The Wes Cecil Podcast

Nietzsche emphasizes the difficulties we will encounter as we attempt to abandon morals and see the world as it is -free from natural laws and order and subject only to the interplay of power. If nothing else, you can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An example of what it means to think with VALUES as opposed to FINANCE. Not saying the workers are correct, though I agree with them, but that their arguments are coming from an entirely different value set.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Democratic governments are globally unpopular and part of the reason is the bind the Late Capitalist logic places them in. Growth and investment GOOD we should do MORE so everything keeps getting BETTER while at the same time having to continuously cut budgets, services, promises and often raise taxes - all unpopular. As of yet, they have not recognized the faultiness of the premises, neither right nor left, and hence they cannot begin to address the issues we actually face.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain...

So now Nietzsche wants to point out how systematically our cultures and grammar influence our capacity to think philosophically - further undermining the notion of Philosophy as an arbiter of transcendent truth. Then, in chapter 21, he decides to attack cause and effect, number, law, relativity and many other concepts we like to think help us think but which Nietzsche considers just so much mythologizing.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from F...

I ran into such a perfect example of financialization - stepping in between landlords and tenants for rent payments - I just had to share. I try to be cynical, but I can’t keep up.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The elimination of all measures of worth besides price leaves us lost in a world where, with the removal of price, we have no ability to make judgements whatsoever. This is perhaps the single most debilitating impact of Late Capitalism.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A response to some comments about Steam and a note on an interesting quote from Andre Gide.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spotify represents a case study in how the logic of Late Capitalism ramifies throughout our lives in ways that destroys fundamental aspects of our culture. Our love of music is leveraged to destroy the ecosystem of music creation and enjoyment. The pattern represented by Spotify is repeated throughout every cultural sphere.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor...

So much for Free Will. Herein Nietzsche attacks the whole question of Free Will - not taking a side but simply pointing out the meaninglessness of most of the conversations surrounding free will.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In an almost Zen Koan kind of way, Late Capitalism increasingly immerses us in a society where we are simultaneously told money is THE most important value but wherein we are no longer able to even determine the price of things. This fundamental rewriting of our assumed economic structure - wherein we can make informed decisions - is eroding the dubious yet pervasive idea that somehow if we get our finances correct everything will work out.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course mate...

Nietzsche rejects Sensualism, Materialism, Metaphysics and any simple understanding of Science with his core concern - an Ethics built on Joy and Vigour derived from a Will to Power that he sees in all life. It is not error he is against, but error that leads to sleepiness. Nietzsche wants a philosophy that wakes us up.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast...

One of the social impacts of Late Capitalism is the undermining of our sense of history. Expanding on a pre-existing pattern in American culture, which partly explains why the US is at the forefront of financialization, the loss of a historical sense disorients us in an endless, meaningless present. The logic of Late Capitalism consistently works to gather our attention, emphasize the individual, and disorient us in a world without value except for cash.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading list...

Having attacked most western philosophy, Nietzsche presents one of his core arguments - that all these claims to universal truth and discovery are simply a self-serving pose on the part of philosophers. Understanding his argument fundamentally alters the way we think not just about philosophy, but the construction of our understanding of the world itself.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See aca...

The creeping presence of Financialization would not be so upsetting if it weren’t that it represents such an odd/counterintuitive world view. The logic of Late Capitalism is not, for the average person, either intuitive or even really comprehensible. So we are surrounded by systems that operate on alien logic designed, as often as not, to exploit us.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hoste...

Wow, Nietzsche rolls out all the rhetorical cannons to open Beyond Good and Evil. He attempts to undercut both the history and focus of Western philosophy and introduce a new basis of thinking based on a different approach to understanding the human.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q17: The Planet?

“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. T...

Financialization

The creeping intervention of global financial actors into every aspect of our lives is an often overlooked, but profound, aspect of late capitalism. These actors follow a very different logic from that of normal commerce. To appreciate the depths of the penetration of these actors I recommend an experiment where one tries to live for a week spending only cash and avoiding all major chains.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’...

This read along series presents one of Nietzsche’s most important and confusing works. Written after Thus Spake Zarathustra, it continues to develop some of his central themes and attempts to reground Ethics in a completely new fashion.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q16: Nihilism?

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. 

Structuralism: The term ‘structuralism’ can be applied to any analysis that emphasizes structures and relations, but it usually designates a twentieth-century European (especially French) school of thought that applies the methods of structural linguis...

The revolution has happened, and we are its victims. If you feel a bit hopeless and disoriented by the world today, this is not just you or some random happenstance. You are being disoriented, and your sense of hope is being systematically undermined by a global economic logic—Late Capitalism—that has come to dominate almost every aspect of our lives. This series is not meant to be anti-commerce or intentionally backward-looking, but rather an attempt to situate ourselves relative to the realities of the world we now inhabit.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your que...

A reflection on the relative nature of Reading vs TV and the peculiarities of both mediums. Indeed, given how much time we spend engaged in watching various kinds of media, I think it is a bit shocking how little time we spend reflecting on the nature of the media and how it impacts us.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.c...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q15: Truth?

Principia Mathematica

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the...

The accumulated gap between our environment and our needs as primates have grown increasingly large over the last 100 years. As a result virtually every measure of health and well being have become shockingly negative. Yet we have little sense of why or what is happening because the systemic issues we face are difficult to identify in the sea of changes we experience in the world since the industrial revolution.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and...

We continually tell ourselves stories about every aspect of our lives. Taking a little time to reflect on the stories we tell ourselves is often quite revelatory about how our thinking is directed and limited. Likely it is impossible for humans to live without a rich life filled with stories, but the stories are often under our control to a remarkable degree.

Image attribution: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer disc...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q14: What is this science thing?

Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception. Novum O...

While the industrial revolution is widely recognized as a turning point in human history, less well appreciated is why it has been so influential. Each of the developments were undoubtedly important, however I argue it has been the rate of change that has had a greater impact than any particular change. As primates we are simply incapable of adapting as quickly as we have been presented with change and the stress is definitely showing. 

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists...

Two famous works that critiqued the Moral structure of turn of the century French society did so in entirely different ways. While Gide is more known for his critique, I argue Proust’s critique is far, far more important and powerful. Both authors are worth reading, however, it is Proust who forces us to join him in his reconsideration of whether we are aware of the fact or not.

Image attributions: See page for author, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questi...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q13: Enlightened?

We can see from this that the sovereign power, absolute, sacred and inviolable as it is, does not and cannot exceed the limits of general conventions, and that every man may dispose at will of such goods and liberty as these conventions leave him; so that the Sovereign never has a right to lay more charges on one subject than on another, because, in that case, the question becomes particular, and ceases to be within its competency. Rousseau Social Contract

When in the Course...

The combination of new crops, new outlooks, new technologies but, most importantly, the expansion of the primate intellectual and imaginative capacities led to the explosive growth in human population that created the world we live in today.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q12: What was reborn?

1374 death of Petrarch   1413 Brunelleschi systematizes perspective 

1439 Movable Press 1492 Columbus  1514 More's Utopia and Machiavelli's The Prince 1528 Castiglionie's The Courtier 1543 Copernicus The Revolution of the Heavens 

No one, it seems to me, can hope to equal Augustine. Who, nowadays, could hope to equal one who, in my judgment, was the greatest in an age fertile in great minds? Petrarch.

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with...

Despite the general acknowledgement of the importance of the printing press, I argue that why the press had such an impact is largely misunderstood. The printing press was the technology that most powerfully transitioned us from a face to face very personal experience of the world to one in which abstraction, distance, time and imagination slowly came to dominate our experience of the world.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from F...

A follow up to my lecture on America seen from France that explores in more detail some of the data behind American consumerism and how this translates into lived experience. In sum, while consumerism is a real issue everywhere, the comparisons between Europe and the US mask how utterly dedicated the US is to consumerism as a way of life.

Image Attribution: Lionel Allorge, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer disc...

Following a question from a Patreon member, here is a reflection on Baudrillard and his theory of the Simulacra and how it relates to us and our condition today. Spoiler alert, I’m pretty sure he was really accurate in his analysis of the problem. Seemingly much less helpful, however, in what we can do about the position we find ourselves today.

Image Attribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ayaleila, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q11: Why Golden?

800 ad Abbasid Capital is established in Baghdad displacing the Umayids

801-873 Al Kindi and the Translation Movement

980-1037 Avicenna Medicine, Philosophy Bukhara

1126-1200 Averroes and the Al-Andalus

1258 Mongols sack Baghdad and destroy most libraries and books

Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī played a significant role in the development of algebra, arithmetic and Hindu-Arabic numerals. He has been described as the father of algebra. Another Persian mathematician, Omar Khayyam, is credit...

Wow, Iron is a huge, huge deal. Both the impact of the Iron itself and the cultural infrastructure necessary to harness the potential of Iron contributed to a revolution in civilization and a noticeable increase in both the global population and the rate of population increase. In some ways, Iron is likely as significant a contributor to civilization's growth as agriculture.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month...

A reflection on some of the differences I have experienced between France and the US. I start with some, at least to me, startling statistics about French working lives and economic situation and then expand to a more subjective sense of what I have ‘felt’ living in France that is quite distinct from the US. Delivered in lieu of my cancelled lecture.

Image Attribution: Lionel Allorge, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access t...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q10: So, About God?

Timeline of Catholicism

313 Legalization of Christianity under Constantine

325-800 Beginning with the Council of Nicaea a series of councils attempt to deal with various controversies and Heresies.

900-1200 Catholic Church consolidates Papal primacy and civil power and begins to systematize church hierarchy.

1200-1520 Beginning of the Inquisition and rise of the power of the Franciscans and Dominicans as enforcers of Church authority ending in the Reformation. 

Gnosticism 100: The word is t...

The Anthropological and Archaeological records strongly suggest we love, love, love creating gods. Whether via animism or anthropomorphic super-beings, humans seem to love placing ourselves within the context of a world filled with supernatural beings different from, yet fundamentally similar to humans. 

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two well regarded authors to the impact of AI robots and their impacts on humans as their subjects for novels. The results are a fascinating contrast in tone, style, and emphasis that highlights the many different reasons, and ways, we read.

Image credit: https://easy-peasy.ai

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informa...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q9: The New World?

Mayan Civilization 

2,000-750 B.C. earliest developments

750 B.C. to 250 A.D. Cities, construction of monumental architecture

250- 900 A.D. Long Count Calendar and spread of city states. Height of Mayan Civilization

900-1500 Post classical period, shift in power centers, fragmentation.

1500-1600 Contact and conquest by the Spanish

Aztec Civilization

600 A.D. Nahuatl speaking peoples begin to settle in Mexico

600-1400 The Mixica a...

Perhaps THE breakthrough that makes the major components of civilization possible, writing transformed our capacity to understand both the world and ourselves. Nonetheless, literacy was historically exceedingly rare and even today is not universally considered an important capacity.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our powerful belief in the economic narrative of investment and growth blinds us to the actual nature of the world we experience and the problems we face. Much like Luther’s critique of the Catholic church, re-thinking this concept would be so disruptive as to cause a complete rethink of our approach to economic challenges - something we are so far unwilling to do.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from Fra...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q8: Why is life so hard?

1 All existence is dukkha. The word dukkha has been variously translated as ‘suffering’, ‘anguish’, ‘pain’, or ‘unsatisfactoriness’. The Buddha’s insight was that our lives are a struggle, and we do not find ultimate happiness or satisfaction in anything we experience. This is the problem of existence.

2. The cause of dukkha is craving. The natural human tendency is to blame our difficulties on things outside ourselves. But the Buddha says that their actual root is to be found in the mind itself. In particular ou...

With the excess food available from the slow transition to Agriculture, cities began to form approximately 12,000 years ago. Nonetheless, as recently as 100 years ago most humans still did not live in urban settings. We are still learning how to adjust both mentally and culturally to putting so many primates in such a small area.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.c...

A reflection on the way in which Philosophy and its uses is so often misrepresented as an attempt to be RIGHT. However, this mistakes the power of philosophy and how it can help us understand our lives and our world.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q7: Where is the universe?

He who sees all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings, he

never turns away from It (the Self).

He who perceives all beings as the Self' for him how can there be

delusion or grief, when he sees this oneness (everywhere) ?

He (the Self) is all-encircling, resplendent, bodiless, spotless,

without sinews, pure, untouched by sin, all-seeing, all-knowing,

transcendent, self-existent; He has disposed all things duly for<...

After Art and Tools, Agriculture is clearly one of the most significant breakthroughs in the evolution of human culture. The changes both socially and intellectually necessary to enable a transition to sedentary cereal growing are likely still incomplete. 

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A brief argument for a few habits of mind and time use that are necessary for developing a life of the mind. Not overly prescriptive, but time for quiet reflection, spending time with powerful people that inform and inspire, and creating an outlet for one’s own discoveries are central to experiencing our own power.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priva...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q6: What can we learn from nature?

Hundred Schools of Thought (600-200 B.C.)

Legalism: Humans are inherently corrupt and social order can only be maintained through strict hierarchy that imposes order through force.

Mohism: Human society is best served through equality, frugality, and ethical education focused on helping people understand their own best interests. An early example of utilitarian and materialist thinking.

Logicians: Focused on correct thinking, argumentation, naming and use of language as the method best suited to...

Likely more important than tool use and necessary for the development of more sophisticated tools, the development and creation of art marks the fundamental development of the modern mind. Here we see the imagination put to work in ways that fundamentally altered both the world and how we understood and understand the world today. At the very dawn of the Upper Paleolithic the arts become central to human society.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s week...

It may feel like the end of the world, but it is mostly just the end of our conception of how the world works. When our fundamental values shift then it often undermines our sense of order and prevents the coherent presentation of political arguments. However, and hopefully, it also represents the opening for new ideas and systems to develop

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q5: Why was the past so great?

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tool use has evolved more slowly and means something different than has generally been understood. Over three million years of practice with tools led, eventually, to a revolution not so much in tools as in the social structure and mental outlook of the primates we are. 

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Henri Bergson explored the tensions between two different conceptions of time - the objective/scientific and the subjective/experienced. The latter he called la duree’ and, despite being how we sense the world, it has been almost totally overwhelmed by the objective measure as represented by the Day-Planner mindset.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q4: How should we govern?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Article I – Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.

Article II – The goal of any politi...

An introduction to a new series exploring the profound influence our primate heritage has had over milennia in shaping practically every aspect of our world today. A different approach that I hope will open some of the deep structures that shape our understanding of the world.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to peer conversation, course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We often think of corporations as primarily destructive for their exploitation of natural resources. However, it is possible that the destruction of the social fabric of countries and communities is even more damaging to our long term health. Yet, this is a little commented on aspect of the Capitalist worldview.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to peer conversation, course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more in...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q3: How should people live?

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few thoughts to take us out. Most importantly Plato provides a model - as well as a trap - for us as we pursue philosophy and thinking in general. Thanks to everyone who read along with me!

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our society's obsession with Data and Information leads to a series of systematic errors in both our understanding of the world and how we approach all kinds of problems we face. We refuse to accept that DATA and INFORMATION cannot solve what are fundamentally ethical problems. In any case, many of our challenges are not soluble but aspects of the human condition that can only be addressed in different ways depending on circumstances.

Image attribution: Sketchplanations

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain acce...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q2: What the hell is going on?

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Other than our concept of Romantic Love, Body Soul Split, Self-Improvement and Truth, Plato really has had no influence at all . . . I mean, Plato is just everywhere - I mean EVERYWHERE!

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wes and Jeremy take questions from PATREON members on Plato's Symposium Lectures 4-11

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q1: What the hell happened?

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The influence of Plato grows from the repeated introduction of Platonic ideas into Catholicism, Calvinism, Humanism, Romanacism, Enlightenment thought and even Scientific Rationalism. Platonic ideals surround us in so many ways it is difficult to actually narrow our focus to a few key points.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wes and Jeremy take questions from Patreon members on Plato's Symposium, Lectures 1 - 4

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our culture in theory tells us not to be stressed and filled with anxiety yet structurally virtually guarantees we will feel this way. Taoism works the other way around and singles out stress and anxiety as signs that whatever you are doing something is going wrong because those are feelings that demonstrate you are not living in harmony with the great Tao. 

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

H...

Enter Alcibiades - seemingly disrupting the entire structure of Plato’s dialogue, he actually works to underscore the power and truth of Socrates’ argument without ever actually engaging with the claims Socrates has made. We see and hear the quality of Socrates as a person rather than engage with the rationality of his thought. A masterclass in using misdirection and action to make arguments that would be impossible to support or articulate more directly.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, b...

If you feel confused and uneasy in a seemingly directionless world you are not crazy. We are experiencing a rapid transformation in all of the elements that create a sense of meaning and belonging and we both need, and perhaps, must create a new set of values if we are to regain a sense of peace.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wow, after all the build up, Socrates - through the voice of Diotima - delivers a truly radical conception of the nature of love. That it might lead us to personal divinity is perhaps the single most powerful in this section of the dialogue.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thanks for the questions and comments. A quick follow up to techno feudalism exploring some of the ideas in a little more depth and clarity - at least hopefully.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When our social narratives fail us, we are thrown back onto the values we create and defend. We can, and should, be the final arbiter of our world.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The final set-up for Socrates’ speech establishes both the importance of one who knows above generally accepted wisdom as well as the complete dismissal of the mythological concepts as presented so far. Plato has Socrates present a stunning refutation of the whole idea that what everyone has said so far can actually be true as a way of beginning his presentation of THE TRUTH.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2...

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard all discussed major aspects of what is today often called Techno-Feudalism. While some of the modern conceptions are certainly apt and insightful, they often overlook the fundamental trick being played on us of extracting value from us while pretending to provide value for us. Further, this is not post-industrial but rather industrialism gone wild in its consumption of capital, mining, manufacturing, building, energy and human capacity. When we think it is both necessary and somehow ‘information’ rather than forced on us and industrial, we miss a lot of what is happening in our worl...

A further exploration of the ways in which a willingness to open ourselves to the cultural influence of West Africa could potentially really help transform our lives for the better.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

While these speeches seem very different - and they are on the surface - they actually articulate a similar outlook expressed in very different terms. The idea of love driving us towards a unity with a universal force is key to understanding Plato’s ideas of Love and why and how he has been so influential.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

If you feel your current values are failing then one needs to search for new values. One readily available set of values is provided by the influence of West Africa that still exists in the United States.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So much for Phaedrus. Plato quickly moves to present core elements of his world view while undercutting the simple love for the gods. Again, everything is political, philosophical and very critical of his society all at the same time. Notice all of the now common concepts that Plato is sneaking in under the guise of a simple set of hymns to praise the gods. What could be wrong with that??

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’...

Shockingly, people are immersed in a series of internal narratives that impose a sense of threat and fear as a core element of existence. Embracing Joy, like Play, fundamentally alters our experience of the world and more accurately reflects the world we find ourselves inhabiting.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first speech comes from Phaedrus. He is sincere and well intentioned but delivers a seemingly very limited take on the nature of Love. As ever, there is a level of philosophy, politics and religious argumentation going on that is not that obvious on the surface.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a world of almost unimaginable opportunity to express ourselves, we still maintain a sense of ‘work’ as our defining characteristic. Embracing a sense of Play in our lives seems like we are abandoning our duties and subjecting ourselves to soul crushing poverty.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We reach the text itself. Hopefully I clarify why there is this strange framing element to the Symposium and the degree to which many of the seemingly odd asides and quotes are actually core to Plato’s general assault on the mytho-poetic concepts of Hellenistic society.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Well, forgot to mention that both the Reformation and the Enlightenment were heavily influenced by Platonic thought(!). As a test, if you’ve ever thought that SCIENCE is THE path to the TRUTH; congratulations, you’re a Neoplatonist.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

YOU ARE NOT A SLAVE:

Despite being by almost any measure some of the freest people in history, we consistently use language and express patterns suggesting we are in fact still peasant, serfs or slaves.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two main points in this introduction:

First, Plato is in deadly earnest in these dialogues trying to work out how his society and his class were crushed in a war and subject to tyranny and what, if anything, could be done. 

Second, Plato has had an unbelievable impact on our conception of the world through his influence on Christianity. Further, as we will explore in later episodes, his thinking is also foundational to the Enlightenment and Humanism - two intellectual movements that undercut the power of Christianity in Western thought while, oddly, increasing t...

Just a follow up to discuss the forces that shape the global real estate market and how our standard response - supply and demand - reveals the degree to which our minds are captured by a wild oversimplification of economic forces and the benighted nature of our collective imaginations faced with economic challenges.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor...

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMUNITY:

Another aspect of confusion comes from a loss of our immediate community that throws us onto an ever increasing sense of individualism and, hence, isolation. We struggle mightily to address the very rapid transition from life patterns established in small scale communities to individualism and national or even global patterns of thought.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acas...

CONCLUSION:

The conclusion to the capitalism series wherein I ramble a bit about the major concepts we have explored and why I think it is so important at this juncture in history to think about the influence capitalism has had on our conception of ourselves and our world.

Also, I checked the Euro Disney prices for a family of four, not counting transportation or hotel—the cost will be between 800 and 1700 euros. The price of coffee in Paris—roughly 3 or 4 euros depending on where you are. Feel free to make your own choices . . .

If you would like to participate in a Summer Symposium Seminar here’s your chance. Get a copy of the Symposium and get ready as I will launch June 9 when the Capitalism series is wrapped up. I will include short quizzes as a spur to questions and debates to hopefully help us really come to grips with this foundational text.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on...

SCARCITY AND ABUNDANCE:

We have inherited a set of values that are a misfit for the world we now inhabit. The tension between our past and our present is creating a strong sense of confusion and dislocation. This series explores some of the elements of this problem beginning with why, in a world of overwhelming abundance, we still feel beset by scarcity.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $...

The past tells us that our future with Capitalism is unlikely to suddenly change. Rather, we are likely to experience a slow evolution of values that undermines and constrains the power of capitalism and frees us to pursue other sets of values and create new worldviews that combine elements of the past but create new ideals for a new world.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted...

In this short parable from the Analects we see the idea that wisdom is relative both to situations and individuals. This approach to wisdom is markedly different from the notion of universal laws and absolute ontology that informs much of the Western philosophical tradition.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I know this sounds like a joke, but the joke was on me. This moment in the coffee shop highlighted how deeply I have internalized our cultural definition of wealth and riches despite, in theory, spending much of my life critiquing these kinds of cultural mindsets.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We reach today and discover, like 16th century Catholics, we know all the critiques of our condition but have difficulty imagining any possible alternative. This leads supposedly quite determinedly different arguments about both politics and economics to, upon reflection, represent very similar or perhaps even identical positions. Herein lies our struggle.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informa...

Searching for what we already have is one of the keys, if not the key, messages of Sufism. If you are a god, what are you looking for out in the world that is not already inside of you? This and related Sufi parables remind us that what we already have is what we are looking for.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast. See aca...

An introduction into why we find it hard to understand Hinduism. It is not a faith based religion, there is no book, there are not many actual rules or commandments, it embraces the world in all its complexities and confusions and has no impulse towards evangelism. All in all, it is very difficult for people raised in the Judeo-Christian ethos to understand what, exactly, is going on with Hinduism.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s week...

CAPITALISM: EP. 9

I argue that one of the problems we face today is simply confusion. We understand the ills of global capitalism, we are cynical about it, and we are perhaps even trying to be exploitative in response. However, none of this is really an answer to or alternative that addresses the core problems introduced by capitalism. Without new standards, whether borrowed from the past or created afresh, it is impossible to adequately respond to the many challenges we face in the world today.

*My comment on the cost of housing in the US...

The "sound of one hand clapping" is a famous, now seemingly trite and often ridiculed, Zen Koan that is quite profound. The Koan asks to pause and reflect on how much of our world is filled by ghosts of our own creation that have little or no actual relation to the world. A simple, powerful and difficult Koan.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast...

The concept of Digital Nomadism misrepresents both the concept of digital and of nomad. By confusing these concepts a narrative is created that argues for a mode of life that is exploitative of others and generally injurious for those who attempt to pursue this path. I argue that the whole concept reveals our deep confusion about how technology shapes our lives and often damages the quality of our lives.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s week...

CAPITALISM: EP. 8

We reach the end of the narrative arc for the Neo-Liberal global order only to discover we have no idea what comes next. The nearly alien nature of the modern corporation combined with global events of the last 15 years have unmoored our old assumptions but provided little or no guidance for what comes next.

Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!

Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month. 

Hosted on Acast...