501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
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What is the main topic of this episode?
Today I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who's a philosopher with a stellar academic career, very good author. And we talked about, well, we talked about his contributions to Peterson Academy first. He's taught five courses at this new online university that some of you may be aware of, and the rest of you should be, as far as I'm concerned. He's taught five courses there, and we... detailed out the structure of the courses. And more importantly and more broadly, I would say, describe the rationale for studying philosophy because he's a professional philosopher as an academic. And so we discussed, well, the importance of a philosophical education. We discussed the nature of the philosophical endeavor over the last three or four hundred years as it shifted from modernism to post-modernism to whatever is dawning in this new age that's emerging. And... That constituted the bulk of our conversation. And so if you're interested in that, and you should be, and if you're not, you should ask yourself, why then? Join us.
Why is philosophy important in modern education?
If the answer is no, it's because you're unconsciously under the sway of some skeptical philosopher, and maybe you shouldn't be. So join us anyways for that discussion. So, Dr. Hicks, it's good to see you again.
A pleasure.
Yeah, thank you for coming into Scottsdale today.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, much appreciated. So, I thought we would start by talking practically a bit about... You've lectured. You've done two lectures for Peterson Academy? I've done five.
Two are out.
Okay, two are out. You've done five. Excellent. Okay, so... Run through that a bit. Tell people what you're teaching and what the experience was like and how you understand the mission of this new enterprise. Why you got involved, all of that, if you would.
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. 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.
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 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? 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.
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.
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
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic of this episode?
0:14–1:25
2
Why is philosophy important in modern education?
1:25–7:46
3
How have philosophical ideas shaped modern society?
7:46–12:15
4
What are the key differences between modern and postmodern philosophy?
12:15–22:23
5
How do stories influence our perception of reality?
22:23–33:13
6
What is the relationship between emotions and reasoning?
33:13–44:48
7
How does neuroscience relate to our understanding of philosophy?
44:48–54:42
8
What are the implications of philosophical thought on human behavior?
54:42–1:44:05