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Jakub Ferencik
189 Plays4 years ago
SRTN's visiting Philosopher, Jakub Ferencik is back! We first heard from Jakub in Episode 60. Since then, Jakub has written another book (!) entitled Beyond Reason: Why We Fail at Understanding Each Other. Our discussion here ranged through many issues but focused on the primacy of reason as an arbiter of truth. Jakub and Ken engage in a lively conversation that is timely but steeped in the historical tradition, which they interrogate.
About Beyond Reason - Why is it that everyone around us professes certainty amidst so much confusion, extremism, and polarization? Everyone has answers and yet so few questions are truly resolved. Academics debate endlessly, politicians manipulate desperately, and parents misguide in the same way that they were misled. In this book, Ferencik argues that the only way to come close to resolving our ideological battles is to assume that we are fallible; he claims that certainty is the enemy of progress. For much of history, dogma restricted the progress our ancestors hoped for.
Today, we are similarly threatened by dogma. But in our case, we have tools we can work with to become more balanced, tolerant, and kind to those who disagree with us. If we are to truly aim at objectivity, we must read widely, disagree kindly, rethink voraciously, and move beyond reason.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20994999.Jakub_Ferencik
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Something Rather Than Nothing'
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Kendalante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer.
Who is Jacob Forensic?
00:00:18
Speaker
This is Ken Volante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast and I have Jacob forensic. Jacob had to look up and see when you were on the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. It was back in episode 60. We're up towards episode 130 now.
00:00:39
Speaker
And I remember distinctly our conversation and, you know, connection we made about talking about philosophy. And at that point, you know, we covered your book and we covered, you know, the general art questions on something rather than nothing.
The Premise of 'Beyond Reason'
00:00:57
Speaker
I wanted to welcome back on, Jacob, and get into, you've been busy, a busy thinker. And you got a book beyond reason with, I think, an important premise. I want you to talk a little bit about, you know, your work and welcome you back on, Jacob Forensic.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much, Ken. It's a real pleasure to be back. I enjoyed our last conversation, so I'm sure that this will be as fruitful and enjoyable for me and for both of us, hopefully.
Society's Challenges: Polarization and Misinformation
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, so beyond reason, this book really is coming from an honest place. We see in society today so much polarization, division, not only in the States, but just everywhere
00:01:50
Speaker
social media and all these troll farms and everything. And we don't really have reliable information, everyone's talking about disinformation and misinformation. There's technology ethicists like Tristan Harris and others who talk about the ways that totalitarian or authoritarian leaders in the world, such as Viktor Yanukovych or
Cyber Warfare and Philosophy's Relevance
00:02:20
Speaker
Putin and Orban and Law and Justice in Poland, all these parties everywhere utilizing social media to stir polarization, you know, domestically in their countries in Eastern Europe, for example, but also in the states far away. So there's this kind of like cyber warfare. So misinformation is rampant. And then we have just the general
00:02:48
Speaker
place philosophy and the humanities have in society and how that's diminishing in value. So this book Beyond Reason is looking like, okay, what's really going on? There's a lot of information out
Roots and Future of Skepticism
00:03:01
Speaker
there. So many people really are fans of their own ideas. They take themselves so seriously. You know, they're willing to sacrifice relationships and friendships because of views they have that may change in two years or five years.
00:03:14
Speaker
And so I'm looking at that I'm looking at this question of where did skepticism come from? What is the importance of being skeptical of one's own view, you know, starting with Socrates all the way going to Renee Descartes and beyond, and, and saying like, Okay, no, we should be intuitionist, we should be what technically is called a post skeptical rationalist. We can get into that later. But my argument is simple, it's not really
00:03:40
Speaker
You know, we create these dichotomies like, oh, you need to be an objectivist or a relativist. No, you don't have to believe in moral objectives, such as, oh, there's right and wrong to each and every moral question, or there's no right and wrong. Maybe there's a compromise. Maybe there's a middle, like, okay,
Navigating Moral Dichotomies
00:03:57
Speaker
there's right and wrongs on certain questions. Is pedophilia justifiable? No. Is slavery justifiable? No. But then, are hijabs oppressive to women in each and every case?
00:04:09
Speaker
maybe, maybe not. Some questions are more difficult. And I feel like in today's society, having answers like Candice Owens and Ben Shapiro and others, and having decisive answers and presenting them in a way that is divisive and kind of, you know, destroying the opposition as all these YouTube videos constantly are, you know, bombarding us with,
00:04:35
Speaker
That gets traction. And for obvious reasons, people love certainty. People love giving answers versus just saying, you know what? Maybe the Nazis, to give another example here, weren't bad people. Maybe they were programmed into being that bad. Maybe there's a Nazi in each society. You know, maybe we should look beyond these kind of like bad, good,
00:05:00
Speaker
conservative liberal.
Understanding Historical Figures
00:05:02
Speaker
Maybe we should understand, you know, Nazis were regular people as Hannah Arendt argued in the banality of evil. These people were oftentimes just accountants who became, so we should look at this, these questions with more nuance. We should say, you know, there's a lot to talk about and a lot of us don't have answers. A lot of us simply do not have the time to read
00:05:28
Speaker
All these accolades, you know, to understand all these big questions about Marxism, Nazism, postmodernism, relativism. So the
Expressing Views with Evidence
00:05:36
Speaker
argument is, let's talk to each other as skeptics. Let's say, you know what, I don't know my view. Why should I have a view about taxes? Taxes seem pretty difficult to understand. And I can have a, you know, obviously, that's not to say that we shouldn't have views. We should have views.
00:05:55
Speaker
But we should express them in a way that's like, oh, this is the research I've done. This is what I know. This is what I don't know. And here's all the various limitations.
00:06:05
Speaker
So briefly. Yeah, well, and it brings up a lot. And I know in listening to you discussing your work on another podcast, I mean, it really broaches a
Discourse Post-Pandemic
00:06:16
Speaker
lot of questions. And I think one of the first ones I'm wondering about this is, is there something different going on right now? Because this one of the questions I've been considering for a little while, right?
00:06:28
Speaker
For me, you know, I'm born of a certain age, you know, we're sharing the earth at the same time and seeing what we're seeing. What has happened around discourse or philosophical questions or how do we discuss political questions? It's changed so radically and it's changed so radically amidst the pandemic and amidst the merging technology of
00:06:57
Speaker
how we get news in what type of silos that news in all that's changed. So one of the things I wanted to ask you as a fundamental question, Jacob, is there something different going on now? Or is it just kind of this kind of breakdown that we've seen historically that just manifest in itself in a different way? It's a really good question. I think it's a really good question.
Social Media: A Modern Printing Press?
00:07:20
Speaker
I think one of the things I've noticed is that people tend to present changes in society as
00:07:27
Speaker
doomsday observations. So they say, oh, look at the rise of social media, what it's going to do to teenagers, what it's going to do to information and all these like the institutions, how it's going to harm media. And I think some of that is correct. But we need to look at similar arguments when, for example, the printing press was being developed in the, you know, in Gutenberg. And a lot of people were saying, okay, there's going to be a lot of
00:07:56
Speaker
alternative journalism, there's going to be a lot of criticism of the monarchy that's going to be able to publish. And there were a lot of arguments against having a printing press. And now we know looking back, the printing press is one of the best inventions for society now and ensure information, having widespread information and having kind of a democratized access to publishing information has some of its setbacks, like yes,
00:08:26
Speaker
You can publish gross forms of pornography. You can publish incorrect assessments of the world, political events, alternative journalism and all this stuff. But then there's also good that comes with it. Democracy in the end has its positives and negatives. And that's why people like Plato were against democracy.
00:08:54
Speaker
So, so I think that, you know, that's my first kind of caveat with, with that type of question
Anonymity and Misinformation
00:09:00
Speaker
is that, um, I think a lot of people tend to be doomsday, but they should remember that, uh, everyone has always been like that. Everyone always says, uh, you know, if we bring in this new form of technology, there's going to be all this bad. So right now we're in the 20 year mark of, uh, the internet, the social media, the internet a little bit longer.
00:09:22
Speaker
But social media, 2008, Twitter, 2006, and all this. So we're still kind of treading murky waters with how we behave around it, what we allow on it. So I think that there should be some changes to the platform, the algorithm. Anonymity, for example, is a big problem. There should be some sort of tracing of, because you can be an extremist on Twitter, and you can sow divisions.
00:09:53
Speaker
and just suffer no repercussions. And I don't think that's okay. And people like Tristan Harris have been talking about this. But yeah, I think that the difference between now and the printing press is that now we have official troll farms from Eastern Europe and from Russia specifically that are just much more effective
00:10:18
Speaker
at sewing misinformation
Fast Thinking vs. Analytical Thinking
00:10:20
Speaker
into society. And we see this around the COVID-19 vaccine mandates around Trump's presidency. And I think that people should keep in mind that there's a lot of that online and they should fact check. There's a lot of websites that help with fact checking. I think factcheck.org is one of them.
00:10:47
Speaker
But obviously that takes a lot of slow thinking, and slow thinking is very taxing on the individual. It's much easier for us to practice fast thinking, as Daniel Kahneman has talked about extensively in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, and all his research surrounding that book, decades of research. This is just the way we think. We have just a horrible ability at thinking clearly. We're not rational as people. We're intuitive oftentimes.
00:11:18
Speaker
And so taking that into account, taking into account the fact that there is so much on the internet that it's just not going to be factual and that, you know, I personally just abstain from using Facebook and Twitter. I use it very rarely. I dilute my intake of those social media platforms because I know what it can instill within me, what it can take out from me. And so I think
The Value of Wide Reading
00:11:45
Speaker
a lot of people should just understand themselves more deeper,
00:11:48
Speaker
They should know their proclivity to engage with stuff that is divisive, and they should just be readily willing to fact check and to say, you know what? I don't know. Yeah. And that's one of the things I found really interesting. I had a guest on recently, and luckily in doing this show, I have some kind of crystallized ideas and quotes that come out of the discussion.
00:12:17
Speaker
She had said that it's tough to figure out your own ideas when you're swimming amidst ideas, ideas, and ideas. And we don't know what our mind is doing, the inundation of our ideas. And there's something about that process where
00:12:36
Speaker
We're lost, or we can't quite ascertain what's ours and what belongs to others. Jacob, I have a different question, and it's one of which I have a personal interest in.
00:12:51
Speaker
I like how you talk about your reading. And I think we share some strong similarities, at least throughout my life, of reading widely and just engaging in doubt and discomfort and something I think it's a good quality for us to share. And I think it's something I'm speaking for myself here as my exploration and seeing what I don't know.
00:13:19
Speaker
has always helped me understand or move towards what I need to know or would like to realize. You do that through reading and wide reading. I've done that as well. My main question is this.
00:13:34
Speaker
just a celebration of the role of reading in the task of reading, I have moved to listening to more books. And now I say, well, that's still different than almost a meditative process of the pages and the reading. What is it for you, Jacob, in the amount that you read and how you're doing that? Why is that important?
00:14:07
Speaker
One of my chapters in Beyond Reason is Where's the Attention?
Books as Knowledge Gateways
00:14:11
Speaker
And it's on this topic. It's about reading, the importance of reading, where reading is gone, the future of reading. I personally don't have a strong view on reading per se. I hear you with the audiobooks. I personally don't listen to audiobooks that much just because I find it more difficult to focus, but podcasts have just been a great source of information for me.
00:14:37
Speaker
I love listening to podcasts. I listen to podcasts all the time. And they're a type of audio book, but just concerning just interviews. But when it comes to reading, the beauty of reading, I think it's really a trade-off between time and energy and information. So a writer like Anne Applebaum, who is an expert on Eastern Europe
00:15:07
Speaker
Ukraine, Stalin, relations at the time, the Soviet Union, she will spend a decade researching about the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s. And it takes me two weeks or so to read her book. And it would take me a decade to research that same material if I were to do it, but she summarizes that. And so that is what a book is to me. I pick up a book not to read it
00:15:36
Speaker
cover to cover. I think that is, you know, I've heard C.S. Lewis say this, we were talking about C.S. Lewis last time I was on. C.S. Lewis said this, he said, you know, don't read a book cover to cover. That's not how, especially nonfiction. I personally just adore reading nonfiction. Fiction less so, but we won't get into that. But nonfiction, yeah, it's basically a Wikipedia article. It's a blog post just over 300,000 words or so, you know, these massive volumes.
00:16:06
Speaker
Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. You pick it up, this 500-page volume. This is a decade, maybe, of research. I don't know how long it took him to write it, but probably over the course of his career, he was gathering information on it, and he summarized it in this book. This is a, you know, to me, I think that's ceremonial almost. I take it with kind of just gratitude in and of itself.
00:16:34
Speaker
of scholarly research. And a grain of salt as well. I don't pick up a book. This is fact. This is an opinion. I generally don't agree with what I read automatically. I say, OK, this is an interesting take on this topic. I will consult other scholars in this.
00:16:58
Speaker
everyone should be discussing these topics in in good faith and reading just widely as you were saying the importance of reading widely uh can't be uh understated so that's to me book you know books people i think are threatened by books because they have this perspective of cover to cover i have to read every word in the book no skip two chapters and you come back to two chapters if you know especially in non-fiction it's all about the information that is in the book this is
Democracy and Reading
00:17:28
Speaker
go, you know, have music in the background, have a show in the background. However best you can absorb material on a topic you're curious about, that's the best way to read. And I think I've noticed this myself from just like a more everyday benefit of reading, I think people become more interesting, they have a lot more to say, and they become more engaged with society, history, they become a more full
00:17:57
Speaker
kind of person if you know the difficulty of establishing a democracy and how long that took. And you appreciate more the ability to engage in a democracy and to vote and to have representatives and to keep those representatives accountable by interacting with them over email or mail or even going to visit your local MP as you can in England.
00:18:25
Speaker
for example, and talking with them about your interests and how they're maybe serving them, maybe not, maybe complaining to your MPs about things that are going on. So all of that is, I think there's a lot that can happen from reading. And you just become a more full person, more in tune with reality, I believe. So people should remember that and they should prioritize however much through audio books, through podcasts,
00:18:55
Speaker
through, you know, reading. But I understand that people don't have time. People have lives. People have families and all this.
Errors in Education Levels
00:19:04
Speaker
So I don't like the elitist attitude towards people who don't read as if there's a difference between educated and uneducated. I think educated people are as potentially able to be mistaken as uneducated people.
00:19:24
Speaker
There's no, and I talk about that a lot actually and beyond reason that, that actually academics, because they're so well researched, they overestimate their judgment and they're then able to misjudge and they trust themselves too much. So there's not really a difference between, you know, educated and uneducated just purely on this kind of metaphysical level.
00:19:49
Speaker
were all able to make a fundamental mistake. Yeah, and I think one of the things I thought of when you were talking as well, lately I've been looking closely at some of the woodblock prints of Lind Ward and Fran Masseril, early 20th century, produced in the United States in
00:20:08
Speaker
What you see is that there's so much content
Images and Communication Beyond Language
00:20:10
Speaker
with the images and the audience is actually working class immigrants who you can't read or can't read the language that they're into, the English language at the time. But the content that's portrayed in the depiction of what happens at work or what happens to women in abuse
00:20:30
Speaker
and the messages of whether it be salvation or other type of things. I think part of the thing of the expansion of language is that coming in contact with images, coming in contact with ideas can happen in a variety of ways, and there isn't a right way
00:20:48
Speaker
right way to consume it. I want to ask a big question here because it's almost psychological, Jacob.
Humility in Knowledge
00:21:00
Speaker
I think nowadays we all need to be humbled about what we know and particularly
00:21:08
Speaker
You know, where there's this responsiveness on social media. Okay, the echo chamber told me this about Afghanistan. I'm going to tell you what my side of the echo chamber or my particular chamber says. And you're going to tell me your echo chamber and we're going to echo chamber back and forth to each other.
00:21:30
Speaker
There needs to be a humbling, I believe, when it comes to what we know. I find it difficult at times when people ask me questions and they think I might know the answer that I would respond with, well, this is what I have a tendency to believe. Here's three other ways you can look at it. And people at the end are kind of like, well,
00:21:53
Speaker
Well, which one is it? So I'm comfortable in humbling and unlearning.
Belief Changes and Experience
00:22:00
Speaker
The trajectory of our times expresses to me a great discomfort with humbling or not knowing. How is this tension resolved? If you and I are saying there needs to be a humbling about what we know,
00:22:18
Speaker
How do you do that, particularly when the pervasive push is to express your belief in what you know? I mean, I could only talk about personal experience. I think it's a fantastic question. Personally, I, as you know, before we talked about on our previous podcast that
00:22:44
Speaker
I have a Christian background. And I remember what it felt like to have that fervor of persuasion. There's a heaven, there's a hell, Jesus Christ came to die for my sins. I want others to know about this good news. And so I would talk about that. And I was 16, 15. So obviously I was a teenager, but I was reading widely on Christian literature, doctrine and stuff. And I had that persuasion. This is very true. There's no way Christian apologetics and all these smart
00:23:12
Speaker
intellectuals from Yale and elsewhere who give you arguments and have arguments from authority that you can then appeal to.
Escaping Echo Chambers
00:23:22
Speaker
I had that. And I remember that zeal. I looked back at that. And the only thing that helped me get away from that, well, there's two things. One was experience, being exposed to people with different experience from different fabrics of life.
00:23:42
Speaker
different countries, cities, moving to Oxford and just living with a lot of people from all over the world. That gave me this broad sense of whoa. So people really think differently. If they're from Spain, if they're from Australia, Canada, South Africa, they have a different kind of perspective because they had different experience being raised up that nature versus nurture debate, right? And secondly, what gave me a more broad perspective is reading.
00:24:10
Speaker
that I remember reading Peter Watson's Age of Atheists when I was 18 or so, one of the first kind of books on atheism that I read. And the book, the Age of Atheists, I think that's the American version. I think the British version is different. It summarizes the development of atheist thought from the Greco-Roman world to the 20th century and the new atheist, Richard Dawkins and all these guys.
00:24:41
Speaker
And I just remember being surprised with the breadth of what was going on, because as a Christian, I just thought, oh, atheism, this is this new strand of intellectualism in the 20th century that came as a result of all the evil and suffering in the world wars and people not being able to cope with it and not being able to believe in a benevolent creator. And so I took that as, okay, atheism, you know, the Albert Camus and the existentialists and how
00:25:11
Speaker
they experienced all this suffering and they went through depression. And so they were atheist. So that was my understanding of atheism as a Christian, which was just completely flawed. And then I read about the hundreds of intellectuals through all of the medieval world to the enlightenment and the Renaissance and how much really depth there was to atheism. And I remember being blown away. And so I think one of those things that can help people
00:25:40
Speaker
is one, you mentioned echo chambers, leaving the echo chamber, realizing that the algorithm on Facebook creates, literally creates, manufactures echo chambers, because that is what helps you stay on the platform. They need your attention, they're fighting for your attention. So they create, they push content that will outrage you so that you engage with it more. This is just the way the algorithm works, one of the ways it works. And
00:26:09
Speaker
realizing that, leaving the echo chamber. There's a reason these CEOs don't allow their kids on these platforms. So we should be reflect on that and take it personally. And secondly, is to read widely and have those conversations with people. There's research I quote by Robert Putnam, who is a Harvard political scientist.
Face-to-Face Interactions
00:26:35
Speaker
And he says, from the 1960s onwards, so the era of
00:26:39
Speaker
Nixon, and Thatcher later, so 60s, 70s. This era created, had weakening face to face interactions. And what we saw was more division. And I think that's what people really, that's what happens, you know, COVID started, there was so much polarization around, one, the Black Lives Matters protest, because that was happening around April 2020, May,
00:27:09
Speaker
around that time, and there was so much polarization because we weren't having face-to-face interactions about it, one of the reasons, right? And then when you really sat down with these people and you talked to any side of the political aisle, whoever was on it, and you said, oh, what's your view? I would often be actually, my breath would be taken away from me on how nuanced their view would be and how it wouldn't be straightforward, but on social media, they were represented as,
00:27:38
Speaker
Oh, you're not protesting. That means you're racist. And then in person, they'd be like, Oh, you know what? There's a lot of things going on. And it's difficult. And so that's just one example of how face to face interactions really help in, uh, in, um, Demystifying the opposition, creating nuance. So those two, I think read widely and experience, um,
00:28:05
Speaker
experience life, talk to people. And one of the things...
00:28:11
Speaker
One of the things I wanted to just chat with you a little bit about is Christianity. But in the sense, one of the things that, I want to tell you, one time I was astounded.
Aquinas and Philosophical Engagement
00:28:24
Speaker
So I ended up having a scholarship in studying philosophy at Marquette University, which is a Jesuit school. I had never been to a private university. I'm a city kid from out east. And I had to take Aquinas.
00:28:40
Speaker
And this intimidated me because when it came to the tradition, I was much more engaged and understood Plato more. I was baffled by Aristotle or had deep difficulty engaging with Aristotle.
00:28:57
Speaker
And when you get to Aquinas, which is the kind of the ideological patron saint of the Catholic Church, I had very, very narrow views about what I would encounter. But for me, it was a very dynamic process that stunned me. And by that, I mean
00:29:16
Speaker
I began to view the project that Aquinas was up with Aristotle, like rescuing Aristotle, the kind of like very earthbound, not up in the clouds like Plato was, him being brought into
00:29:31
Speaker
a Catholic philosophy where the natural push historically was always towards Plato. His ideas seemed easier to adapt to 1000 Christianity. The other pieces that I found astounding was that
00:29:47
Speaker
Aquinas was engaged with Muslim scholars, and not just engaged, he was openly writing about arguments of Avicenna and Averroes, the Western names of particular philosophers, engaged with them, seeing them as somebody as an interlocutor to talk about at the time that he's trying to bring this heathen Aristotle, this heathen Greek,
00:30:12
Speaker
into the annals of Christian thought, of Catholic thought, it blew my mind because it pointed to a dynamism that, yes, Aquinas's doctrine here at the end of the day. There's no doubt about that. He's arguing for the faith, but the dynamics of how he engaged is what astounded me in that it didn't feel like it, of course, historically ignored certain things, but it didn't ignore
00:30:42
Speaker
Muslim thinkers, it didn't ignore a philosopher Aristotle that everybody said, what are you trying to do to rehabilitate this guy? So I was shocked by the dynamism within it and it felt out of time. Do you think in some of the things you've encountered that there is that there historically with maybe some of the traditions? And if it was, is it still there or where did it go?
00:31:15
Speaker
Yeah, the connection, I think you're right, Thomas Aquinas did reintroduce rationality to Christian dogma. Plato and early Christianity had a lot of overlaps, and I think it was specifically Augustine of Hippo, who was another kind of patron of Roman Catholicism,
00:31:41
Speaker
He said that if it wasn't for these metaphysical things, like mainly belief in God, Platonists and Plato specifically are a straightforward adaptation of biblical doctrine. So a lot of Platonists he thought would be Christians if they were alive in the fourth century AD. So yeah, you're right, but a lot of Christians
00:32:09
Speaker
Augustine specifically, and all of those guys around his era, they detested reason because it was anathema to the faith that was needed from the Christian church. And Thomas Aquinas thought that, you know, he developed his five proofs for God. And he reintroduced Aristotle, who you're right, had a more materialist kind of understanding of
00:32:37
Speaker
events, whereas Plato is much more in the clouds. And Thomas Aquinas, yeah, introduced rationality to an extent that a lot of people were uncomfortable with, and he borrowed from Syriac and Arabic writings, because they were adopting Aristotle, where the medieval world abandoned him and focused primarily on Plato.
00:33:03
Speaker
But then afterwards, because of Aquinas, arguably, and other scholars at the time, the reasoning was introduced to the church and a lot of pluralism was held in Europe. The Reformation with Jan Hus from the Czech Republic, and then Martin Luther, Sebastian Castelio, John Calvin, and all these figures, they reintroduced this level of, you know, there should be debate over what is heresy.
00:33:33
Speaker
And other scholars, you know, there's a lot of conversation around this. Obviously, Susan Jacoby presents John Calvin and Martin Luther, I think rightly as totalitarian figures, and they were, they didn't allow for much diversity of thought. But I think that there were the seeds of pluralism, the seeds of rationality, the seeds of discussion. Martin Luther, for example, wasn't anti-Semite,
00:34:01
Speaker
but he wrote long treatises on his views. And, you know, one of them was on the Jews and their lives, a 65,000 word treatise, you know. So, and there were, I'm not a scholar in Protestant or medieval theology or philosophy, but from the readings that I've done,
00:34:26
Speaker
I think you're right, you know, rationality was introduced, and I think that we shouldn't discredit it, no matter who kind of introduced it. And, and yeah, I mean, from there, then we had the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. And so a lot of the pluralism that was introduced because of this, you know, Aquinas's five proofs, and all the
00:34:52
Speaker
of the scholar of the research that went around his work, we benefited from it for sure. And a lot of the thinkers like Descartes, who was Roman Catholic himself, benefited from it.
00:35:10
Speaker
So yeah, we should remember. I heard you talking recently, and sometimes it feels like ancient history, but I like some of your political examples over the past few decades about certain
Plato and Political Strategies
00:35:24
Speaker
issues. And I heard you talking about George W. Bush and the dynamics of the Iraq invasion and huge, huge catastrophic events, like world events that
00:35:34
Speaker
I don't seem kind of passé in our minds, but at the heart of the Bush piece, which was frustrating for me as a philosopher, I'm not sure about you, was the inner circle foreign policy introduction of concepts in Plato, of the noble lie, of a myth, of a myth that folks are formed in a certain way and they're going to move through society in a certain way, and that
00:36:05
Speaker
The elites, the men in general who are closer to knowledge, closer to maybe God or closer to the truth,
00:36:17
Speaker
be placed in the position to tell the commoners a noble lie, something that is false, something that is generally known to be false, and to create a myth around that, and to create political action, international action around that type of thing. Philosophers show up, and Latino shows up at discourse finally, and you take the shittiest part of their philosophy to push something.
00:36:50
Speaker
What's the role of introducing your political philosopher? What happens when we introduce philosophy to our thoughts, to our ideas, to our international policy? And that's a bad example. It's a good example and a bad example. What are your thoughts on that?
00:37:17
Speaker
a lot of things can happen. As you're saying, what tends to happen is sometimes people bring bad ideas from philosophers such as the Nobel lie or other ones. Let's not get into the details here. But with George W. Bush, also kind of a utilitarianism,
00:37:40
Speaker
And a lot of these foreign policy, a realist approach to international relations would advocate for a utilitarian strain of ethics, which just argues for the highest amount of good for the most number of people, which obviously can override the individual rights of civilians. And so I think the justification to go to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan,
00:38:09
Speaker
Afghanistan being the longest war that the US has engaged in, ending just now in the summer. You look back at them and they're really puzzling events. The justifications for going into them seem to be this mythification of pure evil that once again, this opposition is where these George W. Bush's whole cabinet at the time, the Oval Office in general,
00:38:38
Speaker
was adamantly Christian, fundamentalist, evangelical. These were people who were praying on Wednesdays or whenever it was for guidance, which is just another way to, you know, you re-invoke gut feeling as Joseph Heath has argued, for example. And you see that with his George W. Bush's just perspective on life. He would have a strong certainty. He's one of my examples of a persona
00:39:06
Speaker
that is harmful in a high position, such as the Oval Office, because you have that type of certainty, inability to second guess your views, you may be living a comfortable life or more comfortable, and you may justify invasions and drone strikes. But if you were really to reflect on your actions, you'd see, you know, maybe possibly all of this is, you know, the good bad distinction. Once again, maybe I'm
00:39:32
Speaker
Somewhere in the middle of zone. Maybe I'm not this good person that I see myself as maybe these drone strikes are completely uncalled for maybe our investments in in this part of the world are not Conducive towards any type of harmonious living that I masquerade under So so that's my you know this kind of foreign policy in general to talk about you know philosophy bringing
Philosophical Influences on Policy
00:40:02
Speaker
into foreign policy. I think what happens generally is that you can see overlaps between these harmful strains or not necessarily harmful, but in philosophy strains that you would criticize a lot like utilitarianism gets a lot of criticism. Peter Singer and other thinkers who are utilitarians, they get a lot of shit for their views. And you know, and then you have people like Barack Obama, I think he was
00:40:33
Speaker
a very good president and actually quite a good scholar, but it's hard to see him and justify his utilitarian position on foreign policy the way he acted towards the drone strikes, a lot of which seem to just be completely unnecessary.
00:40:54
Speaker
But you know complex topics and I think that people who are really engaged in politics would be able to talk Yeah, well, I have a I have a question for you and it's it's it's on it's on the just the the idea of rationality and And one of the pieces in thinking about some of the things you said because it prompts a lot of thought in my head For me I've had a history in studying philosophy of
00:41:24
Speaker
choosing the annoying philosophers, being gravitating towards the annoying philosophers. And by that I mean your Nietzsche's and your Kierkegaard and the existentialist yes of Hume, arguments cutting against
00:41:45
Speaker
typical notions of causality. And, you know, I've studied these in the institution a lot at the university and have developed close intellectual relationships with Sun and just unnerved others. There's this sense if you are, so I adore Kierkegaard. I am agnostic. I am
00:42:10
Speaker
I connect strongly to the personage of Jesus Christ, but I have no connection, no heart feeling, no rational feeling towards the higher up. There's this sense when you connect with these folks.
00:42:28
Speaker
It might be emotional, it might be intuitive, it might be aesthetic, it might be Nietzsche talking about the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus. There's this sense that you're a lazy philosopher and you're doing it wrong because of the dominance of rational thought.
00:42:49
Speaker
What is the status of philosophers like this who are more antagonistic to the way that you're supposed to do philosophy or what's perceived to be the way you're supposed to do philosophy, maybe even exemplified perfectly by Aquinas, the conclusions at the end. Here's God, here's how, and I've knocked away all interlocutors and questioners. So what are the role of philosophers like this?
00:43:22
Speaker
I think you're right in your observation about how the elite institutions, they tend to be very dismissive towards philosophers who are kind of unorthodox. So Kierkegaard would be one example. Nietzsche, another one that comes to mind is Albert Camus or Aldous Huxley. Aldous Huxley would probably be a perfect example of this.
00:43:50
Speaker
talked a lot about psychedelics, doors of perception, and he was a very equipped thinker but didn't really gain mainstream precedence in the academia because I think they don't engage with the
Philosophy's Practical Engagement
00:44:06
Speaker
topics or with kind of a progressive philosophy
00:44:12
Speaker
touching on the thinking of the day and kind of trying to expand on that which thinkers like robert nozick and thomas nagle were doing in political philosophy but i've read all these guys and they have long arguments the reading uh... their their literature is at times very difficult you have to have a vocabulary for what's going on so there has to be a commentary you can't just you can't just start reading thomas nagles political philosophy and
00:44:41
Speaker
for the average person and really make sense of anything that he's going for. So I think they tend to be dismissive towards these thinkers because they're not really discussing what they want to be talking about. They're not really talking about the edges of academic philosophy, where they're pushing the limits on what is accepted of the day. So to use one example,
00:45:13
Speaker
Let's, let's see here. Um, I wouldn't want to get too much into philosophy here, but, but yeah, Wittgenstein is, is an example of someone who was an unorthodox thinker. I was reading some biographies on him the other day and I kind of became semi obsessed because I couldn't understand him at all at college.
00:45:37
Speaker
or at uni. I just was reading, I have no idea what this person is on about these logical positivists, what their new language meant for philosophers and how language dilutes in general. And they need this new language because they need to talk about facts objectively. And I just couldn't understand that as a, when I was in the uni, I could understand like vaguely the sense of, okay, where this is coming from Bertrand Russell talking about how
00:46:05
Speaker
There's a table in the room and how everyone sees this table differently. To what extent does this table exist? But to me, all these discussions are just kind of irrelevant because you go outside, you go to your part time job or you go talk to your parents and siblings and your roommates and you're like, this is just, this is just not what people are ever talking about. This is, is this rationality? Is this what it means to be a thinker?
00:46:33
Speaker
to be the most equipped thinker, right? Because philosophers and people, members of the humanities, these are the people who are the most equipped. These are the full-time thinkers of our day. If you're a philosopher professor, you are the full-time thinker of our day. You're employed to think and push the boundaries of knowledge. And what you come up with is whether
00:46:57
Speaker
Table is written. That's obviously really diluting their philosophy. I think When it comes to metaphysics, it's just not that interesting to me because of this because people really obsess over over these details and this these intricacies I Think that moral philosophy is a little more interesting political philosophy I think is quite interesting but also can be a
00:47:23
Speaker
a little disheartening because of the vocabulary that you need in order to access it. So, so in general, I have I have these problems with now I've graduated, I switched my major from philosophy to political science, actually, just because of this, I just I just thought that political science would have me more engaged. I did that in my last year at uni. So I had to take more classes for for this.
00:47:49
Speaker
But I thought that political science and I had an emphasis in political theory, so I was dabbling more with political philosophy. I found myself to be more engaged with reality, talking about freedoms and the rights of citizens and topics like should vaccines be mandatory, the principle of harm that John Stuart Mill talked about. I thought these were much more fruitful to actual events going on for the average layperson. And I thought that I could
00:48:19
Speaker
represent their interests or talk about things that they thought about, but in a more academic way for them, rather than just engaging with this new logic meant for
00:48:34
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and Jacob, you mentioned Wittgenstein and I've expressed to you, I share an obsession with them.
Wittgenstein's Impact
00:48:43
Speaker
And I think one of the things I wanted to say for me is I almost can't, me as a reader, as a thinker, I can't quite
00:48:55
Speaker
get it all with Wittgenstein, but I'm actually fascinated by some of the surrounding pieces of what somebody as a philosopher is going to try. So somebody's not trained in philosophy in the slightest, like Wittgenstein was not trained in the slightest by anybody. And then he was at Cambridge and then he was telling Russell how he was wrong. And I think Wittgenstein was right. He was
00:49:20
Speaker
He was gay. He did other things. He was an architect. He served in the army. He had many different types of patents that he did. And he made the fundamental thing that any philosopher would tell you never to do when he kind of got to the point where he couldn't explain anymore. He would draw pictures.
00:49:42
Speaker
And I think I was told day one in philosophy, if a philosopher is picking up a pen and starts sketching a drawing, they're done. One piece I enjoyed about Wittgenstein is he figured out, he thought he figured out language or acquisition of language and what it does to young thinkers. And so he wanted to go to up in Austria mountains and he taught kindergarten.
00:50:10
Speaker
from the hallowed university and went for two years to teach kindergarten to say, well, I think I'm right. Wittgenstein was ill-equipped to deal with young children who could not understand a single thing he was saying, and he was run out of town. He's almost an example of that kind of idiosyncratic, where do they fit in,
00:50:33
Speaker
uh hot why do you even do you know what what you do um and it was kind of the shock of vikenstein that i haven't got you know beyond i mean i've read his philosophy but it's kind of that shocking in bit that i think you find in the existentialist the antagonism the the shaking of thought but again
00:50:55
Speaker
At times, what do you do with it? I think some of those questions that you point to, which can get stale for people, are why are we discussing the table? There's rockets exploding outside, this practical political philosophy where folks say, yeah, it's important.
Philosophy in Today's Society
00:51:19
Speaker
but I need to go somewhere else. Do you feel yourself, describe yourself moving towards that political philosophy. Do you think that's where the rubber hits the road for philosophy in 2021? Yeah, a lot of scientists, a lot of thinkers, theologians, for example, think that
00:51:45
Speaker
The philosophy is at its end. Scientist Lawrence Krauss has expressed his distaste for a lot of philosophy, philosophy science specifically. I think that philosophy just as an academic discipline, I don't see it moving forward. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens and other awesome, really great books. He has, for example, said that philosophers will be one of the last professions that will be automated.
00:52:13
Speaker
And I don't know if I completely agree with that because I think that philosophers as a profession are needlessly tedious and convoluted. I think that a lot of the broad understanding of what philosophers are going at can be understood by regular people and the humanities and that we don't really need academic philosophers
00:52:38
Speaker
that much at this present moment. I think their work they're doing is for themselves, for their colleagues and all this. I think so personally, I don't see philosophy with rare exceptions. I think that epistemology could have some awakening here in the 21st century with all the misinformation. But once again, you look at epistemologists who are traditionally in academia, they're not really engaging with
00:53:08
Speaker
the public's problems, misinformation on social media, for example. They're still talking about the gettier problem, how to justify true belief and all these things that, just frankly, it's hard to bring up in a conversation without sounding completely oblivious to what's going on. And I know, even in writing this book, philosophers will probably, they would rip me to shreds in a lot of this.
00:53:38
Speaker
And I think that's warranted, you know, you look at the way academia has treated a lot of people who are engaging with the public, like C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, Richard Feynman, you know, science popularizers, but even, you know, John Lennox and others. There's always this sense of, you know, Richard Dawkins, you're you're writing a book for the public about God, you know, God delusion.
00:54:05
Speaker
And he was torn to shreds of that book. And so I pick up the book and I try to read it and I'm like, no, this is a, this is a good book. Sure. There's a lot of stuff that's untouched, but that's how you write books. You can't touch on everything. You're not going to appease the whole audience. There's, there's always going to be something.
Philosophy and Public Discourse
00:54:22
Speaker
This book would be endless. It would be eight volumes. If we would take ourselves philosophically, um, seriously.
00:54:32
Speaker
that's the point is that these philosophers they do take themselves so seriously so they rarely publish things that are diluted because there's no point to it for them yeah and i appreciate that too but let me let me let me let me be uh let me be the armchair philosopher here and say okay here's what i think is going to happen jacob i think if you talk to a philosopher what's happening now they're going to say
00:54:56
Speaker
Yeah, there's a bunch of bullshit on social media. People aren't arguing properly. They're not creating any foundation for the belief system. And probably academic philosophy or philosophers in general are going to have an inclination to the public, speaking separately and saying, you're doing it all wrong. And there's something I sympathize with that as far as how discourse is supposed to happen without interposing
00:55:24
Speaker
academic philosophy. What do you say to the philosophers sitting there being like, look, there are ways to interact, debate, and engage in discourse. You're not following any of those United States citizen. And if we did, we'd have better conversations. What do you say to that? I think there's a place for it. And I would actually be very willing to listen to that. I think Robert Nozick is a perfect example of someone who
00:55:54
Speaker
often would say that he doesn't know and often he would listen to feedback from his students on his positions, but then you have other people like Bertrand Russell, we talked about him before, who was very not sympathetic to feedback apart from rare exceptions like Wittgenstein, he would sometimes listen to him, who he thought he was a very gifted student, but
00:56:20
Speaker
Overall, Russell and other philosophers like him in the 20th century were very snobbish towards the public. They actually didn't think it was worth talking to the public. Some of them didn't think that uneducated people have the right to vote. For example, they were against democracy as Plato was because of the potential for demagoguery populism. So I think that
00:56:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think that a lot of philosophers can, they are that way, but a lot of philosophers are actually very elitist. And I get that sense just from being a student with a lot of philosophy professors. Sadly, a lot of the times their perspective was that of kind of this snobbish elitist attitude. But if they are representing, I think Jonathan Haidt did some interesting research on this. He's a cognitive psychologist.
00:57:19
Speaker
And he was quoting someone, I forget who it was now, but there was some research on moral philosophers and how there were studies on whether moral philosophers behaved better than philosophers in general and academics. And I think the statistic was that moral philosophers universally do not answer emails, respond to phone calls,
00:57:44
Speaker
clean up after themselves, after conferences more than other philosophers. And there are more there, but then they don't even do that more than other academics. And so you think that, okay, you're talking about philosophy for four decades, moral philosophy specifically, and you're not behaving better than people who never talked about moral philosophy.
00:58:07
Speaker
Um, so, so that's my, and, and Jonathan Heights conclusion from that was that there's no way to design an ethics class that will make others behave better. We're just not that way. And I think I agree with that. It's like, yeah, yeah. And thanks for that. I, um, I, you know, so on the, on the podcast itself, you know, here I've, I've, you know, uh,
00:58:30
Speaker
It's philosophy, but I've always known that by talking to creators and many times, not from a philosophical tradition or such, that
00:58:45
Speaker
The undergirding of the project is popular philosophy is to engage in questions and maybe engage in them Different different way and inside as a trained academic philosopher. I feel that That tension but I've always felt that this is where the philosophy is and I think when you look at some of the elite elitism and exclusion which is
00:59:12
Speaker
so conspicuous in philosophy as white male and really not changed or not changed in a way you think over time of indigenous philosophers or how you engage in discourse that way.
00:59:28
Speaker
You know, I think over the last 20, 30 years, you've seen the emergence of philosophers like, you know, bell hooks and, you know, kind of recognize philosophers and diverse philosophers. But, you know, it's it's a very white male field. And I think when you talk about philosophy and you open it up and you kick it around and you ask, you know, what is art in these type of questions, it opens up for some of the things
00:59:56
Speaker
for me and for the person I'm talking to of honestly getting a philosophical answer in a way that I don't need the answer the right way. You know what I mean? And I don't know that right way. What happens, do you think, what do you think happens when you talk with folks
01:00:19
Speaker
in a philosophical way, not standard academic philosophical way, and engage them that way. Is that something intuitive for folks? Do they like to do that? Is that part of their makeup? I think people are very nuanced. I think people do respond. Everyone has natural inclinations towards thinking about right and wrong.
01:00:45
Speaker
and towards thinking about whether a God exists or, you know, what's the conception of time? What's her relation to society? What's her rights and freedoms? How do they exist? Is slavery wrong? And we talk about all these things with the vaccine mandates, you know, to what extent should my freedoms trump the freedoms of others? And do I have a responsibility to protect the collective or is the individual? Everyone thinks about these things.
01:01:13
Speaker
That is philosophy for the masses. And I think, you know, some of the interest in religion is because of that. A lot of people are religious all over the world. I think it's probably more likely to be religious if you're born randomly than to be secular. Although I wouldn't know specifically about the statistics, but my intuitions say that that's likely the truth. And I think some of that is, you know, the churches, specifically evangelicalism are philosophy for the masses, I feel like.
Modern Philosophical Interest Resurgence
01:01:43
Speaker
You know, you talk about sacrifice, the importance of postponing delayed gratification and all these. And I think this is, you know, the Stoics, there's huge overlap between Stoics and Christian thought. And Stoicism is getting a big resurgence nowadays with writers like Ryan Holiday, or like how to think like a Roman emperor and all these people have a hunger for knowledge. They have a hunger for placing themselves rightly.
01:02:11
Speaker
in the world. Jordan Peterson, huge example of this massive popularity, almost rock star popularity in the States. And he combines a lot of Nietzsche. He takes in a lot of Nietzsche. He takes in a lot of Jung, a lot of psychoanalysis into his writing, into his speeches. And I think one of the reasons why he's so popular is that people didn't really do that
01:02:40
Speaker
at such a grand scale. Academics were very much in their ivory towers and sometimes had people branching out, Bertrand Russell, but even Bertrand Russell's branching out did not seem as genuine as someone like Peterson or someone like Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience, has a philosophy background from Stanford, his undergraduate degree.
01:03:09
Speaker
and has spent long years meditating, engaging with Eastern philosophy. And he is quite popular. And so, you know, the Steven Pinkers of the world, the Robert Sapolsky of the world, there is a huge resurgence for knowledge. And so that's why I'm not doomsday about the place of philosophy. I think that this type of philosophy, the surface, the scratching of the surface philosophy,
01:03:38
Speaker
That stuff is necessary for the public. Everyone is going to think about these questions. Academic philosophy, I find, is a little more tedious. It gets a little too bottled down into the nitty gritty words and premises and conclusions. And yes, I think there's nice to have that kind of formatting, as you were mentioning before. But I think that people
01:04:06
Speaker
want to engage with things that are simpler, presented in a simple way. And I think that's how we communicate. So it makes sense that that's how we want ideas to pop out from pen and paper.
01:04:18
Speaker
Thank you. We're talking to Jacob forensic and, uh, Hey, Jacob, I think you're our, uh, I think you're my studio philosopher. I'll keep pulling you in here as we like, you know, really, really, really, really expand out. Um, I wanted to mention something curious little thing. Um, I'm thinking about political philosophy and, and, and talking about things and, and having brought up, uh, Wittgenstein for me, I've always found that, um,
01:04:44
Speaker
I like what Karl Popper does in Open Society and its enemies. I've been critical of what I think is a misread at times of Marx and Plato, but I think what Popper's primary objective there is to say, there are these type of thoughts that create an absolutism. You'll find it in Plato, but you'll even find it in Marx, where
01:05:11
Speaker
in the theory of historical materialism, this is where the world is going. This is science, feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism, that there's this absolutism to it. And I find it's just so curious because when you look at Popper and you look at Wittgenstein, two very different philosophers, you also come to the point of Wittgenstein's poker, a book about the confrontation between these two where
01:05:42
Speaker
Wittgenstein threatened Popper with the poker. I see so much philosophy behind that strange collision. For me, it's almost an analogy or a real-life event that has to do around a lot of the political questions or the methodologies
01:06:06
Speaker
between the two. And I know I brought up a pauper before, but do you have a problem or do you see that critique of philosophy in the sense of the universality that it presents? And you talked about Christianity as well. If you have an answer, if Jesus Christ is the truth,
01:06:32
Speaker
If Aquinas's structure about Roman Catholicism and why God exists is the truth, are those things possible and is it right for Popper to take swings or anybody to take swings at that if that is there, the absolutism? I think
Universal Truths vs. Nuanced Understanding
01:06:57
Speaker
This is the crux, honestly, of the mission of philosophy, is the human tendency for needing universals. It was just the way for all of history. You had to have universals because we were living on this planet.
01:07:20
Speaker
with social customs, needs, desires, fears, thunder, hunger, plagues, there was a need to explain. And how do you explain? You have to explain with some kind of certainty. And that was universality. So religions came as a result of this. And I think even more so Francis Fukuyama has argued, for example, that religion also came for the need for political order and
01:07:49
Speaker
having kind of social organization. I agree with that feudalism and the monarch, for example, divine rights of kings, that kind of universality, having overreach over the peasants, the people by having noble blood and having a right to rule on behalf of God with the Pope.
01:08:10
Speaker
So I think universality is entrenched deeply in history. That was what was going on for centuries and prophets were, you know, spoke into this. But one needs to remember that literacy was non-existent up until fairly recently on the
01:08:29
Speaker
on kind of a historical scale. It was not until 400 years ago that literacy was being introduced to the public with the invention of the printing press. So before it was easy to universalize morality, relatively easy, because you would just present some sort of capital punishment you would have against minor offenses like stealing cabbage, there would be pretty serious ramifications, cutting off your arm, for example.
01:08:58
Speaker
Public hangings were readily available for citizens. Kids would watch public hangings. And that was once again, that needs to enforce a morality and colonialism, slavery, the European Western philosophical message. That was that of universality.
01:09:26
Speaker
And that was spread to, as we all know, to all over the globe, to the Indigenous tribes in Australia, to the First Nations Canada, Native Americans, Indigenous populations. This was all over the place. And what was spread to them? It was the good news that was spread to them.
01:09:47
Speaker
because there was zeal and universality. And I think the 20th century really is a theater in the limits of this message of universality. So I think for all of history, universality was being tested. And then when you democratize knowledge,
01:10:05
Speaker
then you had people still having kind of remnants of universality being spread to America, but you saw more and more revolutions in Europe against Tsarist monarchies
01:10:22
Speaker
you had revolutions against the Habsburg Empire, and the First World War was basically that. It was revolutions against the monarchs, and almost all monarchies fell in Europe after the First World War. And then World War II came, and who were the leaders of the war? It was Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini and Churchill, who was opposing the universality
01:10:48
Speaker
and the one-sided reinterpretation of history that Hitler had, for example. And so that was the ultimate test. And then after you had a huge reaction to the Marxism and the Nazism of the day by the postmodernists and the relativists and then the intuitionists and the psychologists
01:11:12
Speaker
the cognitive psychologists who argued that intuitions are really at play in almost all of our decision making and we should take ourselves less seriously. So I think honestly looking at history, I think universality, the need to express things in a certain way is at the crux of history. And all of history can be kind of glanced at from that perspective.
01:11:42
Speaker
And now we're living in this kind of era of, I wouldn't call it an era of post-truth. I would call it an era of nuance. Things are complex. And we've tried the theater of the 20th century. There's been a huge attempt at establishing universals.
01:12:03
Speaker
in a way, you know, on a scale that no one has ever seen in the USSR, for example. But even in American, as the USA is the hegemony of the world, we saw, was everything going well? I don't think so. The Vietnam War was justified by the states, all the Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, invasions were justified by the USA. There were a lot of horrors committed
01:12:32
Speaker
by the states when the good guys were the hegemony. So we saw everything happen. And so that's why I believe that universality has been tried. And I think we need situated truths. People are going to defer fundamentally. And a lot of thinkers like Sam Harris have been getting into this. Is capital punishment OK in Somalia, Saudi Arabia,
01:13:00
Speaker
Is homophobia okay in those countries versus there needs to be a morally binding agreement? And I think yes, generally on those questions, this is the case. We need morally binding agreements. Some things are just wrong just because they're wrong, such as slavery. You don't need much argument against it. They're self-evident truths.
01:13:23
Speaker
But there are a lot of things that need intricate analysis and we're just not going to agree on. And I think France Fukuyama has argued that democracy in Afghanistan is probably not going to work because they have this long lineage of tribal overlords and democracy has, it's been tried. It's been tried by the Russians. Now it's been tried by the Americans. It's been tried by the British, by the French.
01:13:51
Speaker
And it's probably not gonna work, they need something else. And so I need, I think I am a fan, and that's my last argument of this book, is my last chapter, The Last Blow to Objectivity, the title of it. This is where I go pretty deep into some of the philosophy around objectivity, quoting Thomas Nagel's work in The Last Word and others, I talk about the hijab specifically.
01:14:18
Speaker
And yeah, I see the solution is to say that we need situated truths and we've overestimated universality and we need to get rid of it. Thank you so much for the discussion.
Influential Philosophical Works
01:14:33
Speaker
I mean, for me, I'm engaged in a lot of things you're thinking about. And one of the things I wanted to do a little bit that might be curious is just mention at the end here,
01:14:47
Speaker
some of the things that I was referring to. I think a lot of this discussion has been informed on things that I've encountered, and just for readers who might be looking at thinking about connecting with philosophers that have been influential for me. Again, St. Thomas Aquinas that I referred to on Being in Essence, Aristotle, of course, as many works by Aristotle, I find
01:15:16
Speaker
I've always found myself being able to, because Plato in my opinion is such a brilliant writer and I adore brilliant writing, he wins me over and I get carried along by him. Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is a two-volume
01:15:33
Speaker
argument against what he calls historicism or an absolutism about what's going to happen in society and how humans respond to when they believe they have the truth. Søren Kierkegaard, fear and trembling, the concept of anxiety.
01:15:52
Speaker
Nietzsche, the birth of tragedy for art in the Apollonian and Dionysian, thus spoke Zarathustra. And one piece I'd mention were the Islamic commentators around Aristotle in Aquinas, Avicenna, Verroes. And as you point out, Jacob,
01:16:20
Speaker
that engagement with Aristotle in that tradition. I mentioned some of these things because I was sticking to the idea of even on the internet, like what ideas are our own and how are we influenced? I love to be able to talk about the things that I've learned and the things that have been informed me. I appreciate your writing, Jacob. I appreciate your thinking and
01:16:50
Speaker
uh trying to stick up for nuance in doubt nowadays is uh
01:16:57
Speaker
not a particularly popular place to stake out. I feel like I try to stake it out a lot and I want to thank you and I just wanted to open up maybe a similar type of thing. I'm interested in the books you encountered, just books, books per se and books that have engaged your thought. I wonder if you could lead us some of the things that you have referenced and mentioned that have been important for you in the development of your thought.
01:17:28
Speaker
Well, all of your examples were great books, great writers. I think they've influenced society and moved us forward. I would add some more footnotes with perhaps some contemporary writers that people could be interested in. Kenan Malik, I think, is just an incredible thinker. He's written one book in particular that I've benefited from, The Quest of a Moral Compass.
01:17:57
Speaker
I love his work. I would further recommend Jonathan Haidt. His book, The Righteous Mind was very influential on me. Bobby Duffy, why we're wrong about nearly everything. I believe the title of that book is Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0, Restoring Sanity into Politics and Everyday Life. I believe the title is
01:18:26
Speaker
Um, books like that, I think, you know, anything related to David, uh, David Leviton, um, and, and this type of kind of intuitions, uh, one book actually, Julia Galif, uh, the scout mindset, fantastic book, Adam Grant, think again, a lot of people are writing books on the need for nuance actually. And you're right. It's a very unpopular position.
01:18:54
Speaker
And that's why a lot of people have been saying, hey, you got to think again. You got to have a scout mindset. There needs to be a new enlightenment, Enlightenment 2.0. We're wrong about nearly everything. And this is a perspective that we should take. We should think slow versus think fast, to quote Daniel Kahneman. So those are some recommendations.
01:19:18
Speaker
I recommend it on top of your recommendations. Thank you so much, Jacob. I find it a deep pleasure to be able to connect with you, our minds to be able to connect and have this discussion. Sometimes it's tough to have philosophical discussions, but we can range and we can talk. I really appreciate your time because
01:19:43
Speaker
When I've heard you're on the podcast and you've been here before and just also seeing things you post and things that influence you, I find them very valuable because it's connecting with the mind who has some of the same questions, some of the same doubts.
01:19:58
Speaker
about how we've learned or what we learned. And even for yourself, it's a very humbling thing to say about your background with Christian thought and some aspects of absolutism and saying,
01:20:14
Speaker
That's how I thought then. I'm a growing, thinking, you know, person, and we all are. And this is what I think now. And here's some of the reservations about what I had before. Doing that is difficult because I think we generally want to be right. We want to repeat the same type of things. We want to show
01:20:41
Speaker
that we've encountered some truth. And if we haven't, we got to kind of have to say, we haven't found it yet. And that's, for me, that's philosophy. So I got to thank you so much, Jacob. Any final thoughts? If you could let folks know how to find your work, I'm going to open it up to you before we close out.
01:21:06
Speaker
Well, I appreciate first and foremost the kind words and it's always a pleasure. Likewise, you know, connecting and talking. I find you also very well read in these topics. So it's very rare for me to have actually a dialogue outside of the academic setting, you know, where someone has this kind of breadth of knowledge on these philosophical issues and can quote Thomas Aquinas, et cetera.
01:21:31
Speaker
But so yeah, it's been a real pleasure always is hopefully we'll be able to do another conversation in the future and social media Jacob forensic official Jacob dot forensic And and I guess I have a blog Jacob forensic on medium I'm on Twitter under that title So and my books are on Amazon up in the air and beyond reason
01:21:58
Speaker
So yeah, those are the platforms. Thank you so much, Jacob. And everybody, check out Jacob's books, check out his material, and even check out some of the philosophy we brought up. We've just scratched the surface, you know, on thought. But part of it is just kind of put some ideas out there, some things, ways of thinking about things that
01:22:20
Speaker
goodness gracious at the basis of it I think people are hungry for thinking and for new thought because the old world's dying or dying or just withering and I think people looking for some fresh fruit I think the dead Kennedy said fresh fruit for rotting vegetables and let's keep looking let's keep looking for fresh fruit Jacob thank you so much brother hope to talk to you again soon
01:22:50
Speaker
It's been a real pleasure Thank you This is something rather than nothing