Within Reason - #70 Philosophize This! - A Beginner's Guide to Philosophy

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

Steven West is the host of "Philosophize This!" one of the world's most popular philosophy podcasts. Listen to it here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Stephen West, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Host of Philosophies This, which has to be one of the biggest philosophy podcasts in the world, I was just telling you, I've been wanting to reach out to you for a very long time. I think if you just type in philosophy into Apple Podcasts or onto Spotify or something, your show is going to be the one that comes up. Over 200 episodes now covering all kinds of areas of philosophy. I mean, do you consider the channel to be a sort of history of philosophy channel,

or more of a philosophical ideas channel? Probably more of like a humanizing philosophy channel. I don't really think I match up to any like legit historian of philosophy and what I do. But I do think I try to, my goal is to always make it where like if you know nothing about a subject and then you want to become at least aware of what's relevant and cool about it and why it should matter to you at all. Like that's kind of where I sit. There's so many levels above that. And I mean, I guess a few levels below that. I try to sit right there. I try to just take something from like the abstract realm and just make it something that people can find something to care about. So I wouldn't say a history. I'd say a humanization.

Yeah. And there's so much to talk about. I thought that you'd be the perfect person to sit down and try to give people an idea about how to get into philosophy. That's really what your show seems to be about is encouraging people to find philosophy interesting and also give them some advice about how to begin things. thinking about this kind of stuff. And so I know a lot of people often reach out to me looking for things like book recommendations and looking for things like areas of philosophy that they should start studying. I suppose I want to begin by just asking you how it is that you approached the show. I mean, you decided to sit down and you were like, I'm going to make a philosophy show that's going to try and cover as many philosophical ideas as I can. Where do you begin in terms of preparing? Like, how do you begin getting your thought scenario in order? What is it that sort of goes into approaching a project like that? Well, I've been doing it for like 11 years now,

so it's changed over the years. When I first started, it was maybe far more ambitious than it is now, where it is maybe about a history of philosophy. These days, I just, I just try to listen to what the audience asked me to do and just try to make it as good as I possibly can. I get into it. It's a nice mental exercise for me. When people say I want to hear about Gijek, I can just immerse myself in it for six weeks of my life. And that's a fun task with Gijek. So yeah, in terms of how I actually started an episode. Yeah, I just, I have a topic. And it, I mean, it also depends like I know more about some topics than others. So the research process will be different. The writing process will be different. All this is probably boring details to your listeners. But yeah, it's a lot of reading. That's

what I'll say. A lot of patience and read just. Yeah. One one interesting thing about the podcast is that the first few episodes, I think the first two or three, the first two, pre-Socratic philosophy. Now, going through the history of philosophy, looking at different areas, you're going to look at Socrates, you're going to look at Descartes, you're going to look at Descartes, you're going to look at Hume. But the first two podcasts are called pre-Socratic philosophy. That tells me two things. Firstly, that philosophy, did exist before this Socrates guy and before Plato wrote anything about him, which, you know, you wouldn't necessarily know if all you had to go on was the sort of Western philosophical canon. But secondly, that this Socrates guy was important enough in sort of starting something new that everything that came before him can be broadly referred to as pre-Socratic philosophy. So Socrates seems like a not too bad place to start. why is he considered to be sort of like a founder, the founder of the Western philosophical tradition, especially if there were philosophers who came before him?

Well, there's many points that it starts, as I'm sure you're well aware. Descartes is often considered to be the modern, the godfather of modern philosophy. Socrates is an important figure as you're talking about. Cicero has a quote that I love that Socrates was the first person to bring philosophy down from the heavens and into the lives of men, meaning that he was the first one to consider, I mean, caveat here, there were a lot of, there's a lot of philosophy before Socrates, not only in the West, but all over the world. And this is by no means a totally accurate conception of what went on. But in terms of the historical definition of Socrates, how we're

thinking of him, he's distinct from the pre-Socratic philosophers because he's talking about ethical issues. He's talking about coming to the definitions of the nature of things, trying to define the categories that we use to make sense of reality in a way that I think is distinctive of philosophy in the West for the next couple thousand years. And yeah, I just think that he is a very noteworthy figure for that reason. The people before him, pre-Socratics, were largely trying to come up with totally secular explanations for things that were formerly explained by Orphism and, I mean, other religious forms. And I think that Socrates is, that's why he's important. It's because he would go into the Agra famously and just like start harassing people about what is justice.

Explain to me what justice is. And then they'd give him an answer. And he'd be like, okay, but what about this example? What about that example? How about how come that? That doesn't seem to be a good definition of justice. This is what gets him his famous reputation of going to the Oracle at Delphi. He's literally looking for, you know, who is the wisest person in the world?

because I want to go to this person and learn from them. And the Oracle says it's you, Socrates. And he's like, what do you mean? I actually know nothing. And she's like, exactly. And that is the sort of fictional story of Socrates and sort of the quest that he was on philosophically that differs from the people that came before him. Yeah, this is where we get the so-called Socratic method of trying to get to truth by

asking the right kinds of questions. Interestingly, Socrates, we only know anything about Socrates because of the things that other people wrote down. Socrates himself doesn't write down any ideas. I think there might even be a live debate about whether Socrates is a real person. I mean, he's probably existed as a historical figure, but basically all of the ideas that are attributed to him can be questioned because they're written by disciples of his. And we know that at least some of the dialogues, the Socratic dialogues that are written, are not really supposed to be historical attempts to remember what Socrates actually said, but rather using him as like a character to get across a philosophical

point. So it's difficult to know who the historical Socrates was, if indeed there was one. But I suppose, in a sense, it doesn't really matter because the thing that we inherit is not, you know, information about the biography of Socrates, but the sort of Socratic ideas, whether or not it was actually Socrates who originally came up with them. But what are maybe some of these ideas? What's like a distinctly, you know, Socratic idea that we've inherited? from this time in philosophy that would help our listeners understand why it is that Socrates was such a radical thinker. A distinctly Socratic idea when he is an interlocutor in Plato's dialogues and we don't

know whether he exists. So we're trying to distill the character of Socrates in Plato's dialogues and come up with something distinct to him that defines current philosophy? That we've inherited, that will give us an idea as to why these dialogues are so important. Right. Well, I mean, geez, I have no idea. And I certainly don't want to speak on behalf of all of philosophy here. For me, he's personally been important because he's an example of that humility that I think philosophy brings you and of this sort of sense that there's always more work to be done. We're never completed when it comes to our engagement with our universals and our values and our definitions of things. I think that is something that carries on to this day. But it's so integral to philosophy. it's tough to know whether that's a Socratic sentiment or just something that's necessary to philosophy itself. Yeah, I think that his, this thing that he did in the Athenian Agra and all these various dialogues where he tried to get to the bottom of the ultimate definition of things. That's certainly something that people have inherited even colloquially, just in Western culture, that may not be actually, probably is not how language actually works when you study structural linguistics and, you know, the more complex when you see language as a living, breathing organism, right?

It's essentially impossible to get to the essences of these terms. But that process of always striving for that ideal, I think, is also something that's very important in philosophy. And Socrates and Plato are, well, I guess it would be easy to confuse them because a lot of Plato's writings are dialogues involving Socrates. When we hear somebody say that this idea is an idea of Plato's, how can we distinguish that from an idea of Socrates. I mean, I hear people talk about, you know, the ideas in Plato's Republic. And that's one of Plato's ideas, even though Plato might put it in the mouth of Socrates. I've always found a little bit strange. I'm sure there are historians of this that dedicate their whole life to Socrates and Plato and trying to suss out the differences between how he's a character in Plato's dialogues versus Plato's ideas and as part of his corpus or whatever you'd call it. I am not an expert in that. And as I think you alluded to before, I'm not really sure. that it matters. I mean, it's, it's not like people are neo-Socratic philosophers or something. I mean, people are neoplatonist. And I think that, I don't know, it doesn't matter to me. I'm, I'm just all

about the value of the ideas as they stand. Let it be attributed to one character or the other. From my, that's one of the benefits of being me. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm not a, uh, you know, a world class trained philosopher as yourself is at Oxford University. I, I, I just do this stuff because I love it. I'm a fan of philosophy. I'm not a philosopher. And my biggest goal is just to try to take the ideas that are cool that have influenced me and inspired me. And I mean, when I first started this, that's what I wanted to do. I just wanted to give that to other people as best I could. I think it's hard to get access to this stuff too. So it's not always the easiest. It's not the most accessible to get these ideas. So for me, that is my biggest goal. Well, let's talk about how to approach

is how to get into this. The first question, I suppose, is why should anybody care? I mean, you hear, if you've never done philosophy before, you might sort of stumble into a pub in Oxford, for example, and you over here the table next to you, and they're saying, you know, but do you really think that, you know, essence precedes form? Isn't it clear from sort of rational reflection?

I mean, I know you belong to a different school, my friend, but, you know, if you think about the nature of essence, and if we define it, and it's necessary and sufficient conditions, are, you know, and you're listening to this and thinking, God, this sounds not only really difficult and technical, but also really kind of pointless. I mean, well, why are you spending your time doing any of this? So for somebody who has that idea that this is what philosophy is about, essentially throwing pretentious words around to get to what are either sort of trivially obvious facts or trivially false because they're so weird and wacky that

you can just dismiss them out of hand. That's what philosophy seems to be to them, just people doing that all the time. What are they getting wrong? What are they missing? What's the sort of beauty of philosophy here. I certainly would have come at them with any hostility because it's understandable why they think that it's not really prioritized in school or cultures, at least you're in the U.S. What they're missing, I think, I mean, here's how I put it. I think we all know what it feels like to look at somebody out there in the world and feel like they could benefit from, wow, they could use a little more critical thinking in their life. Wow, they could understand the assumptions they're bringing to bear when they make these, they have these views

on the world. Wow, they really benefit from seeing the other side of the argument more. Wow, they benefit from formulating questions a bit more accurately to be able to get to what they're, to solve the problems that they think are worth solving to them. I just think it's so easy to just sit in this middle place where you think I have the perfect amount of critical thinking about the world. Like anybody that thinks more than me about stuff, like those people at the pub, those are just, those people are just pedantic. They're just overthinking it. They're addicted to thinking. But anybody that thinks less than me, they're just ideologues. They're just stupid, right? I have the perfect amount. And then, of course, I'm going to reflect. Of course, I'm going to get to a deeper

understanding of what I think I know. But I'm only going to do that at the rate that the world throws stuff at me to question, to force me to question those things. And I just, I'm not saying philosophies for everybody. I think there's certainly people out there you could point to that it's not for, or it wouldn't be useful for them, given their present state of mind. But if you're somebody that likes to think about the world. I mean, you're probably listening to Alex O'Connor's podcast right now. So you're a thinking person. You're probably the smart person in your group of friends. Your family comes to you and asks you for help and advice about things. And you use your brain to solve problems in the world. And I'm saying with no hostility, like if you're, if you're

one of those people and you're not well-versed in philosophy, I just feel like you're missing out. Like I just think there's so much more for you to get to. It would be like saying that I want to be the best fighter in the world that I can possibly be, but I'm not going to study martial arts. I refuse to go down to the gym and train with other people that also want to get good at martial arts. I'm only going to get good at martial arts whenever somebody comes up and tries to whip my ass in public. That's the only time I'm ever going to practice. It just, it feels silly to not do it. It's such a good resource. If comedians go on stage and the whole job is to be funny, you know, and they go up on stage and they say their jokes and the crowd

doesn't laugh. And it's uncomfortable when they don't laugh. Like it feels bad. But they can go to their colleagues afterwards and they can say, hey, put this premise over there, change this punchline right here, hit this harder, order this differently. And they go up on stage again and they're funnier. And I just think that's what philosophy does for the realm of ideas. It is an absolutely beautiful place for me. It's sacred, but I don't want to use religious terminology. To me, it feels sacred. this process that people are engaging at the highest levels of, I have an idea, and now all you other smart people in the room, use 110% of your brain power to critique my idea and find where conceptually it's lacking, or where it's not connecting together well, where I'm not

arguing as efficiently as I could. That to me is just, that's human progress when it comes to thought, and it's beautiful to me. So that's what I think they're missing. Trust in our news media is at an all-time low, and people often make up their minds about important and nuanced issues based on headlines alone, which are often steeped with media bias. That's where today's sponsor can help, ground news. Ground news aggregates thousands of local and international news outlets in one place so you can compare headlines across the political

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to inform how you behave, it will slowly transform the person that you become. And if you study philosophy in such a way that you begin to think that certain things are actually true and you uncover new insights about how to live, then the person that you will be transformed into will be, according to your own standards, probably a better one. So it's probably worth it just on a sort of self-interest model as well as thinking about how there's some kind of intrinsic goodness to trying to get to truth and understand the world and make the world a better place. There's just a lot of reason, practical reason to think about this stuff, right? Yeah, I think some people that are fans of philosophy get upset

when people try to reduce it down to the self-help or the practical interest realm, which I understand, but you're 100% right. This goes on at different scales. It's extremely useful just personally, only having conversations with yourself. It's helpful when it comes to managing the way that you're sort of interacting with their family or community at the level of society. we live at least for now in open societies where people have to vote and people have to like the whole process is founded on the idea that we're going to we're going to have this analytical capability of looking at the world as accurately as we can and knowing what's going on and then we're going to evaluatively choose which better or worse decisions are how to move forward from there I mean and then have conversations with other people about what the best idea is and what how we should be structuring our societies moving forward that's absolutely at all different scales this is crucial I think So what do you say to people who say, well, look, philosophy is about reading about metaphysics in like leather bound books in a library somewhere, like with, with dust and you're wearing a tweed jacket. And I get why maybe those ideas could be applicable, but like, look, I just don't need this philosophy stuff. Like, as you said yourself, it's not for everyone, like, like meta ethics and so I don't need to study meta ethics to know what's right and wrong.

You know, I see something happen in front of me. I see someone kick a homeless guy. I know that that's wrong. And then the sort of, have you seen, there's this meme that I saw once of like somebody's dying on an aeroplane. And they say, is there a doctor? And this guy puts his hand up and says, yes, I'm a doctor. A doctor of philosophy. And they're like, oh, well, well, we need to save this man.

And it's like, well, you know, we must consider whether the use of resources in this emergency is going to be most effectively served. If we take a utilitarian approach, then we could try to judge the hedonic calculus. of this. However, the deontological approach would say maybe that he should stay alive, but then what about the rights of the rest of the past? And by the time he's sort of finished talking, the guy's just dead, right? There's this parody of philosophy to make that it is just overthinking in a way that isn't actually useful to most people's everyday life. Yeah. I mean, just like being a black belt in jujitsu would be way overkill at being able to defend yourself. At a certain point, I do think that.

weighing the pros and cons of utilitarianism versus deontology, although this is more complicated. Personally, I think that is valuable and it does have real effects on the way that you assess moral situations in your everyday life. I would much rather have the person that has practiced in moral, that like moral proving ground, the thought experiments. Anyway, maybe I should just pause and say, there's this point of contention about moral thought experiments like what you're talking about, weighing the pros and cons, utilitarianism, deontology. There's people that say that's a waste of time because it's not real life, moral situations. There's messiness in the real world. Everything ultimately is predicated by social and economic outcomes that you're just ignoring when you isolate yourself into this echo chamber of you're on the side of a trolley track. You have a lever. There's five people on one. There's one person on the other. Decide whether to pull the lever. Real life is never that simple. We always have contextual complexities that we need to consider. And I think that there, I mean, there's some validity to that, sure, and I point taken. But I also think some people that make that argument, I think have forgotten what it's like to not be educated in moral philosophy and to not, and to want to know more about moral philosophy and to want to practice honing their skills of working through these ethical dilemmas, but not necessarily being able to do it in real life.

You know, like it is useful to be able to sit with a friend where there's nothing at stake and to talk about how a utilitarian would pull the lever to save the five people to get the one and then bringing up, hey, but what if we harvested five organs from one person to save five? What is the problem with that? Why is that different? I think there's undeniably a benefit to doing that that it's sort of a rising tide that raises all ships in your life. It's a level of thinking and a level of practice that I think improves your thinking. That said, to come back to the person that maybe they're they don't feel like anything's lacking in their life because they're not there's there's no reason to study this philosophy on a mountaintop. I'm not saying you should study it on a mountaintop. And I certainly wouldn't be some person proselytizing this. Like everybody needs to do this. If you're not, you're just, I'm saying, I mean, the first thing is that, I mean, me saying I don't benefit from having any more philosophical insight in my life or any more awareness. That's exactly what somebody who lacks self-awareness would say. I mean, that that has to bother you at some level if you're a thinking person and you value being self-aware and self-determining about

things. I mean, it just, there's a sense in which I would never want to force somebody to do anything like that. I would never even implore them to do it. I just, I think that it is undeniably valuable if you value the conceptual engineering of your thought. There's so many things that you don't know that you would be making a mistake on that studying philosophy would get you to. And I also think there's value to it just when it comes to a lot of practical skills when it comes to having conversations and arguments in general, that have nothing to do with studying a specific metaphysical text, right? Yeah, I do think that we run the risk of overthinking sometimes in situations where it's not appropriate. However, having the tools to do so doesn't mean

you always need to. So, like, you may be a black belt in taekwondo, but if somebody comes up to you and tries to seal your wallet, you're not going to begin by sort of stepping back and going through all the, whatever, you know, warm-ups you usually do and then bowing and then making sure you're following all of the rules. Like, it's, it's useful to have that under your belt, as it were, but it doesn't mean you need to employ it all the time. But even in situations where you're not employing it, it's worth having that, you know, availability open to you. I mean, you said a moment ago, the idea that, that, well, how moral, we were talking about how moral decision making can seep into our everyday lives. And perhaps people don't realize how commonly

that already happens. I mean, there are areas where we've done the moral calculations so long ago that we kind of forget that we even did it or that we're doing it. I mean, if you're walking down the street and a homeless person asks you for some money and you think, well, I've got five pounds in my pocket, but well, I don't want to give it to them. I'd rather go and give it to a charity that make sure it gets put to good use because I don't know how they're going to spend it. So you go and do that. That's a sort of normal everyday thought for someone living in a big city. But that is steeped in so many ethical considerations.

The ethical motivation to give the money at all and the idea of charity and the sort of Peter Singer idea of how much money you're supposed to give if you have it available to you. The idea of the ethics of alcoholism or the ethics of spending money on things that you yourself think are wrong to spend on. the ethics of giving people the autonomy to do things that you consider to be immoral. Like, should you enable somebody, it is freedom so worthwhile that you'll give somebody money to do something that you think is immoral just because you value their freedom to do it more than you value the morality of the act? All of those kinds, those are big philosophical questions. And all of them are like baked into this decision, this simple decision that you might make

on a daily basis. I mean, there's that old joke, you know. I saw a homeless person come up to me and asked for some money and I thought, do I really want this money going on alcohol and gambling? I thought, no, I don't. So I gave it to him, you know. I think that in all of these situations, in all of these situations, the moral thought that goes into developing the sort of intuition that you just think on the spot, yeah, this is what I'm going to do because this is what I always do. People forget how important philosophy has been in coming to those conclusions. Right. Yeah. And those conclusions haven't been made consciously

by the person. They sort of internalize, it's possible, very possible for people to internalize all of their moral intuitions like that and to just sort of be operating on autopilot. This is why I love Simon Blackburn's definition of philosophy is like conceptual engineering. If an engineer builds a bridge and they study the history of bridge building, they study the materials that the bridges build out of how they connect together to form the bridge as a whole. how it bears weight here, how if you put weight over there, it will collapse if it's weak. Engaging in that sort of moral discourse, the conversations about hypothetical moral situations or even studying morality just theoretically, I think, strengthens your bridge. It helps you

understand the why behind the components that make up your worldview. It's possible to just internalize them and be on autopilot, like I said. Okay. Well, enough of this. We've convinced people that philosophy is worth doing. So let's figure out how to actually go about it. Your podcast begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers and talks about Socrates, talks about Aristotle, sort of going chronologically from some sort of starting point in the history of Western philosophy. I'm not sure how that precisely develops over the rest of the show. But do you think that that is a good place to start, as in if somebody wants to get into philosophy, suppose they do it by listening to your podcast, do we begin with the ancients and sort of move forward? Or is there a better

or a different way in? Where would you recommend people start? Well, I certainly wouldn't recommend starting with my show back then. It was 11 years ago, and it's horrible. I can't even listen to it myself without, you know, my doctor is advised against it. It's not the worst place you could start going back to the classics, going to antiquity. It's one place. It's a popular place. if I'm given a piece of advice right now, just 2024, Stephen, I'm saying forget any chronology to it, although I'm sure it's useful. Pick something that you're interested in and find out how to learn about that. Because I think that what stops people when they start learning these things, because it is, I think philosophy when it's done well, all that we've been talking about

so far is a bit uncomfortable. And if you're putting in that, there's so many just demons calling to you in the world around you, like just TikTok and Netflix and fun stuff that's just surface, it doesn't take any work at all. It's, it's our, it's part of our plight as modern people. And I just think finding something that you can dedicate this, this work to that you're actually interested in it is probably the most important thing to me. Now, within reason, I mean, don't, don't have the first thing that you're interested in, be Shelling's German idealism or something like that. There's, there's obviously limitations, but find something that you're like excited to know about. And then find books that have to do with that, which I can explain. I can give

tactics for how to do that too. But I think the first thing is just finding something that you're actually interested in. Yeah, we'll do that. By the way, that is the first time in this show's history that someone has done the sort of name of the show thing unintentionally while talking. You said the words within reason. And I don't think that's ever happened in the show's history. So, you know, you've got to sort of look and smile at the camera. I think that I think that one sort of observation I've made about people when they're looking at philosophers and they say like, oh, you know, like I really like this philosopher. I really like Schopenhauer or I really like Hume or I really like Wittgenstein. I think it's very rare for somebody to, with basically no interest in the philosophy of language, which is what Wittgenstein is best known for, to sort of sit down, read Wittgenstein.

and suddenly go, oh, gosh, you know, I'm blown away. This is amazing. I mean, I'm sure it happens. But I think what really happens with, I mean, Wittgenstein opens his tractus, you know, his sort of first attempt at putting this down on paper, with a phrase like, I suspect this book won't be useful to anybody except those who already agree with its contents. And I thought that was a stunning admission for him to make, as if he recognized his role here, is that if you sort of agree with me and if you've observed the world in this,

way, then here's my attempt to synthesize it and explain it. And I think that's so much what, like, good philosophy does is it takes an idea that you sort of think is a bit intuitive and when you read it in a text, you sort of go, oh, yeah, no, that does make sense because it was sort of somewhere in there already. I mean, I think the word education, the Greek root of education literally means to draw out, you know, to bring out what's already within you. And so I think if you're looking for somewhere to start, chances are if you're listening to this show, you'll already have heard some philosophical names, right? And depending on what you've been interested in, you'll have heard different names. So maybe you are a bit of a

doomer and you're looking at a lot of like self-help stuff. Maybe you're feeling a bit depressed and you're looking for philosophy as a tool to get you out of that. And you might have heard people throwing around the name like Albert Camus. You might have just heard that name sort of here and then. The fact that you've been interested enough in content that other people have thought is relevant to that thinker implies that that thinker

might be a good place for you to start. Whereas if you've never heard that name, I mean, you'll probably have heard of Albeckermud, but if he never comes up in any of the stuff you're already interested in, then it might be like totally out of left field and uninteresting to you. If you listen to a lot of Jordan Peterson, you hear him talking about Nietzsche, like all the time.

Again, you might not know anything about Nietzsche, but you know that he's come up enough. in the conversations you've been having in other areas to know that there must be something in there that will be relevant to your discussion. Similarly, you know, you might read Dostoevsky because you've heard him mentioned so many times. So I would recommend going into the philosophy section of a bookshop, scanning through the names. What do you see? Heidegger. I've heard of that name, but I don't know anything about him. Aristotle. Yeah, definitely heard of him. He's the Greek guy. Whereas if you're a Catholic, you might be like, Aristotle, oh, people are always talking about him.

I'm going to start there. If you're not, then you might go, oh, I'm not really. sure. Maybe you see Albert Camus, maybe you see Jean-Paul Sartre and you're like, oh, those come up all the time. So whatever's just been coming up in whatever you've already been doing, there's names that sound familiar to you. There's a reason they're familiar to you. And it's because they have been thought relevant and useful to and by the people that you've obviously already been listening to. So I think that would be a good place to start. We'll call that the algorithmic method of finding a book. I love it, dude. I love that as a policy. The other thing that I would say that I think is useful for anybody out there that, because what you're talking about

is somebody finding something that they're interested in when they don't know yet what they're interested in, which is a problem. Because again, like algorithms typically give us all our content. So when you have to become the person that decides what to find, it can be kind of tough. But what I would say also, I take a page out of the book of Nietzsche. I do this in my life all the time, just in general. He talks about envy. In short, what I'd say is like, find somebody whose philosophical knowledge about something you were envying or admiring in a conversation and make that a part of you. I mean, if you watch this show,

you've seen videos of Alex O'Connor doing his thing, you've seen this talent that he has of reductio ad absurdum. Like he literally puts ethical, like Peter Singer, Peter Bogasian, Sam Harris recently, like just puts philosophers through the paces on their own theories and finds those levers that they're pulling, that they need to further justify the fact that we aren't appealing to some sort of objective morality written into the any intrinsic structure

to things. It's more complicated than that. But that's all just skill. If you wanted to get good at that, if you see, I'm talking about it, if you see a skill, somebody answer a question in a way that's particularly eloquent and you're like, wow, I wish that was a piece of me. Use that also as a marker for what you should be going for. I mean, it's fueled by like a bit of vanity if you're coming from the wrong place.

But like, I think it's, it is what Nietzsche says, is that envy. It's one of the seven deadly sins. People think of it is so bad. But it's also, if we interpret Nietzsche in a certain way, it is a personalized guide for what you want in the world. If you're ever confused about what you might want next, just look at what you envy in somebody else and try to make that a part of your life. Yeah, and so yeah, that's another. Chances are you've listened to somebody talking about philosophy, be it like a public figure or be it like a friend or a professor, teacher. and that's what's made you think,

you know, I want to learn about this philosophy stuff. Just ask them, ask them, don't ask them, you know, what's your advice as to where to start reading philosophy? Because they'll probably say, oh, well, you know, you should probably begin with Plato and then move through the Socratic.

No, just ask them like, hey, what, what philosophy book did you read that you think was the most influential on you? And they might give you something totally random that you've never heard of before in your entire life. But if, as you say, if that's the person that you're looking up to, if you're like, man, I want to be more like that,

then the reason why they're they're so, you know, different from the person that you want to be is because they've read these things that you haven't read. You know, it should be a bit out of left field and a bit out of the blue if you really want to change something about yourself. I think chances are, whatever they recommend, you'll have heard the name before and you'll, you're not going to make a wrong decision here, right?

Like if you start reading Emmanuel Kant, and you start reading the direct text because this person that you like talks about can't all the time and you realize I just can't do this this is too complicated I don't understand what's going on then you can just put it back on the shelf and you can try something else you know you'll only have wasted a tiny little bit of time

and you know it's it's especially if you run the risk of potentially actually being captured by it like it's always worth doing it doesn't really matter as far as I'm concerned where you start because it's easy for us as people who've been sort of talking about philosophy for years and years and years now, to sort of comprehensively say, okay, well, if I'm thinking about it, I'd say you should start with this school and then move into this school and then

study this and do this. But that's not how either of us did. I mean, I don't know if that's how you did it. It's certainly not how I did it. You know, I get into philosophy from listening to the new atheist debates and listening to Christopher Hitchens, who I've since, you know, made no hesitation in saying, I don't think it's a, has a great sort of philosophical world view. You know, I've criticized that. But he was still my entry. If it weren't for Christopher Hitchens, I might not have heard of, you know, the founding fathers. And if it weren't for the founding fathers, I might not have heard of the Enlightenment philosophers who introduced me to empiricism and eventually to people like David Hume and that

kind of thing. Like, that's a weird path. And I would never say to somebody, hey, you want to get into philosophy? Okay, start by reading mortality by Christopher Hitchens, which is the first book of his I ever read. That would make literally no sense. But I'd be lying if I said that wasn't the way I did it. And so the more broad advice is don't go and read Christopher Hitchens, but go and read what captures you. Go and read what captures you. And then, more importantly, once an author does capture you, go and read the authors that captured them before them. Or the authors that most disagree with their greatest intuitions that you agree with. That's what I did in my past. That's also true. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is that part of the reason, I don't know entirely your

I mean, I know that you're the cosmic skeptic, legend, and everything, and so you primarily are an atheist back in the day. Did you go to school for theology because it was a bit like a crazy person going to school for psychology? Because it's the thing that you're like trying to understand what you disagree with. Well, in a sense, I mean, I did philosophy and theology and at Oxford, they don't let you do philosophy on its own. It can't be done. You've got to pair up with something. So I had to pick something and it could have been philosophy in French. could have been philosophy and maths, well, I couldn't have been because I got three U's the first time I did maths at a level. I'm showing my absolute ignorance of the university setting.

I apologize for that. But I do expect that. No, that's really abnormal. It's a very abnormal thing for them to do as a university to not allow you to do philosophy on its own. Basically, every other university lets you do that. It's just here that they wouldn't. And so one of the options was philosophy and theology. And so I thought, yeah, like this will be useful practically because I make videos about atheism.

It would be good to know. But I did also just find it the most interesting. I mean, the faculty is theology and religion. So it's not just confessional theology. It's also like the study of religion. So you can do anthropology, you can do the sort of history of religious thought. And so that's why I think I chose to study it. But it's interesting because in the university environment, it is much more systematized.

It is much more we're going to begin somewhere. But even at university, it's not like we sat down and they said, okay, we're going to go back to the Socratics and the pre-Socratics. And we're going to start there and we're going to move forward. No, first thing I ever did at university was studied Mills Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, the famous essay that John Stuart Mill writes, which comes in Victorian England, so thousands of years after the Greeks that we've just been talking about, and is pretty important, but a lot of even utilitarians today would say not the most compelling utilitarian in the world. But that's where we started.

And the thing is, even though if you ask me about utilitarianism, I might say, oh, don't read Mill, go and read, I don't know, Sidgwick or something. And even if you said, I want to study ethics, I might say, oh, well, you know, don't start with utilitarianism and start somewhere else. Utilitarianism is familiar to a lot of people, that they understand that there are debates about maximizing good and minimizing suffering and killing five people to save one and vice versa. And so, although it is a little bit almost random seeming to just start there, we just picked it, we studied it, we did that text, and from there you sort of open up Pandora's box because there'll be a footnote and there'll be an objection that introduced you to another area of philosophy and another one. So you've just got to pick somewhere to start. You've just got to find something that you find interesting and captivating and get on with reading it. Yeah, one of the great things about university too is you have like a multi-thousand-dollar thing hanging over. your head. I mean, there's, there's intrinsic motivation being in university that your teacher

assigns you utilitarianism. You have to stick with it. And to me, that's why I would say pick something that you're really fascinated by. And I would agree with everything you're saying. Like, the biggest thing for me is to remain patient, remain humble, know that this is going to be difficult if you're doing it right. But to make it a little bit easier on you to stick with it, pick something that you're truly fascinated. There's plenty of stuff out there. You don't, you don't have to study something boring if it's boring to you. There's just too much out there to waste your time doing that at first and don't get overwhelmed with the the amount of different kinds of philosophy that there are like in front of you I mean the reality of the situation is

you could sit down with somebody doing a PhD in Aristotelian thought that's Aristotle Aristotelian right and this person could have studied in more depth than you could possibly hope to ever understand the philosophy of Aristotle and they will just wax lyrical, they'll speak beautifully, they'll answer any objection, they've just got such an amazing knowledge, and maybe of some of the surrounding philosophers, they'll know about Plato, you know, they might know a bit about the history of Alexander the Great who Aristotle tutored, you know, they might know that. But then if you say something like, you might bring up Wittgenstein, who I mentioned earlier, and they might look you dead in

the eye and say, I've never read a word of Wittgenstein. I have absolutely no idea about anything to do with this philosophy, right? And it's extraordinary because you think, but you're this great philosophy. You've got a PhD in philosophy, but it's like going to a molecular biologist and expecting them to be able to tell you how to put an aeroplane together. It's a different kind of science. And it doesn't matter if you've got a PhD, you're never going to know all of these areas. So whatever it is that ends up captivating you, you're probably going to go down that rabbit hole. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, now I've been reading philosophy for a few weeks, a few months, maybe a year, and I still haven't

gotten around to reading Nietzsche. You know what? It doesn't matter. As long as you're reading what's interesting to you and as long as you know more today than you did yesterday about something interesting and important in philosophy, it does not matter if you haven't ticked off one of the important names that you're sort of supposed to have read. Because if you tried doing that and you did so unnaturally, you might end up getting bored and put off the whole philosophy enterprise altogether. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And I think, I mean, on the other side of that, I don't know if you have the same policy, but I don't really ever like to make people feel stupid for not being in the same place as me, for not having

read as much as me. I think it's a mistake that activists make these days and people that are even in philosophy where they just think people should shut up and be quiet if they don't, if they haven't read all the stuff that I've read, the stuff isn't accessible to everybody. It's actually pretty difficult to get into some, the more complex stuff. though I guess that's why I'm here is to try to make it a bit easier for the people that want to know about it. How do I get from zero to a good understanding and something like Aristotle if that's what I wanted to do? So yeah, for sure.

So suppose somebody is listening to this and they feel inspired to learn, but they actually, yeah, okay, they've heard of some of the names that we've mentioned, but they don't really feel like there's an obvious place for them to start. They're not particularly captivated by anything. I mean, if somebody just said to you, I just want to get an idea of what philosophy is kind of about, right? Like, just across the board. I don't know if I'm interested in ethics. I don't know if I'm interested in philosophy of religion or whatever. Like, where can I go to just start learning something about philosophy for an introduction to give me an idea of what this is all about? I will reiterate that I don't think it's where you should start.

But if that's what somebody wanted to do, I would, there's a few I can recommend. I think Nigel Warburton does a good job in his book, Philosophy, The Basics. It's very broad. It does not cover a lot of Christian thought. So I know there's Christian and also just religious listeners of your show. So it just all the cards on the table. I'm not sitting here trying to say these are the greatest books ever written. I'm saying, I mean, like these are the ones I can recommend honestly as me.

And I come from a set of biases too. So I'd say that one. I'd say if you want that that's more going to be just going from, I mean, almost academically from one thing to the next. conceptually. One that I really love, it's like five bucks on Amazon is Bertrand Russell's the problems of philosophy where he just, it's much more conversational. It's much more like real world scenarios. And I just think having such a legit philosopher go through and break down the complexity of every, of these things that we think to be very simple by by by default.

You know, I, I, I enjoy that one. I reread it every few years just to just because I like Russell. The other one, if you're a total beginner, I'd say Sophie's world. I know it's ironic, but it's like I don't, I didn't read it when I was a very beginner in philosophy, but I did read it on a plane one time and I think that it's good. I don't know what it feels like for that book to hit you and teach you about what's going on in philosophy, but it's more fictional. It's about a girl that goes around and just learns about philosophy through things

that are happening to her. And so it's very accessible to people that are just getting into it. I've heard it's really useful for people. So that's one I'd recommend. It's highly rated too. So those are the three I'd recommend. Sure. So those are books for broad overview, philosophy introductions, but you said that this isn't

where you would point people. No. So where would you point somebody who said they wanted to start reading philosophy? I want some books. You know, the person listening to the show right now is like, I want to go on Amazon. I want to order some books. I want to read something. I want to learn about philosophy.

What should I do? I would, again, pick something that you're interested in, just hypothetically, let's say that that's Nietzsche, right? Like, where I would always start is with secondary sources. The reason why is because, like our good friend Alex O'Connor here, when you're in a university setting, you not only have the lectures that you go to, which are more interpretive, it's more context, it's more explaining the ideas and telling you everything you need to know about reading them. And then there's the assigned reading where you actually engage with the primary text that the author's writing. And I think that you need to do both in order to get the most out of philosophy, even if you're not in university. And so the best comparison I can give to a lecture, I mean, there are literal lectures on YouTube that you can watch a big university professors giving lectures. I would, like I'd probably recommend those.

The other part of this is that there's resources in every type of thing. There's text resources, video resources, audio resources. and you can do whichever one is best to you. But anyway, to get to the actual process here, if it's Nietzsche, I always tell people to go to the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy first. If you're a total beginner in something, it's a free resource, it's online. It'll look a little bit like Wikipedia, but it's not. It's actually peer reviewed to an extent.

It's edited, it's updated pretty regularly. It's written usually by somebody that is in academia, that is involved in the conversation that's going on in this field. They understand the state of the literature. chair right now. And it's designed to try to make it accessible to people as much as possible. There's also the most important thing is that there's a bibliography at the bottom. Yes. All sorts of books that they cite where these ideas are going to come from. And what I've done and what I've told other people to do in the past is if you're a total

beginner to something like Nietzsche, you just go to Amazon or to Goodreads and just type in Nietzsche and filter for the secondary sources. The one's not written by the author himself, Nietzsche. It's not written by Nietzsche. It's not written by Nietzsche. written by like Walter Kaufman is a name. And you find people that are highly rated in that world. And then you copy and paste their names into Stanford. You just go to Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy on the Nietzsche page, Control F, put in Walter Kaufman up there and see how many times he's annotated in the bibliography down there. It should give you a decent idea of whether this is a thinker that is still involved in the current discussion or whether this is a totally outdated source.

It'll give you an idea of how relevant they are to the discussion that's going on. You can also do this on Google Scholar, which is also free to see how many times they've been cited by academic sources, although it's uncommon for secondary sources to be cited like that. Not impossible, though. That's the real tactic that I would do, is a multiple layered vetting process of going to Amazon or Goodreads, finding what it seems good, and then contrasting that against how many times they're mentioned on the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy page. If you're looking for a book, that would be my process for trying to find something good. I'm so glad you mentioned the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I mean, that is just such a phenomenal resource.

You know, it's written by people. It's going to have its flaws and its faults. But as a resource, it is unbelievable that it's free. It's unbelievable that it's so broad. There's also the internet encyclopedia of philosophy, which is sort of a another version of the same thing. So even then, like starting with Nietzsche, for example, go to the SCP, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry for Nietzsche, read it. Maybe also, if you want to read the internet encyclopedia of philosophy, they've probably got an entry on Nietzsche as well. Maybe they'll have entries on the texts instead, I'm not sure, but, you know, if you just read and read properly as if you were reading a book, you know, maybe like underline, annotate, whatever, like try to remember what you read,

if you just read the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries, if you read the entry on Nietzsche and you read the entry on Augustine and you read the entry, on, you know, emotivism, if that's all you read, you would still probably have a better understanding of those topics and those thinkers than like 90% of the people that you come across. It is a wonderful, wonderful resource. And I'm so glad you mentioned it. But this idea of sort of, if you want to go a bit deeper, cross-checking the secondary authors with how many times their reference, I think is a genius way to figure out how relevant those commentaries are. also it also goes the other way to include people in this that are watching that go to

Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy and it's it's too deep for them. It's too dense, which it varies from article to article. The one on Nietzsche may be totally accessible. Other ones may be more technical. If it is, like don't, there's this whole other area over here of actual Wikipedia and of blogs and of Reddit posts and of videos on YouTube of people just doing summaries and and of comment sections, just engaging with the concepts there. The only thing I'd say is just proceed with caution. It's like there's this law that I have where like you proportion the amount of faith you have to whatever you're reading to the credibility of the source or how long you've been looking into this source or how long how much the source knows. It's actually

kind of similar to in real life. If somebody just like yells at you on the side of the road that they like insult you or a person that doesn't know you just says something bad about you, you don't really put much weight on it because they don't have much information about you. They don't, you know, you proportion the amount of weight you put on it to how much information they have. If I'm going through the comment section, you literally don't even know if this is like a Nobel laureate or a person like literally on meth right now typing this. And I would just proportion the amount that you're just, this is the gospel truth about this subject as you're going through those. But there's certainly value to just familiarizing yourself with the whole discussion

before even going to the Stanford Encyclopedia. The key is patience and humility, I think. And just sitting in that discomfort, but just knowing that progress is happening when it's happening. And then you, you know, take your time, move up from there to the primary text, if that's eventually where you want to go. That's true. It's also a good way of trying to find out what you're interested in. If you really don't know, you know, try, like, listen to philosophize this, right? Listen to your podcast.

Like, go from the beginning, go from the oldest, look at the newest, whatever. It doesn't matter. Just like, listen to it. Like, scroll through. There's an episode on Boethius. Who's that? I think I've heard that name. You listen to it for five minutes.

Are you bored? Are you captivated? If you're bored, skip to the next one. Maybe it's day cut, maybe it's Hume, maybe it's Epicurus. And once you've listened for five minutes and thought, you know what, actually, I'm kind of interested in this. Even if you don't then want to listen to the rest of that podcast, you now know that like Epicurus is someone that you're going to be interested in looking at. So you can go to the SEP and look for Epicurus, right? And that will take, you know, maybe 20 minutes of your time if it takes you four tries to get to something that you find interesting.

I mean, I've just gone to the Stanford of Encyclopedia. If you go to the front page, there's a table of content, and you can scroll, and it's an alphabetical order, this absolutely mammoth list of all kinds of topics. It's either names, like Hobbs or Buddha, just like appears, you know, under B, but also like there's an entry on identity politics, impartiality, impossible worlds, you know, individualism, and this is obviously just I. Information. Like, what is information? These are areas of philosophy that you might not have even considered. Like, if you're reading through this, this, just scroll through it at random. And then you see like information. You're like, gosh, the philosophy of information, that sounds really interesting. And you click on it. And you click on it. And just read and just see where it takes you. Because a bit like when you're on Wikipedia, and it's not hyperlinked in the same way, but you might open this page and it will say that it's a subset of this kind of philosophy. And you click on that and you click on that. You end up just going down this hole. And you spend an hour doing that every single day. you basically be a philosopher in no time, I think. I mean, certainly much more educated than the average person or people that haven't put in that work. Yeah, for sure. I still think, I just have a tremendous amount of respect for the people that go even deeper than that,

where they start to engage with the arguments more and they start to, anyway, yeah, 100% that is better than you could be for sure. And yeah, if on the note of what you were saying, if you listen to episodes of the show and you don't like that thinker, move on to the next one. If you listen to like 10 episodes of my show and you don't like any of them, it's probably just me. Don't stop there. Don't like judge philosophy because you don't like me.

Maybe I'm boring. Go to another philosophy podcast. Go to another set of videos. I mean, maybe I'm sure just the, in the same way form and content and art are often interlinked in ways and to try to separate the two is just. I mean, maybe you just receive philosophy better from conversations like what Alex O'Connor's doing on YouTube. And whatever is getting you to that place where it's causing you to really sit and engage with, again, the conceptual engineering of your view of the world, if you're doing that, again, for an hour a day, whatever that takes, I think you're winning as a person. So here's a question that I think maybe people might have sort of come across and it will be relevant to getting into philosophy.

a lot of people like to separate philosophy into two different approaches, and they're generally called the analytic philosophy approach and the continental philosophy approach. What is the difference between analytic and continental philosophy? Right. Well, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a big divide in philosophy where people, known as a logical positivist, believed that where have we gone, like the, the, We're facing a lot of problems post-enlightenment with the ideas and how they're actually playing out into the world. And the thinking is maybe philosophy shouldn't be something that talks about metaphysics anymore. That metaphysics always, by default, is the realm of unverifiable speculation, that anybody trying to construct a vast system of philosophy that's all based on values that they've universalized at the bottom of it and the whole process of metaphysics into epistemology, into ethics, into

politics, that that is a lost cause and that maybe philosophy should be less ambitious and try to focus on the things that we can know, a priori and a posteriori facts about the world, things that can be verified by empirically observing them, and things that are truthful just by virtue of their definitions. All triangles have three sides. All bachelors are unmarried, that sort of thing. In the most general sense, this is the, this is a separation in the ways that philosophers are thinking about their work. In terms of there being a clear-cut divide between continental and analytic. It's an ongoing debate as to whether that's even an accurate way of describing it. I think it's helpful when just looking at the history of

philosophy and trying to understand it. But I think just like with British empiricists and continental rationalists, it's like there's overlap. It's not like either one of them we're purely doing one side or the other. It's not that clean cut. I'd be interested to hear what you would say is the origins of the continental analytic divide. Well, my understanding, if of the difference is that the analytic philosophy approach is a sort of mathematicized philosophy. It's formal logic. It's if P, then Q, P, therefore Q. Very sort of rational, very left-brained. If you've listened to last week's, I believe, episode with Ian McGilchrist, you might know what I'm talking about there. A sort of approach that tries to capture

and systematize philosophy, right? And so you get the introduction of formal logic, people taking philosophical ideas and trying to make them very specific, trying to design them almost as if you could put them into a calculator. And that's where you get the P's and the cues and the cues and the conditionals and the arrows and the formal logic symbolism and all of that kind of stuff. And that's great in one sense,

because it allows you, as I say, to systematize. It allows you to really test ideas and see if they're like logically hold up, right? But there's also this kind of philosophy that seems like you can't capture it in that kind of language. And continental is the name given to it because a lot of it comes from like continental Europe. But if you read like a philosophical novel, so for example, if you read the outsider or the stranger by Albert Camus, it's just a story, it's a story of a man. I won't tell you what happens because I don't want to spoil it. But it's a novel.

And it's a philosophical novel. Like it contains philosophical theatre. You know, you know, one of my, one of my pet peeves is people spoiling like movies and books and things, partly just because they assume that people already know because you're quite right. People might already already know what happens. But it's not so embedded into the culture that people know what happens here. And on the off chance that like one person listening like doesn't know. I'm just I'm just not going to mention it so many people it's like what what what does it serve you know unless you really have to make your point I don't need to do it to make my point here what does it serve to like tell someone what or mention what happens in a book mention if somebody dies or if some relationship happens or something you know like it just I don't know it's always it's always in one of my pet my pet peeves I remember I was holding a book once again I won't tell you which one I was holding this huge novel right and I was stood on the staircase of my old house with my housemates so my housemate had some of his friends come over. And this guy who I'd never met before, like, looks at me holding this

book and he goes, oh, cool, I read that before. I was like, oh, yeah, did you like it? And he goes, yeah, yeah, it was great. Oh, has, you know, ex-character died yet? And I was just like, man, you know, for goodness sake, and I was so annoyed. Now, in fairness to him, the fact that this character died, dies, was written on the blurb. But the fact that I'd managed to somehow miss that and not realize that, because I'd literally just begun reading it was enough to make me realize that as obvious as it may seem, I'm not going to spoil it. So you might read Albert Camus. Well, I'm all for more consideration in the world.

Yeah. You might, you might, you know, you might read Albert Camus' philosophical novel, The Outsider. And if I ask you to put it into logical form, if I ask you to take the insights that you thought you got from that novel, you know, you put it down, you think, wow, that really sort of challenged my worldview. Well, you know, put it into formal logic. Give me an if, P, then Q, kind of formulation.

It just doesn't work. It seems totally, totally inappropriate, right? And so this kind of philosophy, this continental philosophy, is much more about narrative, much more about sort of poetry, it's much more right-brained, as it were, again, in the sort of hemispheric language. And I don't know about the sort of historical divide exactly, but in terms of the approach today, I think that is, that is what we're looking at. If somebody's doing analytic philosophy, they are trying to see if things logically follow,

trying to point out logical fallacies, trying to construct syllogisms. A syllogism is just a sort of form of argument with premises and a conclusion. If they're doing continental philosophy, they're more likely to be reading a novel, telling a story, talking about sort of skirting around the edges, trying to get to meaning. So people like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialists, people like Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, novelists, but thought to be sort of philosophers as well. these guys are your sort of you know continental philosophy type approach whereas on the analytical side you have your your bertrand russells um you have um i don't it's quite difficult to map this on historically to to older to older thinkers um right but you know you've maybe you've maybe a vittgenstein um i'm not sure actually i'm not sure about vittgenstein but but i i hope people

will know what I'm talking about when I say the more systematized, mathematicized approach to philosophy as opposed to the moral narrative and poetical. Yeah, I like the way Jose Ortega, you got set. Very underrated philosopher talks about the value of philosophy as being this thing

that in this day and age we have all these areas of specialization and the scientists. My wife is a quantum physicist. She's a PhD in computational chemistry right now. So she is highly specialized. And she spends all of her time, work on the friction between molecules and this type of density function theory thing with her team.

And it's so specialized and so compartmentalized that people can make progress, even when they're not like a super genius. I guess this is a bit of a tangent from what you were saying. But what Jose Ortega-Gasette says is that the value of philosophy in this world where everybody is hyper-specialized is the ability to see the forest for the trees. It's the ability to see the whole picture and to link together all of these disciplines. that people don't really have the luxury of being able to link together if they're 100% focused on their specialization. I see that as a big part of what continental philosophy tries to do

in today's day and age, and also just help us ask better questions about the problems that face us. Yeah, where analytic philosophers are studying the brushstrokes and the type of canvas and the pigment of the paint, the continental philosopher tries to understand it by stepping back and looking at the painting. I think that's a good way to put it, yeah. And it's not actually clear. I mean, you can't say one of those is better than the other. In the case of a painting, it seems obvious that stepping back and looking is more

appropriate. But it kind of depends what you're trying to do. Like if you're interested in what a painting is, where it came from, like what it's like nature is, what it's made up of, then yeah, pull out the microscope. But if you're interested in the meaning of the painting, if you're interested in the intention of the artist, that kind of thing, they. you need to take a step back. So it really depends on what your goal is. So if your goal is to sort of break down and understand the world by trying to classify it and study it through a microscope,

then analytic philosophy, you know, there's the approach you should take. Whereas if you're more broadly just sort of looking for meaning and beauty and looking for the kind of truth that you won't find at the bottom of a microscope, then maybe continental philosophy is going to be more of interest to you. But again, you should be able to work this out just from thinking about what intuitively appeals to you. I mean, like, are you more excited about reading a novel that when you put it down has made you change the way you see the world? Does that excite you?

Or does it make you think, well, that's a bit stupid because that's just fiction. I don't care about fiction. I want to do, like, analysis, right? Just from your initial reaction to what that sounds like should give you an indication of what kind of philosophy you're going to be more into. Yeah, I think that's beautifully put. Now, I, you know, I suppose sort of wrapping up here, I, you're someone who has spent, as you say, like over a decade, going through various philosophers, philosophical thinkers, trying to sort of get to grips with what they think and sharing it with the world. Who do you think is the most underrated philosopher of all time?

Oh, it's such a good question. and unexpected. You know, I'm very biased. I might say Simone Vei because I don't think that many, I think in recent years, more and more people are starting to understand who she was and the example that she embodied. Tell us,

tell us about Zimbi. Sure. I mean, up against Titans like Kant and human, and just these people that revolutionized Western thought, I understand that there's a lot of value to them. and I'm not trying to impugn their work. I'm just saying,

Simone Vei to me personally, is just such a breath of fresh air in contrast to the more Nietzschean perspective that people typically fall into in like modern Western culture where it's about imposing your will upon things. Not that Nietzsche says that specifically, but just this is often the inference that people take from Nietzsche's philosophy. At least I did. It's like it's okay to be strong.

It's okay to get good. things to try to become who you truly are, to just sort of accept things that have to be as they are and be positive about it. And just like Simone Veib is not about finding, you can interpret that through the internet and everything. It's like, I'm going to learn about the world. I'm going to learn about philosophy. I'm going to go out there looking for answers and all these books we've been talking about. I'm going to, I'm confused about how morality works. So I'm going to go out there and look for ethical answers to things. And Simone Vei was just so much more about, sure, answers, fine. But like, when you go out looking for answers, you, you find them. And that's whether

they're a false idol or whether they're the actual truth about the world. I mean, we, everybody sets out to find answers about the world. And they almost always settle on things that eventually down the road they find to be incomplete. And it's a trap to fall into. Like, in fact, like, when she would famously teach her students about geometry and she'd go out under this tree outside her students would talk about this after she was dead. Just like, and her lessons were not like, hey, prove this geometrical thing or, you know, A squared plus B squared equals what. It's like she would just have them explore questions within geometry and try to find new lines of thought, try to find new interesting questions that they had never really thought

about that causes them to look at geometry totally different. And this translates into the most practical sense of just if you want to be better at something, one like David Goggins approach or like motivational person approach is like just stay hard. like impose your will on the thing. I want to read more. So what I'm going to do is force myself to read for two hours a day. And I'm going to do that for three months.

And then by the end of that three months, man, I'm going to feel satisfied and proud of all the work that I put in, grinding and forcing myself to do it. And there's, there's merit to that. Like, good on you. It's beautiful. But like,

if you look at it through Martha Simone Bay's work, which she values will for sure. But she just says there's a whole other element to that that has to do with openness and curiosity. It's like another thing about you can grind and just force yourself to read two hours a day, or you can try to look at reading differently, conceptually. You can try to see it through a different light where reading becomes something that's more interesting to you. There's an openness to the experience.

Instead of trying to impose yourself on reality all the time, be an antenna that sort of lets reality speak through you in a way. And it's a whole skill that often gets ignored if people are focusing on just improving themselves and the sort of narcissistic pursuits that we often gravitate towards in modern consumer society. So that's what I would say. If anybody out there is looking for an underrated one, this is a woman that died at 34 years old. There's conversations about her death, but like the accepted theory is that she was dying of complications of tuberculosis in the hospital, and she wouldn't have died, but she was on a hunger strike in solidarity with the people that were going without food during the war at the time. I mean, this is a person that gave their life in the name of their philosophy.

And in a world where one of these criticisms somebody could offer of philosophy is that it's too theoretical and there's not enough practical action and what the world needs is action. There's some philosophers throughout history like Socrates that embody their philosophy. And I think Simone Veis is one of the most underrated ones. She had a great job at a university. She could have just sat there behind a desk and just read and wrote for the rest of her life, safe and sound. but she quit her job and went and joined a factory and worked with the auto workers. Just she bawled her eyes out the first three days she was on the job.

She worked there for months just trying to understand the plight of what it is to be somebody actually in these conditions that she's just riding about from up in her ivory tower and the university. She embedded herself into a militia in the Spanish Civil War. I mean, the people were like trying to send her home and she's like trying to stay. She's trying to finagle things so that she can stay. She's just an absolute inspiration to me. she's on the wall behind me like right now it's backwards right there and so yeah if you're

looking for somebody that can inspire you more in that continental sense she i i'm very indebted to her work personally well uh well one see i i wanted to ask you the the mirror question of whether you think there's a sort of most overrated philosopher of all time but then that that feels like such a a wonderful and inspirational place to to leave things off but i suppose i've asked it now I don't know if you have any ideas on the mirror question. I don't want to be negative about anything. I'm going to use what little time I have on a public platform like this to just be positive. I'd say Descartes, short answer.

Longer answer, you'll have to ask me for, and maybe I'll do an episode on it. Yeah, for sure. For what it's worth, I think maybe, I've said in the past that it might be David Hume for various reasons. That might just be the contrarian in me, because so many people in the sort of atheist online space He's really like David Hume and look up to David Hume. So maybe it's just me trying to be a contrarian. But I really do think that he seems to just contradict himself in a few areas.

There's this amazing passage where so Hume thinks that all of our knowledge ultimately comes from empiricism. So everything that you could possibly know ultimately comes from some kind of, you know, you see it, you touch it, you hear it. That's the way the information comes into your head. So there's no idea that you can have that doesn't have a corresponding what he calls impression. And an impression is something that you see. It's like the image of the chair or the microphone on your eyes. That's the impression. And the idea is what's in your head.

And so he says, so there is no idea that you have in your head that doesn't have a corresponding impression. It doesn't exist because all ideas come from empirical impressions. And then he himself brings up a counter example, the famous missing shade of blue. Where he says, oh, but you could imagine in your head. imagine somebody who's seen every single shade of blue except for one little bit and so they can imagine in their head the entire sort of the entire part of the rainbow that is the different shades of blue with a tiny slither missing like could they imagine the shade of blue that fills in that gap

without having ever actually seen it and hume goes well i suppose that they could have done now this seems to be a direct contradiction to what he said a moment ago that every idea that you have must have a corresponding impression And you know what he says? Well, this is such a minuscule counter example that it's sort of, it doesn't really affect the general point. Even though five minutes ago he says, of the idea that all ideas have corresponding impressions, he says, I know of no way to prove this except by the failure of anybody to provide a counter example. If someone could show a single counter example, you know, it would undermine this, but I will infer from their silence, you know, the viability of my theory or something like that. himself brings up a counter example, accepts that it is a counter example, and then says,

oh, but it's such a small one that it doesn't, it shouldn't affect the general point. After reading that, I think that, that just, that, I, I found it difficult to, to ever revisit David Hume without remembering that he'd done that. So for me, maybe that's a bit unfair to pick up on that one thing. You should do a video on it and see what people say, that are fans of Hume. I might, I might do that. I, I've been thinking about doing it for a while, actually. Can I ask a quick question on the way out here. Do you find it to be a benefit to do philosophy content for a living where you have, you cast a global net. And so you just have a intrinsic

advantage to improving at philosophy better than other people around you. Because when you post something on the internet like your interpretation of Hume there, if there's somebody that's a big fan of Hume, they're going to come back at you in the comment section and give you a counter argument as they see it. Do you, like, are you grateful for that? As I am, I feel super grateful for that. Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly grateful on so many different levels, not just the fact that I'll have immediate access to counterexamples within minutes of posting something, but also the fact that that's something I can do for a job, you know? It's a, it's a marvel, and I never want to take it for granted. The flip side of that, of course, is that although

if I put out an interpretation of Hume and then someone in the comments immediately says, oh, well, this is wrong for this reason. And I read that. And I go, oh, man, I hadn't thought about that. That's brilliant. Like, how lucky it is that I can immediately have that response. The problem is that the video I've put out that I've now seen this response to is now going to be seen by thousands of people. And maybe I now think that it's wrong. And so, I don't know, do I, do I take it down? Do I add an addendum? Do I, like, respond to it myself? I don't know. There's a sort of responsibility that comes with it. So, I have to always be very careful to say, like, that's my understanding of David Hume. But, like,

go and read the source material yourself. Go and look at what other people have to say. you know, don't take my word for it. So it comes with, as long as you sort of give that caveat, I think, yeah, I could never not be grateful for it. So because sometimes you forget, you do it for so many years, you forget how abnormal it is. And when I've been preparing for podcasts, sometimes I'll have friends over and we'll sit and we'll be hanging out.

And I'll be listening to this person's previous podcast or I'll like be flipping through their book or something. and they'll say, all right, see you later, man, I've got to go, you know, I've got work tomorrow. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to sit here and here and read this book. And one of my friends said to me the other day, sort of on the way out, like, do you know, it's amazing that you just get to do this, right? Like, here we are just like sat listening to, you know, Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson on a podcast because you're preparing to speak with this person.

It's like, this is just what you do. You just, you just listen and read and then you get to go and ask people, sometimes the people who were sort of originating these ideas about those ideas. The day that I stopped being grateful for that, I think something has gone has gone terribly, terribly wrong. I saw this interview that you did with your friend Chris Williamson, and he said something about you that I think is accurate. He said, your value in the marketplace has not been priced yet. It's a bit of an overly commodified way of saying it, but that's his whole thing. He's a businessman. That's very Chris. I put it in different terms, but he said, if I could invest in somebody like a stock, I would invest in you. And I agree. I think that you have a great disposition, a great vibe, great skills to be able to just take this to, I don't think it's a coincidence you're doing so well on all these interviews with people that are absolutely legit philosophers that will be remembered in the history books for our time. And perhaps you are somebody else that will be remembered in the history books. And I just want to thank you for having me. And you've been doing such good work the last year and a half, man.

keep it up from I'm one vote for you to keep up what you're doing. Thanks Stephen. I mean that yeah that that that means a world very kind of you to say and yeah I mean that is that is the reason I do all of this for for pride and to be remembered after I die and to make lots of money while I'm doing it so so that's good news. Well at least you're honest too yeah the the podcast is philosophize this if people are interested in some of the actual ideas that we've been been talking about this is this is your podcast as i say it's one of the biggest philosophy podcasts in the world and a bit like with the sEP if you're like oh i want to learn about plato or i want to learn about boethius or something um sure you can go to the sep but if you prefer to listen to things

there's probably an episode of philosophize this on it too and you can go and check that out so i'll make sure that's all linked down in the description Stephen thanks for taking the time again thank you for the kind words there that that really does mean a lot and uh course i i hope people have enjoyed this and find it useful, especially if they're new to philosophy interested in getting into things. I hope this helps to give some direction to that pursuit, which is a difficult one and a confusing one at times, but one that I think we can both agree is, is worth pursuing. Absolutely. Just thank you for having me, and for anybody out there thinking of starting philosophy, just be patient with yourself. Like, this stuff isn't Sesame Street. This is, these are the greatest

ideas that people are thinking of in philosophy. They're at the top of their field. It's not just intuitive. You shouldn't just understand it right off the bat, but there's something beautiful as a prize on the other side of that, and that is a perspective that you didn't have before. On the other side of this book that you find could be a totally different view on life or art or beauty, I mean, whatever it is. So be patient with yourself and stick with it. Yes, sir, you don't get the beautiful view without climbing the mountain. And there's a reason why despite some of these books being very dry, very long, very confusing. requiring slow, difficult reading, despite them being on paper, some of the least desirable things to

spend your time doing, they stay with us, they stay in print, people continue to buy them, and people continue to be excited about their content. Despite all of that, it tells us that there's got to be some sort of nuggets of wisdom that are worth pursuing in there. So yeah, stick with it if you're confused or bored, but you know that the person you're reading is useful and you know that there's something in there that you want to get at. Stick with it. The reason why, everybody is not completely and utterly steeped in expertise about philosophy. It's not because they don't think it's useful, but because it's difficult. As they say, of so many things, if it were easy, everybody would do it. And I really think they would, because philosophy is

so useful, they really would do it if it was easy. But it's not easy. So if you're willing to put in the effort, you'll get that reward, I think. Well said, as usual. Cool. Well, Stephen, thanks. It's been fun. I'll have to have you back on at some point. It's been good. Cool. Anytime. Thank you.