Toby Buckle
speaker
272 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2018
last heard Oct 2018
Toby Buckle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The idea of the individual at least as a value, as a construct, as
A way of breaking down society.
This is a bourgeoisie notion that barely predates the Enlightenment, which is again not to say it's false.
The idea of individual freedom as an aspirational social goal is something that began in ancient Greece and has been quite unique to certain cultures since then, and the way we understand the social structure as rationally intelligible, much less individual actions as guided by it, again is the result of particular historical.
Processes.
So when someone says libertarianism must be true because of these fixed constants of human nature.
They're actually just making a claim about human nature that's historically false.
If you want to justify that view of the world, you have to come up with something more fundamental.
Yeah, so let's take up the one of reason, and if we're gonna look at ancient Greece, I think a good preamble to that is you really can't study the ancient world without anachronism.
It's not just like translating a foreign language and finding the equivalent word.
We have to take concepts that we don't have and translate them into concepts that we do have.
So often we read, you know, a a line in Plato or Aristotle about human beings being rational.
That word, as you know, you said, doesn't mean the same thing to them that it does to us.
So to take Plato, for example, his form of rationality is about us matching up our internal psychological compositions to some sort of ideal form.
To him, rationality is having a certain ordered components of the soul.
It's a psychological process.
I don't think what the moderns mean by rationality is anywhere near that.
They're talking about external observable truths in some sense.
So, yes, you can find concepts that are analogous, but
what it would be like to be in Plato's head, much less what it would be like to be in the head of just the guy on the street in Athens, phenomenologically, how they would experience the social world, I think would be radically different to us in a way that we don't fully appreciate.
Showing 101–120 of 272 · page 6 of 14
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