Podcasts about David Hume

If God exists and Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity is true. Case closed! However, there are still those who offer alternative explanations for the empty tomb despite the evidence for the resurrection. What are these theories and do they withstand critical analysis?This week, Frank sits down with Dr. Gary Habermas, the world's leading resurrection scholar to discuss, 'On the Resurrection: Refutations', the second volume of his magnum opus--a massive 4-volume project nearly 40 years in the making. From second-century texts that seem to challenge the resurrection to modern skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman, Gary will uncover why naturalistic explanations for the empty tomb simply don't hold up. Tune in as Frank and Gary answer questions like:Who was David Hume and why do so many modern atheists still lean on his centuries-old arguments?What was Hume's actual argument against miracles, and how did C.S. Lewis respond?Are there any good arguments for naturalism or materialism?Why did former skeptic Antony Flew become a theist before he died?What are the top 5 reasons naturalistic explanations for the resurrection fail?What are the 4 best arguments in favor of an afterlife?If you're looking for the most well-researched scholarship to refute common resurrection objections, you won't find a better resource than this! Be sure to pick up your own copies of Gary's amazing work and stay tuned for the next podcast where he'll return to discuss even more insights from his life's work on the resurrection!Resources mentioned during the episode:PODCAST: Did Jesus REALLY Rise From the Dead? - https://bit.ly/3VnrtiDOn the Resurrection: Evidences (Vol.1) - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1087778603On the Resurrection: Refutations (Vol.2) - https://a.co/d/48jozEvOn the Resurrection: Scholarly Perspectives (Vol.3) - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1087778646Gary's website - https://www.garyhabermas.com/There is a God by Antony Flew - https://a.co/d/eOhWkSTSignature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer - https://a.co/d/5XLmVhc

In this episode of Transfigured, I sit down with Dr. Jim to delve into a range of pressing intellectual and spiritual topics. We explore his recent writings on his Substack, "Around the Corner," his perspective on the "re-enchantment" narrative currently popular in some online spaces, and a critical engagement with modernism. Using Carlos Eire's book "They Flew" (about the levitating St. Joseph of Cupertino) as a springboard, we discuss the nature of evidence, the moral responsibilities tied to metaphysical claims, and the vital role of institutions (like those in science, medicine, and education) in fostering self-correction and upholding human values. Dr. Jim shares his thoughts on the "scientific image" versus the "manifest image," the limitations of evolutionary biology's common framing, and why he considers himself a "reactionary modern," wary of prematurely discarding the hard-won insights of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism. Join us for a deep and nuanced conversation! We mention Dr. Jim, Sam (Transfigured), David Bentley Hart, Paul Vander Klay, Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, Carlos Eire ("They Flew"), St. Joseph of Cupertino, Ross Douthat, Bart Ehrman, David Hume, Sam Harris, Wilfrid Sellars (Scientific Image vs. Manifest Image), Richard Dawkins, Bach, Mozart, Galileo, Michael Servetus, John Calvin, Rod Dreher, Bethel McGrew, Benjamin Boyce, Jesus Christ, Hermes, Chad (the Alcoholic), Julian, Aristotle (Four Causes), and more.Dr. Jim's Substack "Around the Corner": https://substack.com/@aroundthecorner1Midwest Apologetics Conference (August 22-24, Chicago, IL): https://www.midwestuary.com/Email for scholarship inquiries: info@midwestuary.com

The 18th-century philosopher David Hume famously predicted that, as the world grew more rational and scientific, people would stop having supernatural encounters.But that's not what has played out.We might live in a secular age, but we continue to have seemingly divine experiences.Lots of people now describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, but taking that next step - that leap of faith - into a formal belief system might actually be more rational than not.(00:00) - - Intro (00:51) - - Modern miracles (05:56) - - Ross Douthat: Columnist and podcaster (07:10) - - The Decadent Society (12:11) - - Secular regrets (19:33) - - The Logos of creation (38:42) - - The Pathos of near-death experiences (45:08) - - Buff Dickson's near-death experience (50:35) - - More miracles (58:50) - - Join a religion - any religion! (01:10:04) - - The three problems with religion (01:17:19) - - Why believe in Jesus? CREDITSUndeceptions is hosted by John Dickson, produced by Kaley Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Alasdair Belling is a writer-researcher.Siobhan McGuiness is our online librarian. Lyndie Leviston remains John's wonderful assistant.  Santino Dimarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant. Editing by Richard Hamwi.Our voice actors today was Yannick Lawry. Special thanks to our series sponsor Zondervan for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com - letting the truth out.

You've done the coaching and the therapy, you've read the books, you've listened to the podcasts - and finally, you can accept that you're just as worthy as the next person! You belong here! You can stand up, take up space, and be proud! You can stop carrying all that anxiety, fear, and shame! Except ... nobody told your anxiety, fear, and shame. You feel just as uncertain as you ever did. And, to make things worse, you now also feel like an irrational mess, because if all those insights you've made about yourself haven't made any difference, perhaps you're beyond help? Don't worry, friend. We've all been there. Your imperfect friend here is throwing you a lifeline in the shape of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. Weird image, but still: you're normal, you're still moving forward, and all you need is a primer on what's going on when what you believe clashes with what you feel.Reference:Hume, David. 1739: A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Section III.

In this episode, we delve into one of the most profound and contested questions in both philosophy and esotericism: What is the self in magical practice?Drawing on thinkers such as René Descartes, David Hume, and Carl Jung, we examine how the self has been variously conceived as a rational substance, a bundle of perceptions, or an archetypal totality. We then explore how these models intersect with key esoteric frameworks, from Aleister Crowley's doctrine of the True Will and the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, to the layered soul of Hermetic Qabalah, and the radically performative self of chaos magic.Is the magical self unified, fragmented, performative, or transcendent? And how do different traditions answer this question through their rituals, symbols, and spiritual technologies?Join me as we explore the shifting boundaries between self, soul, and sorcery.CONNECT & SUPPORT

We talk a bit more about David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), and add some parts of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739): sec. 3 "Of the Influencing Motives of the Will" within the third part of Book II, "Of the Passions," and the first two sections of Book III, "Of Morals." Can reason by itself motivate moral action? Hume says no: All ethical reasons must point ultimately to sentiments, which we can generalize about, but which are epistemically basic. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.

The Trump White House has enacted tariffs in the belief that other countries are “cheating” by enacting tariffs against US goods and “manipulating” their currencies. However, with the US dollar being the world's reserve currency, the US has engaged in dollar manipulation through inflation.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/mmt-and-us-history-redefining-chartalism

The Trump White House has enacted tariffs in the belief that other countries are “cheating” by enacting tariffs against US goods and “manipulating” their currencies. However, with the US dollar being the world's reserve currency, the US has engaged in dollar manipulation through inflation.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/mmt-and-us-history-redefining-chartalism

¿Es posible que las leyes de la naturaleza no sean necesarias? ¿Qué pasaría si todo lo que creemos estable pudiera cambiar de forma radical, sin ninguna razón? En este video exploramos en profundidad el capítulo "El problema de Hume" del libro Después de la finitud del filósofo francés Quentin Meillassoux. A partir de la crítica clásica de David Hume a la causalidad, Meillassoux propone una tesis filosófica radical: no hay necesidad alguna en el universo, y la única necesidad absoluta es la contingencia misma.

In this enlightening episode of Consider the Constitution, host Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey sits down with Dr. Dennis Rasmussen, professor of political science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Their conversation explores the philosophical underpinnings that influenced the creation of the U.S. Constitution, particularly focusing on Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu whose ideas shaped the framers' thinking.Dr. Rasmussen, author of "Fears of a Setting Sun," provides fascinating insights into how the founders – particularly Madison – navigated between theory and practical application when designing America's system of government. The discussion reveals surprising details about Madison's disappointment with certain aspects of the Constitution, the founders' evolving opinions about their creation, and the remarkable durability of America's founding document despite its imperfections. This episode offers listeners a deeper understanding of the intellectual foundations of American constitutional governance and reflects on what lessons we might draw from the founders' experiences as we face today's political challenges.

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell, it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their contributions to concepts of religious tolerance, free speech, and rationality. In our conversation, Bell addresses criticisms of the Enlightenment, including its complicated relationship with colonialism and slavery, while arguing that its principles of freedom and reason remain relevant today. 5 Key Takeaways* The Enlightenment emerged in the early 18th century (around 1720s) and was characterized by intellectual inquiry, skepticism toward religion, and a growing sense among thinkers that they were living in an "enlightened century."* While Paris was the central hub, the Enlightenment had multiple centers including Scotland, Germany, and America, with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Franklin contributing to its development.* The Enlightenment introduced the concept of "society" as a sphere of human existence separate from religion and politics, forming the basis of modern social sciences.* The movement had a complex relationship with colonialism and slavery - many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, but some of their ideas about human progress were later used to justify imperialism.* According to Bell, rather than trying to "return to the Enlightenment," modern society should selectively adopt and adapt its valuable principles of free speech, religious tolerance, and education to create our "own Enlightenment."David Avrom Bell is a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. His most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here. Bell is also the author of six previous books. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of his publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. His Substack newsletter can be found here. His writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese. At the History Department at Princeton University, he holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offers courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, he spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Bell's new project is a history of the Enlightenment. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History. Another is now out in French History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, in these supposedly dark times, the E word comes up a lot, the Enlightenment. Are we at the end of the Enlightenment or the beginning? Was there even an Enlightenment? My guest today, David Bell, a professor of history, very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, has an interesting piece in the spring issue of It is One of our, our favorite quarterlies here on Keen on America, Bell's piece is The Enlightenment Then and Now, and David is joining us from the home of the Enlightenment, perhaps Paris in France, where he's on sabbatical hard life. David being an academic these days, isn't it?David Bell: Very difficult. I'm having to suffer the Parisian bread and croissant. It's terrible.Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I won't keep you too long. Is Paris then, or France? Is it the home of the Enlightenment? I know there are many Enlightenments, the French, the Scottish, maybe even the English, perhaps even the American.David Bell: It's certainly one of the homes of the Enlightenment, and it's probably the closest that the Enlightened had to a center, absolutely. But as you say, there were Edinburgh, Glasgow, plenty of places in Germany, Philadelphia, all those places have good claims to being centers of the enlightenment as well.Andrew Keen: All the same David, is it like one of those sports games in California where everyone gets a medal?David Bell: Well, they're different metals, right, but I think certainly Paris is where everybody went. I mean, if you look at the figures from the German Enlightenment, from the Scottish Enlightenment from the American Enlightenment they all tended to congregate in Paris and the Parisians didn't tend to go anywhere else unless they were forced to. So that gives you a pretty good sense of where the most important center was.Andrew Keen: So David, before we get to specifics, map out for us, because everyone is perhaps as familiar or comfortable with the history of the Enlightenment, and certainly as you are. When did it happen? What years? And who are the leaders of this thing called the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, that's a big question. And I'm afraid, of course, that if you ask 10 historians, you'll get 10 different answers.Andrew Keen: Well, I'm only asking you, so I only want one answer.David Bell: So I would say that the Enlightenment really gets going around the first couple of decades of the 18th century. And that's when people really start to think that they are actually living in what they start to call an Enlightenment century. There are a lot of reasons for this. They are seeing what we now call the scientific revolution. They're looking at the progress that has been made with that. They are experiencing the changes in the religious sphere, including the end of religious wars, coming with a great deal of skepticism about religion. They are living in a relative period of peace where they're able to speculate much more broadly and daringly than before. But it's really in those first couple of decades that they start thinking of themselves as living in an enlightened century. They start defining themselves as something that would later be called the enlightenment. So I would say that it's, really, really there between maybe the end of the 17th century and 1720s that it really gets started.Andrew Keen: So let's have some names, David, of philosophers, I guess. I mean, if those are the right words. I know that there was a term in French. There is a term called philosoph. Were they the founders, the leaders of the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, there is a... Again, I don't want to descend into academic quibbling here, but there were lots of leaders. Let me give an example, though. So the year 1721 is a remarkable year. So in the year, 1721, two amazing events happened within a couple of months of each other. So in May, Montesquieu, one of the great philosophers by any definition, publishes his novel called Persian Letters. And this is an incredible novel. Still, I think one of greatest novels ever written, and it's very daring. It is the account, it is supposedly a an account written by two Persian travelers to Europe who are writing back to people in Isfahan about what they're seeing. And it is very critical of French society. It is very of religion. It is, as I said, very daring philosophically. It is a product in part of the increasing contact between Europe and the rest of the world that is also very central to the Enlightenment. So that novel comes out. So it's immediately, you know, the police try to suppress it. But they don't have much success because it's incredibly popular and Montesquieu doesn't suffer any particular problems because...Andrew Keen: And the French police have never been the most efficient police force in the world, have they?David Bell: Oh, they could be, but not in this case. And then two months later, after Montesquieu published this novel, there's a German philosopher much less well-known than Montesqiu, than Christian Bolz, who is a professor at the Universität Haller in Prussia, and he gives an oration in Latin, a very typical university oration for the time, about Chinese philosophy, in which he says that the Chinese have sort of proved to the world, particularly through the writings of Confucius and others, that you can have a virtuous society without religion. Obviously very controversial. Statement for the time it actually gets him fired from his job, he has to leave the Kingdom of Prussia within 48 hours on penalty of death, starts an enormous controversy. But here are two events, both of which involving non-European people, involving the way in which Europeans are starting to look out at the rest of the world and starting to imagine Europe as just one part of a larger humanity, and at the same time they are starting to speculate very daringly about whether you can have. You know, what it means to have a society, do you need to have religion in order to have morality in society? Do you need the proper, what kind of government do you need to to have virtuous conduct and a proper society? So all of these things get, you know, really crystallize, I think, around these two incidents as much as anything. So if I had to pick a single date for when the enlightenment starts, I'd probably pick that 1721.Andrew Keen: And when was, David, I thought you were going to tell me about the earthquake in Lisbon, when was that earthquake?David Bell: That earthquake comes quite a bit later. That comes, and now historians should be better with dates than I am. It's in the 1750s, I think it's the late 1750's. Again, this historian is proving he's getting a very bad grade for forgetting the exact date, but it's in 1750. So that's a different kind of event, which sparks off a great deal of commentary, because it's a terrible earthquake. It destroys most of the city of Lisbon, it destroys other cities throughout Portugal, and it leads a lot of the philosophy to philosophers at the time to be speculating very daringly again on whether there is any kind of real purpose to the universe and whether there's any kind divine purpose. Why would such a terrible thing happen? Why would God do such a thing to his followers? And certainly VoltaireAndrew Keen: Yeah, Votav, of course, comes to mind of questioning.David Bell: And Condit, Voltaire's novel Condit gives a very good description of the earthquake in Lisbon and uses that as a centerpiece. Voltair also read other things about the earthquake, a poem about Lisbon earthquake. But in Condit he gives a lasting, very scathing portrait of the Catholic Church in general and then of what happens in Portugal. And so the Lisbon Earthquake is certainly another one of the events, but it happens considerably later. Really in the middle of the end of life.Andrew Keen: So, David, you believe in this idea of the Enlightenment. I take your point that there are more than one Enlightenment in more than one center, but in broad historical terms, the 18th century could be defined at least in Western and Northern Europe as the period of the Enlightenment, would that be a fair generalization?David Bell: I think it's perfectly fair generalization. Of course, there are historians who say that it never happened. There's a conservative British historian, J.C.D. Clark, who published a book last summer, saying that the Enlightenment is a kind of myth, that there was a lot of intellectual activity in Europe, obviously, but that the idea that it formed a coherent Enlightenment was really invented in the 20th century by a bunch of progressive reformers who wanted to claim a kind of venerable and august pedigree for their own reform, liberal reform plans. I think that's an exaggeration. People in the 18th century defined very clearly what was going on, both people who were in favor of it and people who are against it. And while you can, if you look very closely at it, of course it gets a bit fuzzy. Of course it's gets, there's no single, you can't define a single enlightenment project or a single enlightened ideology. But then, I think people would be hard pressed to define any intellectual movement. You know, in perfect, incoherent terms. So the enlightenment is, you know by compared with almost any other intellectual movement certainly existed.Andrew Keen: In terms of a philosophy of the Enlightenment, the German thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to be often, and when you describe him as the conscience or the brain or a mixture of the conscience and brain of the enlightenment, why is Kant and Kantian thinking so important in the development of the Enlightenment.David Bell: Well, that's a really interesting question. And one reason is because most of the Enlightenment was not very rigorously philosophical. A lot of the major figures of the enlightenment before Kant tended to be writing for a general public. And they often were writing with a very specific agenda. We look at Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Now you look at Adam Smith in Scotland. We look David Hume or Adam Ferguson. You look at Benjamin Franklin in the United States. These people wrote in all sorts of different genres. They wrote in, they wrote all sorts of different kinds of books. They have many different purposes and very few of them did a lot of what we would call rigorous academic philosophy. And Kant was different. Kant was very much an academic philosopher. Kant was nothing if not rigorous. He came at the end of the enlightenment by most people's measure. He wrote these very, very difficult, very rigorous, very brilliant works, such as The Creek of Pure Reason. And so, it's certainly been the case that people who wanted to describe the Enlightenment as a philosophy have tended to look to Kant. So for example, there's a great German philosopher and intellectual historian of the early 20th century named Ernst Kassirer, who had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. And he wrote a great book called The Philosophy of the Enlightened. And that leads directly to Immanuel Kant. And of course, Casir himself was a Kantian, identified with Kant. And so he wanted to make Kant, in a sense, the telos, the end point, the culmination, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But so I think that's why Kant has such a particularly important position. You're defining it both ways.Andrew Keen: I've always struggled to understand what Kant was trying to say. I'm certainly not alone there. Might it be fair to say that he was trying to transform the universe and certainly traditional Christian notions into the Enlightenment, so the entire universe, the world, God, whatever that means, that they were all somehow according to Kant enlightened.David Bell: Well, I think that I'm certainly no expert on Immanuel Kant. And I would say that he is trying to, I mean, his major philosophical works are trying to put together a system of philosophical thinking which will justify why people have to act morally, why people act rationally, without the need for Christian revelation to bolster them. That's a very, very crude and reductionist way of putting it, but that's essentially at the heart of it. At the same time, Kant was very much aware of his own place in history. So Kant didn't simply write these very difficult, thick, dense philosophical works. He also wrote things that were more like journalism or like tablets. He wrote a famous essay called What is Enlightenment? And in that, he said that the 18th century was the period in which humankind was simply beginning to. Reach a period of enlightenment. And he said, he starts the essay by saying, this is the period when humankind is being released from its self-imposed tutelage. And we are still, and he said we do not yet live in the midst of a completely enlightened century, but we are getting there. We are living in a century that is enlightening.Andrew Keen: So the seeds, the seeds of Hegel and maybe even Marx are incant in that German thinking, that historical thinking.David Bell: In some ways, in some ways of course Hegel very much reacts against Kant and so and then Marx reacts against Hegel. So it's not exactly.Andrew Keen: Well, that's the dialectic, isn't it, David?David Bell: A simple easy path from one to the other, no, but Hegel is unimaginable without Kant of course and Marx is unimagineable without Hegel.Andrew Keen: You note that Kant represents a shift in some ways into the university and the walls of the universities were going up, and that some of the other figures associated with the the Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, human and Smith and the French Enlightenment Voltaire and the others, they were more generalist writers. Should we be nostalgic for the pre-university period in the Enlightenment, or? Did things start getting serious once the heavyweights, the academic heavyweighs like Emmanuel Kant got into this thing?David Bell: I think it depends on where we're talking about. I mean, Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow in Edinburgh, so Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment was definitely at least partly in the universities. The German Enlightenment took place very heavily in universities. Christian Vodafoy I just mentioned was the most important German philosopher of the 18th century before Kant, and he had positions in university. Even the French university system, for a while, what's interesting about the French University system, particularly the Sorbonne, which was the theology faculty, It was that. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, there were very vigorous, very interesting philosophical debates going on there, in which the people there, particularly even Jesuits there, were very open to a lot of the ideas we now call enlightenment. They were reading John Locke, they were reading Mel Pench, they were read Dekalb. What happened though in the French universities was that as more daring stuff was getting published elsewhere. Church, the Catholic Church, started to say, all right, these philosophers, these philosophies, these are our enemies, these are people we have to get at. And so at that point, anybody who was in the university, who was still in dialog with these people was basically purged. And the universities became much less interesting after that. But to come back to your question, I do think that I am very nostalgic for that period. I think that the Enlightenment was an extraordinary period, because if you look between. In the 17th century, not all, but a great deal of the most interesting intellectual work is happening in the so-called Republic of Letters. It's happening in Latin language. It is happening on a very small circle of RUD, of scholars. By the 19th century following Kant and Hegel and then the birth of the research university in Germany, which is copied everywhere, philosophy and the most advanced thinking goes back into the university. And the 18th century, particularly in France, I will say, is a time when the most advanced thought is being written for a general public. It is being in the form of novels, of dialogs, of stories, of reference works, and it is very, very accessible. The most profound thought of the West has never been as accessible overall as in the 18 century.Andrew Keen: Again, excuse this question, it might seem a bit naive, but there's a lot of pre-Enlightenment work, books, thinking that we read now that's very accessible from Erasmus and Thomas More to Machiavelli. Why weren't characters like, or are characters like Erasmuus, More's Utopia, Machiavell's prints and discourses, why aren't they considered part of the Enlightenment? What's the difference between? Enlightened thinkers or the supposedly enlightened thinkers of the 18th century and thinkers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.David Bell: That's a good question, you know, I think you have to, you, you know, again, one has to draw a line somewhere. That's not a very good answer, of course. All these people that you just mentioned are, in one way or another, predecessors to the Enlightenment. And of course, there were lots of people. I don't mean to say that nobody wrote in an accessible way before 1700. Obviously, lots of the people you mentioned did. Although a lot of them originally wrote in Latin, Erasmus, also Thomas More. But I think what makes the Enlightened different is that you have, again, you have a sense. These people have have a sense that they are themselves engaged in a collective project, that it is a collective project of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. They believe that they live in a century of progress. And there are certain principles. They don't agree on everything by any means. The philosophy of enlightenment is like nothing more than ripping each other to shreds, like any decent group of intellectuals. But that said, they generally did believe That people needed to have freedom of speech. They believed that you needed to have toleration of different religions. They believed in education and the need for a broadly educated public that could be as broad as possible. They generally believed in keeping religion out of the public sphere as much as possible, so all those principles came together into a program that we can consider at least a kind of... You know, not that everybody read it at every moment by any means, but there is an identifiable enlightenment program there, and in this case an identifiable enlightenment mindset. One other thing, I think, which is crucial to the Enlightenment, is that it was the attention they started to pay to something that we now take almost entirely for granted, which is the idea of society. The word society is so entirely ubiquitous, we assume it's always been there, and in one sense it has, because the word societas is a Latin word. But until... The 18th century, the word society generally had a much narrower meaning. It referred to, you know, particular institution most often, like when we talk about the society of, you know, the American philosophical society or something like that. And the idea that there exists something called society, which is the general sphere of human existence that is separate from religion and is separate from the political sphere, that's actually something which only really emerged at the end of the 1600s. And it became really the focus of you know, much, if not most, of enlightenment thinking. When you look at someone like Montesquieu and you look something, somebody like Rousseau or Voltaire or Adam Smith, probably above all, they were concerned with understanding how society works, not how government works only, but how society, what social interactions are like beginning of what we would now call social science. So that's yet another thing that distinguishes the enlightened from people like Machiavelli, often people like Thomas More, and people like bonuses.Andrew Keen: You noted earlier that the idea of progress is somehow baked in, in part, and certainly when it comes to Kant, certainly the French Enlightenment, although, of course, Rousseau challenged that. I'm not sure whether Rousseaut, as always, is both in and out of the Enlightenment and he seems to be in and out of everything. How did the Enlightement, though, make sense of itself in the context of antiquity, as it was, of Terms, it was the Renaissance that supposedly discovered or rediscovered antiquity. How did many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, writers, how did they think of their own society in the context of not just antiquity, but even the idea of a European or Western society?David Bell: Well, there was a great book, one of the great histories of the Enlightenment was written about more than 50 years ago by the Yale professor named Peter Gay, and the first part of that book was called The Modern Paganism. So it was about the, you know, it was very much about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the ancient Greek synonyms. And certainly the writers of the enlightenment felt a great deal of kinship with the ancient Greek synonymous. They felt a common bond, particularly in the posing. Christianity and opposing what they believed the Christian Church had wrought on Europe in suppressing freedom and suppressing free thought and suppassing free inquiry. And so they felt that they were both recovering but also going beyond antiquity at the same time. And of course they were all, I mean everybody at the time, every single major figure of the Enlightenment, their education consisted in large part of what we would now call classics, right? I mean, there was an educational reformer in France in the 1760s who said, you know, our educational system is great if the purpose is to train Roman centurions, if it's to train modern people who are not doing both so well. And it's true. I mean they would spend, certainly, you know in Germany, in much of Europe, in the Netherlands, even in France, I mean people were trained not simply to read Latin, but to write in Latin. In Germany, university courses took part in the Latin language. So there's an enormous, you know, so they're certainly very, very conversant with the Greek and Roman classics, and they identify with them to a very great extent. Someone like Rousseau, I mean, and many others, and what's his first reading? How did he learn to read by reading Plutarch? In translation, but he learns to read reading Plutach. He sees from the beginning by this enormous admiration for the ancients that we get from Bhutan.Andrew Keen: Was Socrates relevant here? Was the Enlightenment somehow replacing Aristotle with Socrates and making him and his spirit of Enlightenment, of asking questions rather than answering questions, the symbol of a new way of thinking?David Bell: I would say to a certain extent, so I mean, much of the Enlightenment criticizes scholasticism, medieval scholastic, very, very sharply, and medieval scholasticism is founded philosophically very heavily upon Aristotle, so to that extent. And the spirit of skepticism that Socrates embodied, the idea of taking nothing for granted and asking questions about everything, including questions of oneself, yes, absolutely. That said, while the great figures of the Red Plato, you know, Socrates was generally I mean, it was not all that present as they come. But certainly have people with people with red play-doh in the entire virus.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin earlier, David. Most of the Enlightenment, of course, seems to be centered in France and Scotland, Germany, England. But America, many Europeans went to America then as a, what some people would call a settler colonial society, or certainly an offshoot of the European world. Was the settling of America and the American Revolution Was it the quintessential Enlightenment project?David Bell: Another very good question, and again, it depends a bit on who you talk to. I just mentioned this book by Peter Gay, and the last part of his book is called The Science of Freedom, and it's all about the American Revolution. So certainly a lot of interpreters of the Enlightenment have said that, yes, the American revolution represents in a sense the best possible outcome of the American Revolution, it was the best, possible outcome of the enlightened. Certainly there you look at the founding fathers of the United States and there's a great deal that they took from me like Certainly, they took a great great number of political ideas from Obviously Madison was very much inspired and drafting the edifice of the Constitution by Montesquieu to see himself Was happy to admit in addition most of the founding Fathers of the united states were you know had kind of you know We still had we were still definitely Christians, but we're also but we were also very much influenced by deism were very much against the idea of making the United States a kind of confessional country where Christianity was dominant. They wanted to believe in the enlightenment principles of free speech, religious toleration and so on and so forth. So in all those senses and very much the gun was probably more inspired than Franklin was somebody who was very conversant with the European Enlightenment. He spent a large part of his life in London. Where he was in contact with figures of the Enlightenment. He also, during the American Revolution, of course, he was mostly in France, where he is vetted by some of the surviving fellows and were very much in contact for them as well. So yes, I would say the American revolution is certainly... And then the American revolutionary scene, of course by the Europeans, very much as a kind of offshoot of the enlightenment. So one of the great books of the late Enlightenment is by Condor Say, which he wrote while he was hiding actually in the future evolution of the chariot. It's called a historical sketch of the progress of the human spirit, or the human mind, and you know he writes about the American Revolution as being, basically owing its existence to being like...Andrew Keen: Franklin is of course an example of your pre-academic enlightenment, a generalist, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political thinker. What about the role of science and indeed economics in the Enlightenment? David, we're going to talk of course about the Marxist interpretation, perhaps the Marxist interpretation which sees The Enlightenment is just a euphemism, perhaps, for exploitative capitalism. How central was the growth and development of the market, of economics, and innovation, and capitalism in your reading of The Enlightened?David Bell: Well, in my reading, it was very important, but not in the way that the Marxists used to say. So Friedrich Engels once said that the Enlightenment was basically the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie, and there was whole strain of Marxist thinking that followed the assumption that, and then Karl Marx himself argued that the documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which obviously were inspired by the Enlightment, were simply kind of the near, or kind of. Way that the bourgeoisie was able to advance itself ideologically, and I don't think that holds much water, which is very little indication that any particular economic class motivated the Enlightenment or was using the Enlightment in any way. That said, I think it's very difficult to imagine the Enlightement without the social and economic changes that come in with the 18th century. To begin with globalization. If you read the great works of the Enlightenment, it's remarkable just how open they are to talking about humanity in general. So one of Voltaire's largest works, one of his most important works, is something called Essay on Customs and the Spirit of Nations, which is actually History of the World, where he talks learnedly not simply about Europe, but about the Americas, about China, about Africa, about India. Montesquieu writes Persian letters. Christian Volpe writes about Chinese philosophy. You know, Rousseau writes about... You know, the earliest days of humankind talks about Africa. All the great figures of the Enlightenment are writing about the rest of the world, and this is a period in which contacts between Europe and the rest the world are exploding along with international trade. So by the end of the 18th century, there are 4,000 to 5,000 ships a year crossing the Atlantic. It's an enormous number. And that's one context in which the enlightenment takes place. Another is what we call the consumer revolution. So in the 18th century, certainly in the major cities of Western Europe, people of a wide range of social classes, including even artisans, sort of somewhat wealthy artisians, shopkeepers, are suddenly able to buy a much larger range of products than they were before. They're able to choose how to basically furnish their own lives, if you will, how they're gonna dress, what they're going to eat, what they gonna put on the walls of their apartments and so on and so forth. And so they become accustomed to exercising a great deal more personal choice than their ancestors have done. And the Enlightenment really develops in tandem with this. Most of the great works of the Enlightment, they're not really written to, they're treatises, they're like Kant, they're written to persuade you to think in a single way. Really written to make you ask questions yourself, to force you to ponder things. They're written in the form of puzzles and riddles. Voltaire had a great line there, he wrote that the best kind of books are the books that readers write half of themselves as they read, and that's sort of the quintessence of the Enlightenment as far as I'm concerned.Andrew Keen: Yeah, Voltaire might have been comfortable on YouTube or Facebook. David, you mentioned all those ships going from Europe across the Atlantic. Of course, many of those ships were filled with African slaves. You mentioned this in your piece. I mean, this is no secret, of course. You also mentioned a couple of times Montesquieu's Persian letters. To what extent is... The enlightenment then perhaps the birth of Western power, of Western colonialism, of going to Africa, seizing people, selling them in North America, the French, the English, Dutch colonization of the rest of the world. Of course, later more sophisticated Marxist thinkers from the Frankfurt School, you mentioned these in your essay, Odorno and Horkheimer in particular, See the Enlightenment as... A project, if you like, of Western domination. I remember reading many years ago when I was in graduate school, Edward Said, his analysis of books like The Persian Letters, which is a form of cultural Western power. How much of this is simply bound up in the profound, perhaps, injustice of the Western achievement? And of course, some of the justice as well. We haven't talked about Jefferson, but perhaps in Jefferson's life and his thinking and his enlightened principles and his... Life as a slave owner, these contradictions are most self-evident.David Bell: Well, there are certainly contradictions, and there's certainly... I think what's remarkable, if you think about it, is that if you read through works of the Enlightenment, you would be hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery. You do find a lot of critiques of slavery, and I think that's something very important to keep in mind. Obviously, the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began well before the Enlightment, it began in 1500. The Enlightenment doesn't have the credit for being the first movement to oppose slavery. That really goes back to various religious groups, especially the Fakers. But that said, you have in France, you had in Britain, in America even, you'd have a lot of figures associated with the Enlightenment who were pretty sure of becoming very forceful opponents of slavery very early. Now, when it comes to imperialism, that's a tricky issue. What I think you'd find in these light bulbs, you'd different sorts of tendencies and different sorts of writings. So there are certainly a lot of writers of the Enlightenment who are deeply opposed to European authorities. One of the most popular works of the late Enlightenment was a collective work edited by the man named the Abbe Rinal, which is called The History of the Two Indies. And that is a book which is deeply, deeply critical of European imperialism. At the same time, at the same of the enlightenment, a lot the works of history written during the Enlightment. Tended, such as Voltaire's essay on customs, which I just mentioned, tend to give a kind of very linear version of history. They suggest that all societies follow the same path, from sort of primitive savagery, hunter-gatherers, through early agriculture, feudal stages, and on into sort of modern commercial society and civilization. And so they're basically saying, okay, we, the Europeans, are the most advanced. People like the Africans and the Native Americans are the least advanced, and so perhaps we're justified in going and quote, bringing our civilization to them, what later generations would call the civilizing missions, or possibly just, you know, going over and exploiting them because we are stronger and we are more, and again, we are the best. And then there's another thing that the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment tended to destroy an older Christian view of humankind, which in some ways militated against modern racism. Christians believed, of course, that everyone was the same from Adam and Eve, which meant that there was an essential similarity in the world. And the Enlightenment challenged this by challenging the biblical kind of creation. The Enlightenment challenges this. Voltaire, for instance, believed that there had actually been several different human species that had different origins, and that can very easily become a justification for racism. Buffon, one of the most Figures of the French Enlightenment, one of the early naturalists, was crucial for trying to show that in fact nature is not static, that nature is always changing, that species are changing, including human beings. And so again, that allowed people to think in terms of human beings at different stages of evolution, and perhaps this would be a justification for privileging the more advanced humans over the less advanced. In the 18th century itself, most of these things remain potential, rather than really being acted upon. But in the 19th century, figures of writers who would draw upon these things certainly went much further, and these became justifications for slavery, imperialism, and other things. So again, the Enlightenment is the source of a great deal of stuff here, and you can't simply put it into one box or more.Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier, David, that Concorda wrote one of the later classics of the... Condorcet? Sorry, Condorcets, excuse my French. Condorcès wrote one the later Classics of the Enlightenment when he was hiding from the French Revolution. In your mind, was the revolution itself the natural conclusion, climax? Perhaps anti-climax of the Enlightenment. Certainly, it seems as if a lot of the critiques of the French Revolution, particularly the more conservative ones, Burke comes to mind, suggested that perhaps the principles of in the Enlightment inevitably led to the guillotine, or is that an unfair way of thinking of it?David Bell: Well, there are a lot of people who have thought like that. Edmund Burke already, writing in 1790, in his reflections on the revolution in France, he said that everything which was great in the old regime is being dissolved and, quoting, dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. And then he said about the French that in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing but the Gallows. So there, in 1780, he already seemed to be predicting the reign of terror and blaming it. A certain extent from the Enlightenment. That said, I think, you know, again, the French Revolution is incredibly complicated event. I mean, you certainly have, you know, an explosion of what we could call Enlightenment thinking all over the place. In France, it happened in France. What happened there was that you had a, you know, the collapse of an extraordinarily inefficient government and a very, you know, in a very antiquated, paralyzed system of government kind of collapsed, created a kind of political vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped a lot of figures who were definitely readers of the Enlightenment. Oh so um but again the Enlightment had I said I don't think you can call the Enlightement a single thing so to say that the Enlightiment inspired the French Revolution rather than the There you go.Andrew Keen: Although your essay on liberties is the Enlightenment then and now you probably didn't write is always these lazy editors who come up with inaccurate and inaccurate titles. So for you, there is no such thing as the Enlighten.David Bell: No, there is. There is. But still, it's a complex thing. It contains multitudes.Andrew Keen: So it's the Enlightenment rather than the United States.David Bell: Conflicting tendencies, it has contradictions within it. There's enough unity to refer to it as a singular noun, but it doesn't mean that it all went in one single direction.Andrew Keen: But in historical terms, did the failure of the French Revolution, its descent into Robespierre and then Bonaparte, did it mark the end in historical terms a kind of bookend of history? You began in 1720 by 1820. Was the age of the Enlightenment pretty much over?David Bell: I would say yes. I think that, again, one of the things about the French Revolution is that people who are reading these books and they're reading these ideas and they are discussing things really start to act on them in a very different way from what it did before the French revolution. You have a lot of absolute monarchs who are trying to bring certain enlightenment principles to bear in their form of government, but they're not. But it's difficult to talk about a full-fledged attempt to enact a kind of enlightenment program. Certainly a lot of the people in the French Revolution saw themselves as doing that. But as they did it, they ran into reality, I would say. I mean, now Tocqueville, when he writes his old regime in the revolution, talks about how the French philosophes were full of these abstract ideas that were divorced from reality. And while that's an exaggeration, there was a certain truth to them. And as soon as you start having the age of revolutions, as soon you start people having to devise systems of government that will actually last, and as you have people, democratic representative systems that will last, and as they start revising these systems under the pressure of actual events, then you're not simply talking about an intellectual movement anymore, you're talking about something very different. And so I would say that, well, obviously the ideas of the Enlightenment continue to inspire people, the books continue to be read, debated. They lead on to figures like Kant, and as we talked about earlier, Kant leads to Hegel, Hegel leads to Marx in a certain sense. Nonetheless, by the time you're getting into the 19th century, what you have, you know, has connections to the Enlightenment, but can we really still call it the Enlightment? I would sayAndrew Keen: And Tocqueville, of course, found democracy in America. Is democracy itself? I know it's a big question. But is it? Bound up in the Enlightenment. You've written extensively, David, both for liberties and elsewhere on liberalism. Is the promise of democracy, democratic systems, the one born in the American Revolution, promised in the French Revolution, not realized? Are they products of the Enlightment, or is the 19th century and the democratic systems that in the 19th century, is that just a separate historical track?David Bell: Again, I would say there are certain things in the Enlightenment that do lead in that direction. Certainly, I think most figures in the enlightenment in one general sense or another accepted the idea of a kind of general notion of popular sovereignty. It didn't mean that they always felt that this was going to be something that could necessarily be acted upon or implemented in their own day. And they didn't necessarily associate generalized popular sovereignty with what we would now call democracy with people being able to actually govern themselves. Would be certain figures, certainly Diderot and some of his essays, what we saw very much in the social contract, you know, were sketching out, you knows, models for possible democratic system. Condorcet, who actually lived into the French Revolution, wrote one of the most draft constitutions for France, that's one of most democratic documents ever proposed. But of course there were lots of figures in the Enlightenment, Voltaire, and others who actually believed much more in absolute monarchy, who believed that you just, you know, you should have. Freedom of speech and freedom of discussion, out of which the best ideas would emerge, but then you had to give those ideas to the prince who imposed them by poor sicknesses.Andrew Keen: And of course, Rousseau himself, his social contract, some historians have seen that as the foundations of totalitarian, modern totalitarianism. Finally, David, your wonderful essay in Liberties in the spring quarterly 2025 is The Enlightenment, Then and Now. What about now? You work at Princeton, your president has very bravely stood up to the new presidential regime in the United States, in defense of academic intellectual freedom. Does the word and the movement, does it have any relevance in the 2020s, particularly in an age of neo-authoritarianism around the world?David Bell: I think it does. I think we have to be careful about it. I always get a little nervous when people say, well, we should simply go back to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenments is history. We don't go back the 18th century. I think what we need to do is to recover certain principles, certain ideals from the 18 century, the ones that matter to us, the ones we think are right, and make our own Enlightenment better. I don't think we need be governed by the 18 century. Thomas Paine once said that no generation should necessarily rule over every generation to come, and I think that's probably right. Unfortunately in the United States, we have a constitution which is now essentially unamendable, so we're doomed to live by a constitution largely from the 18th century. But are there many things in the Enlightenment that we should look back to, absolutely?Andrew Keen: Well, David, I am going to free you for your own French Enlightenment. You can go and have some croissant now in your local cafe in Paris. Thank you so much for a very, I excuse the pun, enlightening conversation on the Enlightenment then and now, Essential Essay in Liberties. I'd love to get you back on the show. Talk more history. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

bto#291 – Hohe Schulden, ungleiche Vermögensverteilung und die Schwierigkeit, einen Ausgleich zwischen den verschiedenen Interessensgruppen zu erzielen, prägten die Zeit vor der Französischen Revolution (1789 – 1799). Während es Großbritannien damals gelang, die hohe Staatsverschuldung ohne Revolution und Staatspleite zu bewältigen, kam es in Frankreich zu Umsturz und Bankrott. Auch heute stehen viele Staaten vor ähnlichen Herausforderungen und es ist nicht klar, ob die Verschuldung in einem geordneten Verfahren gesenkt werden kann. Welche Lehren sind aus der Vergangenheit zu ziehen? Der Historiker Dr. Michael Sonenscher, Professor am King's College in Cambridge und Autor des Buches Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (dt.: Vor der Sintflut: Staatsverschuldung, Ungleichheit und die intellektuellen Ursprünge der Französischen Revolution) beleuchtet im Gespräch mit Daniel Stelter die Parallelen von Geschichte und Gegenwart. HörerserviceDen Global Debt Report der OECD finden Sie hier: https://is.gd/oEpSkx Den Text von David Hume finden Sie hier: https://is.gd/cHE9a6 Neue Analysen, Kommentare und Einschätzungen zur Wirtschafts- und Finanzlage finden Sie unter www.think-bto.com. Den monatlichen bto-Newsletter abonnieren Sie hier.Sie erreichen die Redaktion unter podcast@think-bto.com. Wir freuen uns über Ihre Meinungen, Anregungen und Kritik.ShownotesHandelsblatt – Ein exklusives Angebot für alle „bto – beyond the obvious – featured by Handelsblatt”-Hörer*innen: Testen Sie Handelsblatt Premium 4 Wochen lang für 1 Euro und bleiben Sie zur aktuellen Wirtschafts- und Finanzlage informiert. Mehr: https://handelsblatt.com/mehrperspektiven Oder lesen Sie das Handelsblatt ein Jahr lang mit 30% Rabatt und erhalten Sie tiefgehende Einblicke in Wirtschaft, Politik, Finanzwelt und Technologie. Zum Angebot: handelsblatt.com/bto30Werbepartner – Informationen zu den Angeboten unserer aktuellen Werbepartner finden Sie hier. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's a small world. The great David Rieff came to my San Francisco studio today for in person interview about his new anti-woke polemic Desire and Fate. And half way through our conversation, he brought up Daniel Bessner's This Is America piece which Bessner discussed on yesterday's show. I'm not sure what that tells us about wokeness, a subject which Rieff and I aren't in agreement. For him, it's the thing-in-itself which make sense of our current cultural malaise. Thus Desire and Fate, his attempt (with a great intro from John Banville) to wake us up from Wokeness. For me, it's a distraction. I've included the full transcript below. Lots of good stuff to chew on. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 5 KEY TAKEAWAYS * Rieff views "woke" ideology as primarily American and post-Protestant in nature, rather than stemming solely from French philosophy, emphasizing its connections to self-invention and subjective identity.* He argues that woke culture threatens high culture but not capitalism, noting that corporations have readily embraced a "baudlerized" version of identity politics that avoids class discussions.* Rieff sees woke culture as connected to the wellness movement, with both sharing a preoccupation with "psychic safety" and the metaphorical transformation of experience in which "words” become a form of “violence."* He suggests young people's material insecurity contributes to their focus on identity, as those facing bleak economic prospects turn inward when they "can't make their way in the world."* Rieff characterizes woke ideology as "apocalyptic but not pessimistic," contrasting it with his own genuine pessimism which he considers more realistic about human nature and more cheerful in its acceptance of life's limitations. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, as we digest Trump 2.0, we don't talk that much these days about woke and woke ideology. There was a civil war amongst progressives, I think, on the woke front in 2023 and 2024, but with Donald Trump 2.0 and his various escapades, let's just talk these days about woke. We have a new book, however, on the threat of woke by my guest, David Rieff. It's called Desire and Fate. He wrote it in 2023, came out in late 2024. David's visiting the Bay Area. He's an itinerant man traveling from the East Coast to Latin America and Europe. David, welcome to Keen on America. Do you regret writing this book given what's happened in the last few months in the United States?David Rieff: No, not at all, because I think that the road to moral and intellectual hell is trying to censor yourself according to what you think is useful. There's a famous story of Jean Paul Sartre that he said to the stupefaction of a journalist late in his life that he'd always known about the gulag, and the journalist pretty surprised said, well, why didn't you say anything? And Sartre said so as not to demoralize the French working class. And my own view is, you know, you say what you have to say about this and if I give some aid and comfort to people I don't like, well, so be it. Having said that, I also think a lot of these woke ideas have their, for all of Trump's and Trump's people's fierce opposition to woke, some of the identity politics, particularly around Jewish identity seems to me not that very different from woke. Strangely they seem to have taken, for example, there's a lot of the talk about anti-semitism on college campuses involves student safety which is a great woke trope that you feel unsafe and what people mean by that is not literally they're going to get shot or beaten up, they mean that they feel psychically unsafe. It's part of the kind of metaphorization of experience that unfortunately the United States is now completely in the grips of. But the same thing on the other side, people like Barry Weiss, for example, at the Free Press there, they talk in the same language of psychic safety. So I'm not sure there's, I think there are more similarities than either side is comfortable with.Andrew Keen: You describe Woke, David, as a cultural revolution and you associated in the beginning of the book with something called Lumpen-Rousseauism. As we joked before we went live, I'm not sure if there's anything in Rousseau which isn't Lumpen. But what exactly is this cultural revolution? And can we blame it on bad French philosophy or Swiss French?David Rieff: Well, Swiss-French philosophy, you know exactly. There is a funny anecdote, as I'm sure you know, that Rousseau made a visit to Edinburgh to see Hume and there's something in Hume's diaries where he talks about Rousseau pacing up and down in front of the fire and suddenly exclaiming, but David Hume is not a bad man. And Hume notes in his acerbic way, Rousseau was like walking around without his skin on. And I think some of the woke sensitivity stuff is very much people walking around without their skin on. They can't stand the idea of being offended. I don't see it as much - of course, the influence of that version of cultural relativism that the French like Deleuze and Guattari and other people put forward is part of the story, but I actually see it as much more of a post-Protestant thing. This idea, in that sense, some kind of strange combination of maybe some French philosophy, but also of the wellness movement, of this notion that health, including psychic health, was the ultimate good in a secular society. And then the other part, which again, it seems to be more American than French, which is this idea, and this is particularly true in the trans movement, that you can be anything you want to be. And so that if you feel yourself to be a different gender, well, that's who you are. And what matters is your own subjective sense of these things, and it's up to you. The outside world has no say in it, it's what you feel. And that in a sense, what I mean by post-Protestant is that, I mean, what's the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism? The fundamental difference is, it seems to me, that in Roman Catholic tradition, you need the priest to intercede with God, whereas in Protestant tradition, it is, except for the Anglicans, but for most of Protestantism, it's you and God. And in that sense it seems to me there are more of what I see in woke than this notion that some of the right-wing people like Chris Rufo and others have that this is cultural French cultural Marxism making its insidious way through the institutions.Andrew Keen: It's interesting you talk about the Protestant ethic and you mentioned Hume's remark about Rousseau not having his skin on. Do you think that Protestantism enabled people to grow thick skins?David Rieff: I mean, the Calvinist idea certainly did. In fact, there were all these ideas in Protestant culture, at least that's the classical interpretation of deferred gratification. Capitalism was supposed to be the work ethic, all of that stuff that Weber talks about. But I think it got in the modern version. It became something else. It stopped being about those forms of disciplines and started to be about self-invention. And in a sense, there's something very American about that because after all you know it's the Great Gatsby. It's what's the famous sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald's: there are no second acts in American lives.Andrew Keen: This is the most incorrect thing anyone's ever said about America. I'm not sure if he meant it to be incorrect, did he? I don't know.David Rieff: I think what's true is that you get the American idea, you get to reinvent yourself. And this notion of the dream, the dream become reality. And many years ago when I was spending a lot of time in LA in the late 80s, early 90s, at LAX, there was a sign from the then mayor, Tom Bradley, about how, you know, if you can dream it, it can be true. And I think there's a lot in identitarian woke idea which is that we can - we're not constricted by history or reality. In fact, it's all the present and the future. And so to me again, woke seems to me much more recognizable as something American and by extension post-Protestant in the sense that you see the places where woke is most powerful are in the other, what the encampment kids would call settler colonies, Australia and Canada. And now in the UK of course, where it seems to me by DI or EDI as they call it over there is in many ways stronger in Britain even than it was in the US before Trump.Andrew Keen: Does it really matter though, David? I mean, that's my question. Does it matter? I mean it might matter if you have the good or the bad fortune to teach at a small, expensive liberal arts college. It might matter with some of your dinner parties in Tribeca or here in San Francisco, but for most people, who cares?David Rieff: It doesn't matter. I think it matters to culture and so what you think culture is worth, because a lot of the point of this book was to say there's nothing about woke that threatens capitalism, that threatens the neo-liberal order. I mean it's turning out that Donald Trump is a great deal bigger threat to the neoliberal order. Woke was to the contrary - woke is about talking about everything but class. And so a kind of baudlerized, de-radicalized version of woke became perfectly fine with corporate America. That's why this wonderful old line hard lefty Adolph Reed Jr. says somewhere that woke is about diversifying the ruling class. But I do think it's a threat to high culture because it's about equity. It's about representation. And so elite culture, which I have no shame in proclaiming my loyalty to, can't survive the woke onslaught. And it hasn't, in my view. If you look at just the kinds of books that are being written, the kinds of plays that are been put on, even the opera, the new operas that are being commissioned, they're all about representing the marginalized. They're about speaking for your group, whatever that group is, and doing away with various forms of cultural hierarchy. And I'm with Schoenberg: if it's for everybody, if it's art, Schoenberg said it's not for everybody, and if it's for everybody it's not art. And I think woke destroys that. Woke can live with schlock. I'm sorry, high culture can live with schlock, it always has, it always will. What it can't live with is kitsch. And by which I mean kitsch in Milan Kundera's definition, which is to have opinions that you feel better about yourself for holding. And that I think is inimical to culture. And I think woke is very destructive of those traditions. I mean, in the most obvious sense, it's destructive of the Western tradition, but you know, the high arts in places like Japan or Bengal, I don't think it's any more sympathetic to those things than it is to Shakespeare or John Donne or whatever. So yeah, I think it's a danger in that sense. Is it a danger to the peace of the world? No, of course not.Andrew Keen: Even in cultural terms, as you explain, it is an orthodoxy. If you want to work with the dominant cultural institutions, the newspapers, the universities, the publishing houses, you have to play by those rules, but the great artists, poets, filmmakers, musicians have never done that, so all it provides, I mean you brought up Kundera, all it provides is something that independent artists, creative people will sneer at, will make fun of, as you have in this new book.David Rieff: Well, I hope they'll make fun of it. But on the other hand, I'm an old guy who has the means to sneer. I don't have to please an editor. Someone will publish my books one way or another, whatever ones I have left to write. But if you're 25 years old, maybe you're going to sneer with your pals in the pub, but you're gonna have to toe the line if you want to be published in whatever the obvious mainstream place is and you're going to be attacked on social media. I think a lot of people who are very, young people who are skeptical of this are just so afraid of being attacked by their peers on various social media that they keep quiet. I don't know that it's true that, I'd sort of push back on that. I think non-conformists will out. I hope it's true. But I wonder, I mean, these traditions, once they die, they're very hard to rebuild. And, without going full T.S. Eliot on you, once you don't think you're part of the past, once the idea is that basically, pretty much anything that came before our modern contemporary sense of morality and fairness and right opinion is to be rejected and that, for example, the moral character of the artist should determine whether or not the art should be paid attention to - I don't know how you come back from that or if you come back from that. I'm not convinced you do. No, other arts will be around. And I mean, if I were writing a critical review of my own book, I'd say, look, this culture, this high culture that you, David Rieff, are writing an elegy for, eulogizing or memorializing was going to die anyway, and we're at the beginning of another Gutenbergian epoch, just as Gutenberg, we're sort of 20 years into Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg galaxy, and these other art forms will come, and they won't be like anything else. And that may be true.Andrew Keen: True, it may be true. In a sense then, to extend that critique, are you going full T.S. Eliot in this book?David Rieff: Yeah, I think Eliot was right. But it's not just Eliot, there are people who would be for the wokesters more acceptable like Mandelstam, for example, who said you're part of a conversation that's been going on long before you were born, that's going to be going on after you are, and I think that's what art is. I think the idea that we make some completely new thing is a childish fantasy. I think you belong to a tradition. There are periods - look, this is, I don't find much writing in English in prose fiction very interesting. I have to say I read the books that people talk about because I'm trying to understand what's going on but it doesn't interest me very much, but again, there have been periods of great mediocrity. Think of a period in the late 17th century in England when probably the best poet was this completely, rightly, justifiably forgotten figure, Colley Cibber. You had the great restoration period and then it all collapsed, so maybe it'll be that way. And also, as I say, maybe it's just as with the print revolution, that this new culture of social media will produce completely different forms. I mean, everything is mortal, not just us, but cultures and civilizations and all the rest of it. So I can imagine that, but this is the time I live in and the tradition I come from and I'm sorry it's gone, and I think what's replacing it is for the most part worse.Andrew Keen: You're critical in the book of what you, I'm quoting here, you talk about going from the grand inquisitor to the grand therapist. But you're very critical of the broader American therapeutic culture of acute sensitivity, the thin skin nature of, I guess, the Rousseau in this, whatever, it's lumpen Rousseauanism. So how do you interpret that without psychologizing, or are you psychologizing in the book? How are you making sense of our condition? In other words, can one critique criticize therapeutic culture without becoming oneself therapeutic?David Rieff: You mean the sort of Pogo line, we've met the enemy and it is us. Well, I suppose there's some truth to that. I don't know how much. I think that woke is in some important sense a subset of the wellness movement. And the wellness movement after all has tens and tens of millions of people who are in one sense or another influenced by it. And I think health, including psychic health, and we've moved from wellness as corporal health to wellness as being both soma and psyche. So, I mean, if that's psychologizing, I certainly think it's drawing the parallel or seeing woke in some ways as one of the children of the god of wellness. And that to me, I don't know how therapeutic that is. I think it's just that once you feel, I'm interested in what people feel. I'm not necessarily so interested in, I mean, I've got lots of opinions, but what I think I'm better at than having opinions is trying to understand why people think what they think. And I do think that once health becomes the ultimate good in a secular society and once death becomes the absolutely unacceptable other, and once you have the idea that there's no real distinction of any great validity between psychic and physical wellness, well then of course sensitivity to everything becomes almost an inevitable reaction.Andrew Keen: I was reading the book and I've been thinking about a lot of movements in America which are trying to bring people together, dealing with America, this divided America, as if it's a marriage in crisis. So some of the most effective or interesting, I think, thinkers on this, like Arlie Hochschild in Berkeley, use the language of therapy to bring or to try to bring America back together, even groups like the Braver Angels. Can therapy have any value or that therapeutic culture in a place like America where people are so bitterly divided, so hateful towards one another?David Rieff: Well, it's always been a country where, on the one hand, people have been, as you say, incredibly good at hatred and also a country of people who often construe themselves as misfits and heretics from the Puritans forward. And on the other hand, you have that small-town American idea, which sometimes I think is as important to woke and DI as as anything else which is that famous saying of small town America of all those years ago which was if you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all. And to some extent that is, I think, a very powerful ancestor of these movements. Whether they're making any headway - of course I hope they are, but Hochschild is a very interesting figure, but I don't, it seems to me it's going all the other way, that people are increasingly only talking to each other.Andrew Keen: What this movement seems to want to do is get beyond - I use this word carefully, I'm not sure if they use it but I'm going to use it - ideology and that we're all prisoners of ideology. Is woke ideology or is it a kind of post-ideology?David Rieff: Well, it's a redemptive idea, a restorative idea. It's an idea that in that sense, there's a notion that it's time for the victims, for the first to be last and the last to be first. I mean, on some level, it is as simple as that. On another level, as I say, I do think it has a lot to do with metaphorization of experience, that people say silence is violence and words are violence and at that point what's violence? I mean there is a kind of level to me where people have gotten trapped in the kind of web of their own metaphors and now are living by them or living shackled to them or whatever image you're hoping for. But I don't know what it means to get beyond ideology. What, all men will be brothers, as in the Beethoven-Schiller symphony? I mean, it doesn't seem like that's the way things are going.Andrew Keen: Is the problem then, and I'm thinking out loud here, is the problem politics or not enough politics?David Rieff: Oh, I think the problem is that now we don't know, we've decided that everything is part, the personal is the political, as the feminists said, 50, 60 years ago. So the personal's political, so the political is the personal. So you have to live the exemplary moral life, or at least the life that doesn't offend anybody or that conforms to whatever the dominant views of what good opinions are, right opinions are. I think what we're in right now is much more the realm of kind of a new set of moral codes, much more than ideology in the kind of discrete sense of politics.Andrew Keen: Now let's come back to this idea of being thin-skinned. Why are people so thin-skinned?David Rieff: Because, I mean, there are lots of things to say about that. One thing, of course, that might be worth saying, is that the young generations, people who are between, let's say, 15 and 30, they're in real material trouble. It's gonna be very hard for them to own a house. It's hard for them to be independent and unless the baby boomers like myself will just transfer every penny to them, which doesn't seem very likely frankly, they're going to live considerably worse than generations before. So if you can't make your way in the world then maybe you make your way yourself or you work on yourself in that sort of therapeutic sense. You worry about your own identity because the only place you have in the world in some way is yourself, is that work, that obsession. I do think some of these material questions are important. There's a guy you may know who's not at all woke, a guy who teaches at the University of Washington called Danny Bessner. And I just did a show with him this morning. He's a smart guy and we have a kind of ironic correspondence over email and DM. And I once said to him, why are you so bitter about everything? And he said, you want to know why? Because I have two children and the likelihood is I'll never get a teaching job that won't require a three hour commute in order for me to live anywhere that I can afford to live. And I thought, and he couldn't be further from woke, he's a kind of Jacobin guy, Jacobin Magazine guy, and if he's left at all, it's kind of old left, but I think a lot of people feel that, that they feel their practical future, it looks pretty grim.Andrew Keen: But David, coming back to the idea of art, they're all suited to the world of art. They don't have to buy a big house and live in the suburbs. They can become poets. They can become filmmakers. They can put their stuff up on YouTube. They can record their music online. There are so many possibilities.David Rieff: It's hard to monetize that. Maybe now you're beginning to sound like the people you don't like. Now you're getting to sound like a capitalist.Andrew Keen: So what? Well, I don't care if I sound like a capitalist. You're not going to starve to death.David Rieff: Well, you might not like, I mean, it's fine to be a barista at 24. It's not so fine at 44. And are these people going to ever get out of this thing? I don't know. I wonder. Look, when I was starting as a writer, as long as you were incredibly diligent, and worked really hard, you could cobble together at least a basic living by accepting every assignment and people paid you bits and bobs of money, but put together, you could make a living. Now, the only way to make money, unless you're lucky enough to be on staff of a few remaining media outlets that remain, is you have to become an impresario, you have become an entrepreneur of your own stuff. And again, sure, do lots of people manage that? Yeah, but not as many as could have worked in that other system, and look at the fate of most newspapers, all folding. Look at the universities. We can talk about woke and how woke destroyed, in my view anyway, a lot of the humanities. But there's also a level in which people didn't want to study these things. So we're looking at the last generation in a lot places of a lot of these humanities departments and not just the ones that are associated with, I don't know, white supremacy or the white male past or whatever, but just the humanities full stop. So I know if that sounds like, maybe it sounds like a capitalist, but maybe it also sounds like you know there was a time when the poets - you know very well, poets never made a living, poets taught in universities. That's the way American poets made their money, including pretty famous poets like Eric Wolcott or Joseph Brodsky or writers, Toni Morrison taught at Princeton all those years, Joyce Carol Oates still alive, she still does. Most of these people couldn't make a living of their work and so the university provided that living.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Barry Weiss earlier. She's making a fortune as an anti-woke journalist. And Free Press seems to be thriving. Yascha Mounk's Persuasion is doing pretty well. Andrew Sullivan, another good example, making a fortune off of Substack. It seems as if the people willing to take risks, Barry Weiss leaving the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan leaving everything he's ever joined - that's...David Rieff: Look, are there going to be people who thrive in this new environment? Sure. And Barry Weiss turns out to be this kind of genius entrepreneur. She deserves full credit for that. Although even Barry Weiss, the paradox for me of Barry Weiss is, a lot of her early activism was saying that she felt unsafe with these anti-Israeli teachers at Columbia. So in a sense, she was using some of the same language as the woke use, psychic safety, because she didn't mean Joseph Massad was gonna come out from the blackboard and shoot her in the eye. She meant that she was offended and used the language of safety to describe that. And so in that sense, again, as I was saying to you earlier, I think there are more similarities here. And Trump, I think this is a genuine counterrevolution that Trump is trying to mount. I'm not very interested in the fascism, non-fascism debate. I'm rather skeptical of it.Andrew Keen: As Danny Bessner is. Yeah, I thought Danny's piece about that was brilliant.David Rieff: We just did a show about it today, that piece about why that's all rubbish. I was tempted, I wrote to a friend that guy you may know David Bell teaches French history -Andrew Keen: He's coming on the show next week. Well, you see, it's just a little community of like-minded people.David Rieff: There you go. Well, I wrote to David.Andrew Keen: And you mentioned his father in the book, Daniel.David Rieff: Yeah, well, his father is sort of one of the tutelary idols of the book. I had his father and I read his father and I learned an enormous amount. I think that book about the cultural contradictions of capitalism is one of the great prescient books about our times. But I wrote to David, I said, I actually sent him the Bessner piece which he was quite ambivalent about. But I said well, I'm not really convinced by the fascism of Trump, maybe just because Hitler read books, unlike Donald Trump. But it's a genuine counterrevolution. And what element will change the landscape in terms of DI and woke and identitarianism is not clear. These people are incredibly ambitious. They really mean to change this country, transform it.Andrew Keen: But from the book, David, Trump's attempts to cleanse, if that's the right word, the university, I would have thought you'd have rather admired that, all these-David Rieff: I agree with some of it.Andrew Keen: All these idiots writing the same article for 30 years about something that no one has any interest in.David Rieff: I look, my problem with Trump is that I do support a lot of that. I think some of the stuff that Christopher Rufo, one of the leading ideologues of this administration has uncovered about university programs and all of this crap, I think it's great that they're not paying for it anymore. The trouble is - you asked me before, is it that important? Is culture important compared to destroying the NATO alliance, blowing up the global trade regime? No. I don't think. So yeah, I like a lot of what they're doing about the university, I don't like, and I am very fiercely opposed to this crackdown on speech. That seems to be grotesque and revolting, but are they canceling supporting transgender theater in Galway? Yeah, I think it's great that they're canceling all that stuff. And so I'm not, that's my problem with Trump, is that some of that stuff I'm quite unashamedly happy about, but it's not nearly worth all the damage he's doing to this country and the world.Andrew Keen: Being very generous with your time, David. Finally, in the book you describe woke as, and I thought this was a very sharp way of describing it, describe it as being apocalyptic but not pessimistic. What did you mean by that? And then what is the opposite of woke? Would it be not apocalyptic, but cheerful?David Rieff: Well, I think genuine pessimists are cheerful, I would put myself among those. The model is Samuel Beckett, who just thinks things are so horrible that why not be cheerful about them, and even express one's pessimism in a relatively cheerful way. You remember the famous story that Thomas McCarthy used to tell about walking in the Luxembourg Gardens with Beckett and McCarthy says to him, great day, it's such a beautiful day, Sam. Beckett says, yeah, beautiful day. McCarthy says, makes you glad to be alive. And Beckett said, oh, I wouldn't go that far. And so, the genuine pessimist is quite cheerful. But coming back to woke, it's apocalyptic in the sense that everything is always at stake. But somehow it's also got this reformist idea that cultural revolution will cleanse away the sins of the supremacist patriarchal past and we'll head for the sunny uplands. I think I'm much too much of a pessimist to think that's possible in any regime, let alone this rather primitive cultural revolution called woke.Andrew Keen: But what would the opposite be?David Rieff: The opposite would be probably some sense that the best we're going to do is make our peace with the trash nature of existence, that life is finite in contrast with the wellness people who probably have a tendency towards the apocalyptic because death is an insult to them. So everything is staving off the bad news and that's where you get this idea that you can, like a lot of revolutions, you can change the nature of people. Look, the communist, Che Guevara talked about the new man. Well, I wonder if he thought it was so new when he was in Bolivia. I think these are - people need utopias, this is one of them, MAGA is another utopia by the way, and people don't seem to be able to do without them and that's - I wish it were otherwise but it isn't.Andrew Keen: I'm guessing the woke people would be offended by the idea of death, are they?David Rieff: Well, I think the woke people, in this synchronicity, people and a lot of people, they're insulted - how can this happen to me, wonderful me? And this is those jokes in the old days when the British could still be savage before they had to have, you know, Henry the Fifth be played by a black actor - why me? Well, why not you? That's just so alien to and it's probably alien to the American idea. You're supposed to - it's supposed to work out and the truth is it doesn't work out. But La Rochefoucauld says somewhere no one can stare for too long at death or the sun and maybe I'm asking too much.Andrew Keen: Maybe only Americans can find death unacceptable to use one of your words.David Rieff: Yes, perhaps.Andrew Keen: Well, David Rieff, congratulations on the new book. Fascinating, troubling, controversial as always. Desire and Fate. I know you're writing a book about Oppenheimer, very different kind of subject. We'll get you back on the show to talk Oppenheimer, where I guess there's not going to be a lot of Lumpen-Rousseauism.David Rieff: Very little, very little love and Rousseau in the quantum mechanics world, but thanks for having me.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

******Support the channel******Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenterPayPal: paypal.me/thedissenterPayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuyPayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9lPayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpzPayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9mPayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ******Follow me on******Website: https://www.thedissenter.net/The Dissenter Goodreads list: https://shorturl.at/7BMoBFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/Twitter: https://x.com/TheDissenterYT This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Dr. Tristan Rogers is a philosopher, author, and teacher. He teaches Logic and Latin at Donum Dei Classical Academy in San Francisco. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in 2017. He works in political philosophy, ethics, and ancient philosophy. He is the author of Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction. In this episode, we focus on Conservatism, Past and Present. We start by discussing philosophical conservatism, and the virtues of gratitude, humility, and justice. We then go through the history of conservatism, and talk about thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, David Hume, Edmund Burke, attitudes toward the American Revolution and the French Revolution, the 19th century and freedom through authority, the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Roger Scruton, and the present in Donald Trump and his supporters. We discuss issues surrounding immigration, the family, sexual ethics, responsibilities and rights, and religion. Finally, we talk about the future of conservatism.--A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, LUCY, MANVIR SINGH, PETRA WEIMANN, CAROLA FEEST, MAURO JÚNIOR, 航 豊川, TONY BARRETT, NIKOLAI VISHNEVSKY, STEVEN GANGESTAD, TED FARRIS, AND ROBINROSWELL!A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, NICK GOLDEN, CHRISTINE GLASS, IGOR NIKIFOROVSKI, PER KRAULIS, AND BENJAMIN GELBART!AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!

This is my message to the Jews. It follows up on my video about Christian/Muslim relations. I mention Elon Musk, Philo of Alexandria, Caligula, Suetonius, Claudius, Prescilla, Aquila, Gallio, Sosthenes, Jusitn Martyr, Trypho, Simon Bar Kokhba, Polycarp, Constantine, Athanasius of Alexandria, Caiaphas, Paul of Samosata, Photinus of Galatia, Arius, Constantius II, Gregory of Nyssa, Hank Kruse, Theodosius the Great, Ambrose of Milan, Julian the Apostate, Aphrahat the Persian Sage, Nestorius of Constantinople, Justinian the Great, John Calvin, Michael Servetus, Marian Hillar, Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, Malcolm Collins, John Locke, Andrzej Wiszowaty, Samuel Przypkowski, Isaac Newton, John Milton, Benedict Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, David Hume, Joseph Priestly, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Hannah Adams, Mordecai Noah, The Apostle Paul, and more.

In this fourth installment on the Problem of Evil, Dr. Jacobs explores the complex relationship between divine providence and human freedom. What does it mean that God delegates subsovereignce to creation? And how does divine foreknowledge interact with human self-determination? Tune in as we examine biblical figures like Abraham, Job, and Saul alongside the desecration of goodness and the atheist's problem with evil. This episode lays crucial groundwork for understanding the synergistic nature of providence before our final exploration of theodicy.All the links: X: https://x.com/NathanJacobsPodSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0hSskUtCwDT40uFbqTk3QSApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nathan-jacobs-podcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenathanjacobspodcastSubstack: https://nathanajacobs.substack.com/Website: https://www.nathanajacobs.com/Academia: https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/NathanAJacobs 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:13 The rational ordering principle00:13:17 What is the individual? 00:32:05 Divine foreknowledge 00:40:08 Abraham, Job, & Saul 00:52:06 Providence: blueprint or synergy? 01:01:29 The desecration of goodness01:08:28 The atheist's evil problem 01:18:51 So why doesn't God intervene? 01:34:30 God delegates subsovereignce  01:46:06 A critical feature of providence 01:49:51 What DOES God do? 01:56:49 The divine energies 02:16:40 The synergistic nature of providence 02:27:17 Engaging in self-determinationOther words for the algorithm… Leibniz, A defense of God, Epicurus, David Hume, Heraclitus, The Problem of Pain, The Problem of Divine Hiddenness, Christianity, Eastern Christianity, Orthodox Christian, Christianity, Evangelical, Protestant, Catholicism, Catholics, pantheism, Empedocles, body-soul dualism, metaphysical dualism, Manichaeism, Augustine of Hippo, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Nicene Creed, The Arian Dispute, Christology, Seven Ecumenical Councils, Jonathan Pageau, Fr. Josiah Trenham, Jordan Peterson, Pints With Aquinas, Christian apologetics, theology, Alex O'Connor, John of Damascus, Alvin Plantinga, modal logic, Scholastics, the consequent will of God, Origen, complex goods, Theism, philosophy of religion, natural theology, moral philosophy, ontological argument, teleological argument, cosmological argument, ancient philosophy, patristics, church fathers, suffering, existentialism, free will, determinism, sovereignty, divine attributes, omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence, theological ethics, moral evil, natural evil, comparative religion, religious epistemology, divine justice, meaning of suffering, spiritual formation, rationalism, empiricism, atheism, agnosticism, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, Bishop Barron, apologetics debate, philosophical theology, Thomas Aquinas, divine providence, spiritual warfare, eschatology, redemptive suffering, qualified omnipotence

Watch here: https://youtu.be/0jUZKIoyDPY  In this episode of Liberalism in Question, Rob sits down with historian and journalist Simon Heffer to explore the rich and complex history of liberalism. From the intellectual breakthroughs of the Scottish Enlightenment to the enduring influence of Adam Smith, we trace the evolution of liberal thought and its impact on modern society. How did thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill shape the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government? What challenges has liberalism faced over the centuries, and how has it adapted? Join us for a deep dive into the historical roots of classical liberalism.

Circular David Hume & His Critics Finishing up looking at David Hume's Philosophy and we see that Hume is being so circular that you'll find yourself dizzy. While he redefines miracles, provides circular arguments, and then begs the question, Hume won't even allow the possibility of a miracle claim to be presented to be considered. Ol' circular David Hume is not being a good philosopher and he's being a bit lazy. Timeline: 00:00 - Introduction 02:20 - Hume's Circular Argument Is Enough To Make Your Head Spin 04:30 - Hume Might Have Argued Slightly - Racistly 05:42 - Hume's Being Lazy Even Though He Claimed An Inductive Argument 08:32 - Critics Of Hume During His Day 08:58 - William Paley's Hume Smackdown 11:11 - James B. Mozley On Hume Not Allowing For Evidence To Be Presented 14:11 - People Today Are More Against Hume Than Ever Before 15:10 - Hume's Circular Arguments Begs The Question Of Miracles 18:25 - Conclusion BOOK LINKS: Main Book - Miracles by Craig Keener: Kindle Hardcover Logos ChristianBook.com     Other Book - Miracles Today by Craig Keener: Kindle Paperback Audible Logos ChristianBook.com All episodes, short clips, & blog - https://www.cavetothecross.com

Watch here: https://youtu.be/TgeMnPeo-Tc In this episode of Liberalism in Question, Rob sits down with historian and journalist Simon Heffer to explore the rich and complex history of liberalism. From the intellectual breakthroughs of the Scottish Enlightenment to the enduring influence of Adam Smith, we trace the evolution of liberal thought and its impact on modern society. How did thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill shape the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government? What challenges has liberalism faced over the centuries, and how has it adapted? Join us for a deep dive into the historical roots of classical liberalism.

Can Hume Get A Witness? Looking at David Hume's philosophy on miracles, now we find ourselves not seeing Hume interact with miracle claims, but questioning if someone can even be a witness to a miracle. Can Hume get a witness? It seems his standard is both circular and redefining of key terms. We see that taking Hume at his standard not only allows for no inductive evidence to come in but leads to some repercussions in daily life that would destroy most of our knowledge. So, ya know, the small things. Timeline: 00:00 - Introduction 03:14 - Hume's Epistemology - Deductive Rather Inductive 04:25 - Begging The Question With Uniformity Of Nature 06:38 - Hume Wanting Testimony - No! Not That Testimony! 07:56 - Surveying Witnesses And Their Interpretations Of Miracles 10:14 - Hume's Circularity With Human Experience & Uniformity Of Nature 12:31 - Hume's Circularity Of What Makes For A Good Witness To Miracles 15:00 - Dismissing What's Never Been Seen With People Who Have Claimed To See It 15:57 - Grant Hume His Standard And See What Happens - Ut Oh! 18:50 - We All Rely On Testimony To Live & In Life 20:35 - Conclusion BOOK LINKS: Main Book - Miracles by Craig Keener: Kindle Hardcover Logos ChristianBook.com     Other Book - Miracles Today by Craig Keener: Kindle Paperback Audible Logos ChristianBook.com All episodes, short clips, & blog - https://www.cavetothecross.com

Jennifer, Çınla, and François talk with André Lapidus, Professor Emeritus of the History of Economic Thought in the Laboratoire PHARE at University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, regarding his work on David Hume, the history of ideas about usury, and economic historiography.   

Dismantling David Hume We start dismantling David Hume at the best place to start - the beginning. Hume's definition of miracles, his epistemology, and his claim of neutrality are the best places to see if the foundation of his critique cracks or even fails to support his claims. Timeline: 00:00 - Introduction 01:35 - Hume & The Philosophy Of Science 02:55 - Hume As Rhetorician Of Old Ideas 03:44 - Not All Empiricists Followed Hume's Skepticism 04:34 - The Real Rise Of Anti-Miracles During The Time Of Hume 05:26 - Hume's Basis For Being Anti-Miracle 07:46 - Where Could One Allow For Miracles To Be Considered On A Regular Basis 09:01 - Miracles - Theology Over Science 10:39 - Hume's Violations Of Natural Law - For No Reason 16:49 - Theism's Definition Of Natural Law Vs. Hume's 18:54 - Hume's Own Violation Of His Epistemology - Induction 24:13 - Hume's Not Neutral Argument For Miracles 30:12 - Conclusion BOOK LINKS: Main Book - Miracles by Craig Keener: Kindle Hardcover Logos ChristianBook.com     Other Book - Miracles Today by Craig Keener: Kindle Paperback Audible Logos ChristianBook.com All episodes, short clips, & blog - https://www.cavetothecross.com

Crowley points to David Hume's essays as ‘the Classic of Academic Scepticism.' Having previously dipped into Hume, we'll now move our attention to his ‘Of Miracles', where he considers the application of reason to the evidence of testimony.

The Intro To Critiquing David Hume We enter our into to critiquing David Hume by setting the stage for what our author will talk about. We do what should always be done with philosophical concepts and that is define our terms! Then we provide some background history to set the stage for giving Hume his due. Timeline: 00:00 - Introduction 02:40 - What To Do With David Hume? 05:55 - 5 Things To Address With David Hume 10:22 - The Nature Of The Question - Naturalism Methodology Vs. Philosophical Naturalism 12:57 - An Accurate Definition Of A Miracle - Not Hume's 13:58 - The Ability To Examine Evidence For Miracles 15:42 - What It Takes To Not Allow God To Be An Explanation For Maybe Miracles 18:52 - Hume's Argument From Nature Is Problematic 19:49 - The Philosopher Most Influential Against Miracles During The Time of Hume - Wasn't Hume 20:06 - Spinoza Defining Out Answers To Miracle Claims 24:07 - Conclusion LINK: 06:35 - InspiringPhilosophy & Lawrence Krauss Debate BOOK LINKS: Main Book - Miracles by Craig Keener: Kindle Hardcover Logos ChristianBook.com     Other Book - Miracles Today by Craig Keener: Kindle Paperback Audible Logos ChristianBook.com All episodes, short clips, & blog - https://www.cavetothecross.com

This video covers David Hume's skeptical philosophy and its influence on the way people think in the modern world. 

Zapraszam do wysłuchania drugiej części spotkania z Davidem Hume'm. W tej części doprecyzuję wyjaśnienie istoty jego odkrycia filozoficznego. Podaję też przykład osobistego stoickiego zastosowania wymogu Hume'a. Wspominam też oryginalną teorię moralną tego filozofa. Zapraszam do słuchania. Artykuł #131 – David Hume i stoicyzm, cz. 2. pochodzi z serwisu Ze stoickim spokojem.

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

It had to happen eventually: this week The Studies Show is all about philosophy. As we look at science in general, how do we decide what those studies are actually showing? Tom and Stuart take a look at the Big Two of philosophy of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with their respective theories of falsificationism and paradigm shifts. Both are theories that almost everyone interested in science has heard of—but both make far more extreme claims than you might think.The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine, the best place to go online for fact-rich, data-dense articles on science and technology, and how they've made the world a better place—or how they might do so in the future. To find all their essays, all for free, go to worksinprogress.co.Show notes* Tom's new book, Everything is Predictable: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World* Wagenmakers's 2020 study asking scientists how they think about scientific claims* David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the problem of induction * Bertrand Russell's 1946 book History of Western Philosophy* Popper's 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Popper* Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Kuhn* 2019 Scott Alexander review of the book* Michael Strevens's 2020 book The Knowledge Machine* Daniel Lakens's Coursera course on “improving your statistical inferences”CreditsThe Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

About the Lecture: During the 70 years of its existence, the Soviet Union claimed to be a communist state based on the philosophical doctrines of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and, at the later stages, Vladimir Lenin. This made philosophy a mandatory course in every Soviet university and led to the creation of a peculiar version of the history of philosophy. Leading Soviet specialists, such as Valentin Asmus and Igor Narskii, interpreted the history of philosophy as a dialectical struggle of oppositions, such as materialism and idealism, religion and science, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Consequently, they divided philosophers of the past into two camps: allies, whose theories preceded dialectical materialism, and foes, who belonged to the idealistic camp. This talk will highlight the principal patterns of the Soviet approach to the history of philosophy and illustrate them through the case study of Igor Narskii's interpretation of David Hume's theory. About the Speaker: Viacheslav Zahorodniuk was an assistant professor at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. He defended his PhD thesis, “The evolution of the ‘idea' concept in the British philosophy of the 17-18th centuries,” devoted to Locke's, Berkeley's, and Hume's epistemology. Zahorodniuk was a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at the University, working on a project on Hume's theory of knowledge. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Research in Humanities, working on the project “Early Childhood in the Early Modern: Locke's Accounts on Children Perception.” His interests also include Soviet studies, and an article, “Painted Red: The Soviet interpretations of Hume's epistemology,” is forthcoming in Hume Studies.

In this episode, Ben Watkins sits down with Professor Paul Russell to discuss David Hume, philosophy of religion, and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Professor Russell is a leading Hume scholar and author of “The Riddle of Hume's Treatise” which argues irreligion is central to understanding the naturalism and skepticism at the heart of Hume's philosophy, specially, that expressed in his “A Treatise of Human Nature.” These irreligious themes culminate in Hume's masterpiece: “Dialogues of concerning Natural Religion.” Professor Russell walks us through different models of god, the argument for design, the argument from evil, and what has been called “Hume's strange inversion” at the end of the Dialogues. Paul Russell's Website: https://sites.google.com/site/paulrussellubc/paul-russell Philpapers: https://philpeople.org/profiles/paul-russell Hume's Skepticism and the Problem of Atheism: https://philarchive.org/archive/RUSHSA-4#:~:text=theist%20nor%20an%20atheist%20but,%2F%20186%E2%80%93%2087%3B%20cp.

Co głosił David Hume? Dlaczego jest to jeden z najważniejszych nowożytnych filozofów? Co zawdzięczamy temu brytyjskiemu myślicielowi? Komu bliżej do stoików: Hume'owi czy Kartezjuszowi? Czy osoba praktykująca stoicyzm może czerpać z filozofii Hume'a? To tylko niektóre pytania, na które odpowiadam w dwuczęściowym cyklu poświęconym Hume'owi. Zapraszam do wysłuchania części pierwszej. Artykuł #130 – David Hume i stoicyzm, cz. 1. pochodzi z serwisu Ze stoickim spokojem.

durée : 00:17:49 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Albane Penaranda, Mathias Le Gargasson, Antoine Dhulster - Gilles Deleuze présente la philosophie de David Hume, célèbre penseur écossais du 18e siècle et l'un des fondateurs de l'économie politique. Théorie de l'association des idées, analyse du principe de causalité et conception de la nature humaine sont au menu de ce quart d'heure pédagogique. - réalisation : Massimo Bellini - invités : Gilles Deleuze Philosophe français

On this episode of ID The Future, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer concludes his conversation with Praxis Circle's Doug Monroe. In this last section of a multi-part interview, Dr. Meyer explains why theistic evolution – the belief that God used the evolutionary process to create – is an incoherent position to take on the origin and development of life. There's no need, Meyer says, to attempt to reconcile theistic belief with a dying theory. Meyer also discusses the topic of miracles. He thinks David Hume's argument against miracles is weak and goes on to explain how miracles demonstrate the independent action of a conscious agent and why they don't violate the laws of physics. It's an intriguing conclusion to a wide-ranging conversation. Source

How has economic thought evolved throughout the years along with the development of the other modern science disciplines? What is the role of human agency, and what are the philosophical underpinnings of economic thought?Margaret Schabas is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and also the author of several books. Her latest work is A Philosopher's Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism.Greg and Margaret discuss how economics evolved from natural philosophy. The conversation delves into historical perspectives and the major influence of figures like Adam Smith and David Hume. Margaret explains the interplay between natural sciences and social sciences. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Adam SmithJohn Stuart MillAristotleJohn LockeDavid HumeLaffer curvePhillips curveGresham's lawJames Clerk MaxwellFriedrich HayekMacroeconomicsJohn Maynard KeynesUnSILOed Episode 467: Vernon L. SmithGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of British ColumbiaProfile on WikipediaHer Work:Amazon Author PageA Philosopher's Economist: Hume and the Rise of CapitalismA World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical EconomicsThe Natural Origins of EconomicsEpisode Quotes:How the 18th century shaped our understanding of economic growth and labor09:13: The real concept of growth of an expanding economy really only takes hold in the early 18th century. And then the question is, how does this happen, and is it through labor? And if it's labor, is it at the expense of other organisms? Arguably, it is. We humans are now going to edge up to 10 billion, and presumably, we've done that very much at the expense of other organisms. But that's not how they're thinking in the 18th century; they're not really thinking that way at all. So then there are a lot of questions that don't get fully answered, and the labor theory of value is an attempt, I think, partly to answer that: that it's through efficiency of labor and increased skills and quality of labor, the intensification of labor, say per unit hour, through the assistance of capital. That allows us to produce more, and we're clearly much wealthier now than our ancestors three centuries ago, at least on average.Philosophy is best grounded in historical analysis53:22: Philosophy, to me, is always best grounded in historical analysis. So, every book I've written, I pose a philosophical question: Why is economics a mathematical science? Or why do people believe there are laws in the economy? And then I pursue it historically, because I think just doing it in one's study, without the empirical resources of the actual discipline, is a disservice, too. But those are my views. I'm trained in the history and philosophy of science, and I think it's a discipline. I think it's best done if you have important philosophical questions to motivate your historical research, and vice versa. To do philosophy of science really is best done if you can appeal or note important historical case studies.Strong empiricism and the enlightenment's legacy in social sciences42:03: I think that's the reigning view: that there is an empirical fact of the matter that can resolve a lot of questions that once were purely philosophical, and, of course, there'll always be disagreements empirically, and there's always question-begging moves in what methods one uses. And so the empirical record will never fully resolve any question, but I think the general thrust is towards a strong empiricism, and, in that sense, I think that's the 18th century—the Enlightenment. If you think about the great philosophers of the 18th century, starting with people like Voltaire, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, and Smith—and one can go on—they're all contributing to what we call the social sciences.

Nicholas Christakis is a Renaissance Man, with whom I have wanted to have a conversation for some time. There was so much to talk about with him, and each item was so fascinating, that we barely scratched the surface, even in the lengthy discussion we had. This is a great Thanksgiving Day listen.. instead of football games! One can get a sense of the breadth of his activities by considering his positions at Yale University. He is Sterling Professor (the highest endowed chair at Yale) of Social and Natural History, as well as Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, and Professor in the Departments of Statistics, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and in the School of Management! Nicholas' personal history is almost as fascinating as his academic accomplishments. Born in New Haven to parents who were graduate students at Yale (his father was a student of the notorious Gregory Breit, about whom I heard many stories when years later I became a Professor in that same department, and his mother was a graduate student of Nobel Laureate Lars Onsager), he moved back to Greece when his father had to return for military service, so Nicholas's first language was Greek. His parents moved back to the US several years later, and Nicholas grew up in the US, returning to Yale University to study biology. All throughout his childhood he grew up under the shadow of his mother's fatal illness, and he and his brothers all became doctor's in response. But while in medical school, the bug for scientific research caused him to pursue both a Masters degree in Public Health and eventually a PhD in Sociology. Moving to the University of Chicago, Nicholas focused on caring for dying patients, and exploring how their partnerships affected their health as well as that of their partners. This began an eventual transition to studying not pairs of individuals, but networks of human beings. His laboratory has done groundbreaking experimental work studying how networks of humans operate and how one might improve their functioning. To understand human networks he has also studied networks of animals including our nearest cousins, Primates. The results of his investigations informed his most recent remarkable book, Blueprint, focused on the notion that evolution has endowed us to create and function in ‘good' societies. We spent time discussing all aspects of this work, from the impacts of evolutionary biology on both human and primate societies, artificial communities, and the strange mating rituals of both other animals, and humans, all of which are more diverse than one might otherwise imagine. The exceptions however, prove the rule that a ‘social suite' of characteristics, including cooperation, love and partnership, leadership and other factors, can produce a successful society. Along the way we discussed topics that appear intuitively surprising, such as culture within animal groups, and how behavior can ultimate affect genetics, something that sounds Lamarckian , but is instead a wonderful example of natural selection. We discussed the philosophical question of the nature of ‘good', and whether one can indeed get ‘ought' from ‘is', as David Hume famously questioned, and ended with a discussion of how AI will affect human societies. It was truly a fascinating privilege to have this discussion, and whetted my appetite for further conversations with this lovely and remarkable man. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Adam engages in a thought-provoking discussion with theologian and author Matthew McGuire, whose book A Magical World offers fresh insights into the reality of miracles. Together, they examine and refute David Hume's influential argument against miracles, presenting a robust defense rooted in theology, philosophy, and reason. ‎Music:Abstract Style‎‎Musician:QubeSounds‎‎URL:https://pixabay.com/music/abstract-style-121455/‎You can Purchase Matthew's book at MattMcGuire.Net

Sevsek de sevmesek de alışveriş hayatımızın parçalarından biri. Hepimiz markete gidiyor, reklam izliyor, internetten bir şeyler satın alıyoruz. İyi ama tercihlerimizi neye göre belirliyoruz? Neyi neden aldığımızın, neyi sevip neyi sevmediğimizin, neden o markayı değil de diğerini tercih ettiğimizin farkında mıyız? Daha da önemlisi, tüm kararlarımızı gerçekten özgür irademizle mi veriyoruz? 111 Hz'in bu bölümünde nöro-pazarlamanın ne olduğunu ve bizi manipüle edip edemeyeceğini konuşuyor, özgür irademiz üzerine bir sorgulama yapıyoruz.Sunan: Barış ÖzcanHazırlayan: Kevser Yağcı BiçiciSes Tasarım ve Kurgu: Metin BozkurtYapımcı: Podbee Media------- Podbee Sunar ------Bu Podcast, Hiwell hakkında reklam içerir..Pod50 kodumuzla Hiwell'de ilk seansınızda geçerli %50 indirimi kullanmak için Hiwell'i şimdi indirin. 1500'ü aşkın uzman klinik psikolog arasından size en uygun olanlarla terapi yolculuğunuza kolaylıkla başlayın.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm up in Glasgow and we're devoting this podcast to all things Scottish, kkicking off with the amazing Scottish Enlightenment. Why did 18th-century Scotland emerge as a crucible for radical ideas, drawing intellectuals, inventors, and innovators alike? The Scottish Enlightenment marked an era where thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith thrived amidst newfound economic growth, sparked by an influx of wealth from trade routes and ventures (like Scotland's ill-fated attempt to build a canal in Panama). But unlike France, where revolutionary fervor overthrew established order, Scotland's intellectual revolution developed under the stability of the British Empire, with Scots integrating into its growing power. As thinkers flocked to Glasgow's and Edinburgh's salons and Masonic lodges, they fostered advancements in empiricism, economics, and even steam technology, laying foundations for the industrial age. With Ireland facing a similar boom today, we explore whether prosperity will again inspire an era of transformative thinking.Buy the new book here: https://linktr.ee/moneydavidmcwilliams Join the gang! https://plus.acast.com/s/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why does the U.S. use Fahrenheit when Celsius is better? Would you quit your job if a coin flip told you to? And how do you get an entire country to drive on the other side of the road? SOURCES:Christian Crandall, professor of psychology at the University of Kansas.Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio and co-author of the Freakonomics books.Scott Eidelman, professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas.David Hume, 18th century Scottish philosopher.Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard University.Steve Levitt, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago, host of People I (Mostly) Admire, and co-author of the Freakonomics books.John McWhorter, professor of linguistics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University.Mark Twain, 19-20th century American writer. RESOURCES:"What Countries Use the Imperial System?" by William Harris and Sascha Bos (HowStuffWorks, 2023)."UK Quietly Drops Brexit Law to Return to Imperial Measurements," by George Parker (Financial Times, 2023)."Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness," by Steven D. Levitt (The Review of Economic Studies, 2021)."A ‘Thrilling' Mission to Get the Swedish to Change Overnight," by Maddy Savage (BBC, 2018)."Why We Can't Quit the QWERTY Keyboard," by Rachel Metz (MIT Technology Review, 2018)."Why Americans Still Use Fahrenheit Long After Everyone Else Switched to Celsius," by Zack Beauchamp (Vox, 2015)."The Intuitive Traditionalist: How Biases for Existence and Longevity Promote the Status Quo," by Scott Eidelman and Christian Crandall (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2014)."What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?" (Edge, 2011)."Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error," by Robert Lee Hotz (Los Angeles Times, 1999). EXTRAS:"Would You Let a Coin Toss Decide Your Future?" by Freakonomics Radio (2013)."The Upside of Quitting," by Freakonomics Radio (2011).

In this weekend episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc explore David Hume's life and role in the Scottish Enlightenment. They discuss the warning to Israel to hold back, Tulsi Gabbard trailed by TSA, Trump-Harris debate will happen, Harris-Walz "vibes-joy" campaign, Walz's past works against him.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.