I think sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter.

They're just attending to some things and not attending to other things. But a filter is different from a screen. But also just to stay on this one issue here, the issue of focus and unfocus, I think it's not a filter either.

In other cases, the philosophers are responding to what's going on in the culture, what's going on historically, trying to make sense of it and either urge it on or retard it. The second course picks up in 1900 and it's called Postmodern Philosophy.

Okay, remind me what element of the tabernacle... I will, I will, I'll lay it out.

It's partly because... So, is this a metaphor for what?

And the main point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers started to react against, in a very sophisticated way, much of what had happened intellectually in the modern era. and they in some cases were radicalizing it, in some cases wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually and culturally in the modern era.

You live in a dynamical environment.

Yeah, let me try a different, I don't want to use the tabernacle example, I'm not as familiar with it, but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let's say you're walking through, this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, right, at night, and you think it's a slightly dangerous neighborhood.

And so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can.

And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field. It's a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.

Yes, that's right. And in that case, what I'm trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular. like I might when I'm reading. Then I'm using my visual attention and I'm focusing on this particular thing. Or I'm an artist and I'm trying to do the glint on the eyeball for the finishing touch.

So my eyes are wide open and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field. But that I think is coextensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works as if I am in the bad neighborhood, at night. And what I've tried to do is just expand my attention to encompass this whole field so that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.

And we started to see in philosophy a move to a more skeptical, relativized, even kind of the death of philosophy, the sense that philosophy has for millennia tried to answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a culminating fashion.

Now, where I think it immediately gets more complicated, and you psychologists know more about this than I do, is even if we stay with those examples, the question about what happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is another dimension that has to cut across.

Even if we grant that in both cases, whether I'm focused or whether I'm diffused attention, I'm aware of reality in some Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense. It is true that if in either of those cases, if I'm the artist focusing on the particular dot and my child suddenly screams, then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go to attend.

Import.

But then even another interesting case would be you're the artist and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams, but you've given yourself a signal. I'm angry at my kid right now. He's been a brat. I'm going to ignore him when he screams. So I'm focusing, exact same scenario, kid screams, I register it, but my reaction is quite different. I stay focused.

But from their more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self-realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions, so it should, in effect, disintegrate. So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.

That's right. That's going to be a back-feed loop.

Yeah. To come back to like your pen example and the issue of as sophisticated cognizers, when we are perceiving the world, that we have their use function kind of built into the... The perception. Yeah. I'm going to put that in quotation marks right now.

And then the action that's going to be embodied in that use also in many cases seems to be built into the perception. I think if we unpack that more, there's still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what is built into the physiological system and the psychological system at birth and how much of it is learned. Definitely.

Yeah, because I don't think we want to say that, you know, even in the 21st century where we come into the world born with kind of a precognized understanding of pens.

And how to use pens. I don't even know if we have that. We have a certain physiological structure that, and a certain conceptual structure that's built on that, such that, and it's going to be very flexible and amenable to different environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things, whatever their intrinsic properties, as potential tools.

Here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase, John Dewey and some of the pragmatists to some extent, Martin Heidegger. and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it.

yeah well a lot of that so let me just it's just to try another example to get to uh because i like the the earlier movie example and the male female difference one thing that comes up in couples is how they learn to be tuned to each other's voices and the sound of their own voice. So couples who, before they met each other, would go to a loud party and they would be talking to each other.

Yeah, that's a really good example. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, there's just noise and it's a big decibel level, right? But then once they become couples and they have heard each other say their name, say Jordan, Stephen, right, or whatever, they can be in a relatively loud party separated across the room, right? And the guy's wife says, Stephen, right?

And he can pick that out of that incredible instrument of sounds.

Yeah, because you've automated certain... Yeah, that's right.

So that centers now... What the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right? That we can automate all of these things and we can learn to detect various things and focus on this, that, and the other thing. all of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives, they turn them into vices.

So, what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes, in their language, because they've already got an epistemological theory, a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective.

But also at the same time, since I don't agree with any of them, but I do give them a fair shot, and we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are coming from, and why these arguments are so powerful, and that we have to take them seriously.

And the idea for them then is that somehow, if we were going to be actually aware of reality and not through this interpretation, we would have to not have any interpretations at all, that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our minds without any intermediary actions. Or what they will then do is to say, I can choose to prioritize this over that in my visual field.

They will say, and they're right to say this, that's a value judgment. I think this is more important now, and this is more important over that. But then by the time they start using the words value, they're coming at a very sophisticated negative judgment. Evaluative theories that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of external reality.

Well, maybe it's worse than that. So for both of them, it's on the cognition side and on the evaluative side that they're deep into subjective territory and so those then become negative words for them. Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition.

All these metaphors of screens and filters and tabernacles and visual fields and so on. That's where we have to get that sorted out, because if we don't get those foundations correct, then we're going to be messed up.

Nonetheless, there have been many, as I think of them, philosophers who think the earlier traditions, sometimes the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions, still have some bite and can be repackaged for this post-modern era.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice. Power properly conceived could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done.

And our cognitive powers, if we have a good healthy epistemology, should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world.

That's exactly right. But then, if you, however, are skeptical, if you do start with the epistemology, all of the postmoderns do come out of an epistemological training. It's a striking fact, you know, the big-name postmoderns, so we mentioned Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty, right, and the others, they are all PhDs in philosophy, right?

They're all doing heavy-duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral level work. And that does come to become the foundation. And because of the time that they are working in, middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy. The revealing theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time. So they came of age.

Now, what that then is to say is, if you don't think... that human beings can know the world as individuals, then you don't think of developing your reason, developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for understanding is the most important thing about human beings. So what then is it to be a human being?

Well, I think to some extent, yes. So, you would be an example of that. Others who think the Enlightenment project has been a great success, Even though it had some philosophical errors, those can be tweaked as an ongoing scientific project. And so I'm interested in also thinkers like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Philippa Foot, who are not so skeptical.

And to the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we are going to become closer to chimps. And then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world. are going to become more predominant. Or even lower than chimps, baboons. Yeah, it's more of a baboon model.

I think this shows the absolute importance of these cognitive issues that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively. Because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition, that it is efficacious, that it is competent, that our brain, mind is an enormously powerful tool. And if we learn to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as individuals.

And socially, we'll start to work out the win-win positive, some social things. Otherwise, we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kinds of levels.

That's right. They're all left with it. That's right. That's what they're left with. You're getting rid of human cognitive power as a positive thing. Then you ask, well, what's left? If it's not the case that I think my human cognition

my mind puts me in touch with reality and that i can work out reality and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality and of course maybe we're initially focusing on things we have different frameworks but that we nonetheless have the cognitive tools to talk about these things to do the experiments to you know i can visit you what you've experienced to take each other's position that's right in service of some higher goal

That's right. And that we can work all of these things out to, in effect, have an agreed upon understanding of the nature of reality. Then, if that's not what's going on, that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture. Right. And what the postmoderns then do is either say, well, I make up my own reality.

That's what's going on here. Or some of them are more passive. All of the influences of more environmental deterministic understandings of human beings. What we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment, your social upbringing, right, and so on. So, again, we don't have an autonomous… The dominant patriarchy.

Yeah, or there could be any sort of social structure from their perspective. But that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships, right?

not me in relation to reality and other people are part of reality so i have to work that out but rather the assumption is that i am inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality and so the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be and the word there that becomes most important is the power word It's a kind of social power.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's the social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding of power. But the power for them cannot be the positive sum

In fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.

kind of power that we're talking about because that understanding of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way the world works and do science and technology and make the world better place and empower ourselves we can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful i can understand that you're a rational person uh and you can understand that i'm a rational person so i have to treat you a certain way conversationally socially and so forth uh

So all of the positive, some social stuff is going to come out of that. But the postmoderns have cut all of that away. All you're left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social world. And what they then call power just is the influence or tools, including the tools of language.

And the idea at the end of that course is that we have a sense of what the philosophical and philosophically informed intellectual landscape looks like in our time. Bringing it right up to current times and characterizing it as, in effect, a three-way debate between the moderns, the pre-moderns, and the post-moderns and post-moderns.

that are now understood as to have nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as being socially constructed themselves. And tools of power. That's right. And so it becomes then necessarily a zero-sum, socially influencing and controlling game. And they reinterpret everything in terms of that.

That can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses, too.

i've done five courses yes three are in post-production two are okay and what are the three that are coming up one is on modern ethics uh so uh what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse more global more multicultural and more critical in some ways of traditional models that have come down to us so it's a much more wide open

world what's interesting about the modern world is how little we have uh what i think of as kind of homogeneous cultures where everybody by and large on the same philosophical that's the collapse of that meta narrative yeah that particular went away and so we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good what is bad what's right what is wrong what's the meaning of my life how should we organize ourselves socially so what i did was uh chose uh eight

completely different but extraordinarily influential modern moral philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them. So it goes back to people like David Hume wrestling with the is-ought problem and Immanuel Kant with his strong duty focus, John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, and so on in through the 20th century up to very contemporary times. So that's one course, modern ethics.

And all of these people are giants, they all disagree with each other, but that's the contemporary landscape within which people who are doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves. The other two courses are 16 lectures in total, but it's called The Philosophy of Politics.

And here what I'm interested in is, obviously we have political science, we have political theory, political ideology, practical day-to-day understandings of politics. But what I'm interested in is the philosophers' contributions to those debates. And one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics, they're not actually disagreeing about politics.

They're disagreeing about something more fundamental. I think that's become evident to everyone. That's right. And in many cases, it doesn't get brought to the core. So I don't want to talk about the recent election, but really it's about culture more fundamentally and not about many particular issues and underlying culture.

In one sense, we've never lived in better times philosophically because we have self-conscious, articulate, and very able representatives of all of those traditions operating in our generation. So bringing all of that in an eight-lecture series to a hopefully large international audience that can access them online. So that's been my intellectual mission there.

Right. So one, though, picks up with the French Revolution, which is perhaps the landmark event in European or at least continental European history. Why that political revolution happened. And there's a lot of philosophy that matters there. But then also. an important theoretician, Edmund Burke, and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism in response to that.

But then we go through all of the big-name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics. So we go through Hegel and Marx, and as we get into the 20th century, we talk about the fascists, Mussolini and Gentile, who was a PhD in philosophy, and Heidegger and the National Socialists, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, and that one ends with World War II.

So French Revolution to the World War II. The next course picks up at the end of World War II and the Cold War, and it starts with Rand and Robert Nozick. At the height of the Cold War, how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context? So it starts with them, goes on to John Rawls. We also talk about James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for public choice economics.

We also do some international, because we're living in a global society, that cliche and so on. But the Islamist revolutions and the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher, Said Qutba, whose brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden, extraordinarily influential. Ayatollah Khomeini had Qutba's works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.

We go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugin in that framework as well. And then we end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism, Roger Scruton's meaning of conservatism, which came out a few years before he died. So the idea here is to say these are the big names.

political theories you need to know, but they're all big name ones because they have philosophical bite behind them by some very deep people and integrating that with the history in each case, how some of them are urging history in a certain direction or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the Cold War or the attacks in 9-11.

That's my ambition.

Fair enough.

I will dive into it. Thanks.

Thank you.

No, that's exactly on track. I think a lot of people in our era are more active-minded than people were in previous eras. We have more media, more freedom, more resources to be able to do so.

But even the more active-minded people, I think, as you are pointed out, even if you are, to a large extent, independently coming up with ideas, it nonetheless is illuminating many cases to realize that there has been a smart person who thought of that before you, in many cases in a more sophisticated form and integrated that with other ideas.

So sometimes you can find a thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down. And most of us don't have time to be active intellectuals. We have our full lives. So anything that we can learn from the philosophers who've thought through these issues can accelerate our process down that road.

And then, of course, the other thing is that to the extent that you don't think about these things, what you are saying, I think, is exactly right. In many cases, we are unconsciously guided in certain directions. Sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure, so all of the roads and traffic lights and lighting systems and so forth.

And we grow up with them and, you know, we're like the fish in the water. We just take it for granted that we're surrounded by these things. And we have automated operating inside a certain kind of infrastructure system. But at the same time, it is illuminating to step back and think that somebody thought through every aspect of that infrastructure system.

And in many cases, I'm being directed perhaps in ways that are not healthy. And how can we make that infrastructure system better? That's going to take people who are aware that in many cases they are being guided by that infrastructure.

A pleasure.