Dr. Stephen Hicks
speaker
174 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Stephen Hicks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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.
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.
In fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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