Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person.
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Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, what do you and Greek philosophers have in common? And how can ancient ideas help us manage our modern woes?
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Chapter 2: What ancient wisdom can guide us through modern challenges?
So Plato becomes a teacher himself. He starts the academy. It is thought to be the first university in Western civilization. And then we come to another student. His most famous student essentially starts what we now call virtue ethics. And that was Aristotle.
Absolutely. And Aristotle looked at his teacher and thought, this is too radical. This has gone too far. And Aristotle famously broke away. He started his own school, the Lyceum, where he was going to teach people virtue ethics in a much more systematic and less politically radical way.
So Aristotle famously thought that the entire pursuit of our lives is a form of happiness that he calls eudaimonia, or flourishing, the good life. That we have a goal that's in front of all of our lives, which is to achieve this kind of flourishing. And to do it, we have to live in healthy communities. But we also have to learn how to exercise our powers of reason and our powers of self-control.
And this is the kind of thing that you can learn how to do. He literally taught a class on how to achieve happiness in ancient Greece. And he did not think that it was a matter of starting a political revolution so much as it was a matter of learning to train your habits.
And if you think about Plato as the great political revolutionary of ancient Greece, Aristotle, and I mean this with huge respect, is like the great self-help philosopher of ancient Greece, where he really gave people a lot of advice for how to flourish where they're planted.
Philosophy professor Megan Sullivan believes that when times are tumultuous, ancient questions and principles can still guide us. And so on the show today, how to probe the past to figure out what a good life means for you. With Megan, it starts in her classroom, where she pushes her students to think and question exactly that.
The thing that ultimately got Socrates killed but which was his real power was that he gave young people a moral imagination. Like they would have thought, along with their parents, that there was kind of only one way Athens could go. There's like only one way the world works.
And Socrates, by asking them questions, by teaching them philosophy, helped them realize they had a lot more options than they might have believed they had based on who was in power. And I see that same dynamic playing out today. You know, I teach a lot of young people. I teach this really big course on the good life at Notre Dame, which has a lot of Notre Dame freshmen in it.
And a lot of them have been fed this diet of visions of the good life from the high school system and the AP, SAT exam system that we inflict on all of our teenagers. And then they're exposed to visions of the good life from TikTok and social media, which tell them they need to be looks maxers. and which tell them they need to attain certain kinds of social perfection.
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Chapter 3: How did Socrates influence the concept of the good life?
were in middle school and high school during the pandemic, they're maybe a little bit more tenderized by the world than, I don't know about you, than I was when I was their age. When I was their age, I was probably more likely to just do whatever a powerful adult told me to do.
Whereas now I think this generation is maybe a little bit more skeptical and skepticism is a good place to start doing philosophy. Cynicism is hard for philosophy, but skepticism we can work with.
That's such a good point because I'm just thinking back to the 90s when I was in college and the big topic was, you know, Bill Clinton's dalliances. Oh, yeah. There were not big conversations over what is democracy. I'll tell you that. It was taken for granted.
Of course. Of course democracy will always work.
Okay. So as you say, they're tenderized. Are they fragile? How do you begin to make them ā I guess not give up or just be like, I don't know, it's beyond my control.
So my approach, which is inspired by Socrates, is to ask them questions that force them to think and then really listen to their answers. One of Socrates' great gifts as a teacher is he really did take young people seriously. Socrates thought that all of us have a certain kind of dignity, this ability to think through these questions for ourselves. And I try to really bring that into my teaching.
And so I structure my class around 10 big questions. that I think we all have to wrestle with if we try to figure out what's true about the good life. And this appears in the book, too. I start with what I think is the easiest of the 10 questions and then move up the ladder each week to a harder one. Hopefully the students clear each level.
I'm intimidated by this and I'm not a college student.
You should be intimidated. The easiest question, the question that we start with, and you're going to laugh at me when I say this given the conversation that we've been having. I think the easiest question is how should we relate to people who disagree with us about politics? Like how should we have political discussions?
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Chapter 4: What was Plato's vision for a better society?
We realize that love makes us really vulnerable to the world and to other people in ways that we're oftentimes not comfortable with. And when you love someone, they could seriously hurt you or something terrible could happen to them and then you'd be crushed. Most virtues make you stronger. Love is this virtue that weirdly its strength comes from making you weaker.
And we've got to be okay with that.
Where does religion fit into this these days? Because you became a Catholic as an undergrad yourself. But as we know, organized religion in many of these institutions is not at the center. Notre Dame, I guess, is different. And does that almost make it easier to have these conversations about ethics?
Does that sort of put you all on a level playing field in some way as opposed to out in the world where people are believing all kinds of different things and so it's hard to even have a starting point, the same language or vocabulary to have these conversations?
I think if there's a big mistake that we've made in our country in the last few decades, it's universities have been kind of afraid or tepid about organized religion. I think if we really believe that people go to college to learn how to care for their souls, to learn why they're here, Thank you so much for having me.
I think I spent, you know, it would have saved me a lot of money in therapy down the road if I had been able to have more open and searching conversations about what role religious faith plays in a good life with teachers that I trusted and cared about when I was young.
I think that's something we do really well at Notre Dame that I wish had been a bigger element of my education growing up, and I wish more young people had the experience of.
How do you begin to model this idea? I mean, Catholicism is hardly a perfect religion. No religion is. No. Megan, you didn't know this? I didn't know this.
Catholicism, look, there are questions.
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Chapter 5: How does Aristotle define happiness and flourishing?
And so I think these are definite questions you want to prepare people in college to be able to navigate. And maybe one of the things that I can give my students is not talking them out of those career paths right away, but helping them develop the sorts of skills and virtues that are going to accompany them, again, when they're 30 and they realize that they're not on the right path.
I mean, I don't want to be intellectually snooty about it. I just remember a young couple who I live next door to who were consultants for financial services firms, big ones. And I was like, so, you know, did you think you wanted to do this? They were like, oh, no, this is how it happens. You have huge student loans.
You get, you know, plucked by a big company and they're going to pay you money like you've never seen before. And you think... Well, I'll pay off my loans. I'll help my parents out with their, you know, bills. And then once that's all taken care of, I can do what I really want to do. And I'll figure that out along the way.
And then they're like, and then it's five years in and you have a mortgage and then maybe you even have a kid. And actually you like going on really nice vacations and the loan maybe still isn't paid off. And then there's your life for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Yeah. And some people, you know, they love it. And so that's fine. But there are other people who I think feel really trapped there.
Oh, absolutely. I'm in this phase of life. I'm 43, so I'm in this phase of life where this is like everybody I know that's going through this great rethinking. And in our current system, the winners get richer and the losers get poorer with each successive cycle. And we sort of realized, this is what Marx was on about too, is, my gosh, you make a bet when you're 18 years old
You take out a bunch of debt to become a computer science major, making this kind of calculation that that's going to be a very lucrative job when you're 23, 24. And then it turns out that powerful artificial intelligence hits the economy, and there's actually no jobs for computer programmers anymore. But how on earth were you supposed to know that when you were 17, 18 years old?
And now you've got this big college debt you've got to pay off, and you've also been training for a career that doesn't exist. And capitalism is utterly merciless in helping you figure out what you're supposed to do next. And philosophy is not going to be able to take the risk out of the equation.
I think the best philosophy can do, which is still pretty good, is helping you realize that you might have gotten set on a particular option and can maybe help you ask some questions that cause you to see side quests or paths that you didn't know were available before.
Yeah, I guess I would add and develop judgment.
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Chapter 6: What philosophical questions do students grapple with today?
Megan has been spending time out in Silicon Valley working with technologists to consider how or if ethics fit into their business models.
There are two parts of the conversation that we're hosting out here. And where Notre Dame is now getting much, much, much more active in debates about AI ethics. One part of the conversation is working with the frontier labs and the tech companies that are really curious about what philosophers and theologians think about artificial intelligence. And you're right.
Some of the companies, I won't name them on this podcast, they just care about making money. They do not care about anything else. And they're, you know, they're hopeless. You don't want to take meetings with them. But there are other companies where the people that work there and lead these companies, they're actually pretty curious and worried about what they're doing.
And they want to make money but they also want to do good in the world. They want to leave a great legacy. They have children. The people that run these companies think about the next generation.
And they realize that they've been spending so much time at a breakneck pace trying to develop AI that they have not paused to ask some of these bigger questions about why we're making it and what society should look like with it in it. But another probably bigger component to what a university like Notre Dame is trying to do
is I disagree with this premise that the only people on planet Earth who matter are the people who are making the AI. In fact, I think that those companies would be making a terrible mistake to believe that only the developers matter, that the strong will do what they will and the weak will suffer what they must.
Because at the end of the day, they only have a business model if we use their products. And we are not just passive, non-playable characters that AI is just happening to. We have agency. It's not only bots that have agency, Manoush. We have agency.
We have the ability as users to bring our preferences and values and ethics to this question about what kind of AI we are going to use, how we're going to let it be deployed in our universities, in our schools, in our workplaces. And one of the most important things that ethicists can do is wake people up to their personal agency and help them reclaim this idea.
You as a user are allowed to ask some pretty interesting and profound questions. about whether or not you want that AI product on your iPhone, whether or not you want to give it to your children, how you're going to vote for AI policy regulation the next time you vote in a local election.
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