Sean Carroll

You have three billion heartbeats and you have to spend them wisely.

And I got to figure out, you know, for how many years do I want to crank out one podcast every week without fail?

It's been it's been a number of years and I've I've done 51 weeks a year every year.

Okay, Michael Keely says, it strikes me that the late 19th century, early 20th century was a particularly fertile period for adoption of more philosophical ideas in areas such as science, economics, politics, and other fields with a lot of paradigm shifting ideas in this timeframe.

Do you think this period was particularly rich time for deep philosophical thinking and adoption of radical ideas?

And if so, what do you think it was about society at this time that made us more open to new ideas?

Well, I don't know.

I'm not going to put forward an opinion on that particular time period being better than other periods in history.

I mean, I do think that other periods in history, if we're just asking about does philosophy have an impact on these other areas, I think that earlier eras often had large philosophical impacts.

I mean, there's certainly –

very big philosophical impacts on the founders of the United States, thinking of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and their plan for the government and things like that.

The discourse over the founding of modern science with people like Descartes and Galileo and Newton and Bacon absolutely was suffused with philosophy at that time.

Going back to Aristotle and Plato, I mean, those people wrote philosophy, but they also wrote about politics and wrote about

literature and wrote about all sorts of things so maybe one could make an argument that it's the 20th century or the mid 20th century or I don't know the the the world going electronic or post-world war two I don't know the world being completely connected but maybe I don't know how to objectively judge this but maybe philosophy has dropped out of the conversation relative to where it used to be and

And I can think of two obvious reasons why that might be true if it is true.

One is just that the rate of change is faster.

Philosophy is a slow field.

Like philosophy is for people who are willing to take their time to sit and think deeply about things without any obvious short-term payoff, right?

And that mode of thought has become less and less common, let's just put it that way, in the late 20, early 21st century.

And the other reason is just that knowledge has become very specialized, right?