Socratic State of Mind Podcast

See the original article: https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewperlot/p/alaric-called-your-statistics-are?r=1xulhu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true Get full access to Socratic State of Mind at andrewperlot.substack.com/subscribe

See original article . Get full access to Socratic State of Mind at andrewperlot.substack.com/subscribe

Original Article . Get full access to Socratic State of Mind at andrewperlot.substack.com/subscribe

Original article . Get full access to Socratic State of Mind at andrewperlot.substack.com/subscribe

Original article: https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewperlot/p/leo-strausss-despicable-project?r=1xulhu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true Get full access to Socratic State of Mind at andrewperlot.substack.com/subscribe

You’ve agreed to put on mental handcuffs and won’t be thinking straight. That’s what you should conclude, first and foremost, if you choose to grapple with philosophy’s famous “ Trolley Problem .” If you’re unfamiliar, it goes like this: The Setup: A runaway trolley is about to kill five people lying on its track. You can pull a lever to divert it onto another track, where one person will be kille...

Shall I be an a*****e? I could bring this question to every relationship; an entire branch of my philosophy can be built around it. I don’t mean “ should I be intentionally offensive ,” but rather, “ should I ask virtuous questions that antagonize the masses , or bow to the foolishness that reigns ?” Bring a truth-seeking, Socratic-style approach to any encounter and Eris, goddess of discord, appe...

You know what you should do. Horse stance can help. I’m not talking about your boss’s orders or meeting society’s expectations. You can summit those heights without horse stance. They offer carrots, sticks, and cheerleaders aplenty; godspeed. I’m talking about that other category of shoulds . The ones that feel more important and less lucrative and practical. The ones we can’t muster enough willpo...

We’re locked in. Our habitual thoughts wear on the brain like wheels on a dirt road, creating hard-to-escape ruts we might feel doomed to follow. Sometimes we’re stuck traversing these rutted tracks year after year, and when emergencies or uncertainties arise, we’re ill-equipped to escape them and find solutions. The feeling is ancient, and our progenitors created a variety of solutions. When bese...

I draw my bow and let the arrow fly. Does it strike the target? Does it split my last arrow down the middle, quivering amid concentric circles? Does the audience gasp and break into applause? Not the right questions. They will, in fact, drive us to madness and ruin. There’s often an audience in the stands, but it would be better if the stadium were deserted or if the crowd roared in inscrutable si...

The Enlightenment is limping across the world stage. Classical liberalism — if not the “ liberalism ” invective hurled across the halls of Congress like a curse — appears to be on its back foot. Some cheer this reversal while others bemoan the downfall of something great. But for a moment, let’s put aside the rightness or wrongness of the Enlightenment’s “fixes,” to mankind’s ancient problems and...

In a recent subscriber chat I was asked how I deal with the Stoics’ sex-negative approach to life. Which confused me, because I wouldn’t characterize Stoics as disliking sex or finding it morally problematic. Or at least they don’t find it more problematic than our drives for food, resource accrual, prestige, and pain avoidance, which also have the potential to lead to bad outcomes. So I’m going t...

“Heraclitus says somewhere that ‘all things move and nothing stays,’ and likening beings to the flow of a river, says, ‘you can not step in the same river twice.’” — Plato, Cratylus , 402a We want to be better — it’s only natural. Moving closer to our values and learning to live them out has many benefits , and this transformation is at the heart of good philosophy. People start down the path and...

Nothing can replace the right inner discourse. Genius will not; the world is full of tortured geniuses encased in hells of their own making. Wealth will not; those who don’t squander their wealth often live in terror of losing it. Luck will not; luck turns on us all eventually. The wrong inner discourse transforms blessings to ash and problems into catastrophe. We’ll always be slaves to externals...

The duldrums, we might call it. Or malaise. Maybe we can’t put our finger on what’s wrong, but something’s not right. We’re unsatisfied, vaguely anxious, and unsure what to do. This is the complaint the Roman knight Annaeus Serenus brought to his teacher, the philosopher Seneca, in On Tranquility of the Mind . Serenus had a lot going for him. He held considerable power as the prefect of the Vigile...

“Overly Cerebral” — it’s an accusation frequently hurled against philosophy, the pursuit of excellence (arete/virtue), or even modern ideas of success. “ Mancoded ” was how one acquaintance described the writing of Marcus Aurelius to me. Others consider excellence capitalistic, unempathetic, or not set up for those with different cognitive abilities or impoverished circumstances. Maybe they’ve tri...

You’ll take the chocolate treats home from the store and only eat them on special occasions in very moderate portions. This is what you tell yourself in the aisle, eyes gleaming. There are people who do this. It sounds wise and moderate. But it’s a roll of the dice many people are better off not making. When we try, we often lose. Our society is full of people failing to eat moderately in our tast...

Prior generations were overwhelmed by new mediums, so they were duped in strange ways. Today we’re so deeply sunk in another medium that we’re also easily fooled. Think about it. * Orson Welles caused mass hysteria with his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Listeners really thought Martians were invading. * When Shakespeare filled the Globe Theater with his stories, people rushed the stage t...

What if Plato is deluded? Most people said they enjoyed reading Gorgias as part of our readalong , but the feeling wasn’t universal. One subscriber said this: “…I like your articles so I gave [Gorgias] a try, but I was disappointed. I don’t get why Plato and Socrates are held up as philisophical paragons. Some of their claims are ridiculous. As you say, I don’t buy that it’s better to be punished...

We’ve covered popular misconceptions about obesity , and found that people placing moral judgments on food choices are slimmer and healthier. But during a recent subscriber chat , someone argued I’d only demonstrated that food moralizers are slimmer while failing to prove that pleasure itself was a primary driver of obesity — isn’t it just an innocent byproduct? So I’ll take another crack at it an...

This is my second and final Gorgias read-along essay. In the first , we heard Socrates’s unconventional view that Rhetoric is contemptible because it persuades without creating understanding. He also insists it’s better to be wronged than to do wrong to others . Now we get to see what the opposite of these opinions looks like when played out to their natural conclusion. Socrates comes out swinging...

Every digital street corner has a Callicles these days, calling for the strong to cast off their shackles and remake the world. Which is weird. The Philosopher Plato probably dropped Callicles — a real-life Athenian sophist — into his dialogue, Gorgias , so he could have Socrates wipe the floor with him. We’ll dive into Callicles’s Socratic clash in my second read-along essay next week, but let’s...

You’ve still got time to join our Gorgias read-along, and I hope you do. Gorgias is a powerful piece that changed how I look at the world and conduct my life. Today, we look at the ominous first half of the dialogue. The seemingly pedantic beginning of Gorgias is darker than it seems. To see why, let’s play the WWWWWH game I used long ago as a newspaper reporter. Who: Socrates: Our “protagonist,”...

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” — Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality , Part II, Chapter 1 Plato thought it no slight to put his greatest wisdom into fantasy. He was a playwright as a young man, and though he burned his plays after finding Socrates and his philosiphia — his love of wisdom —...

“Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak.” — Seneca, Letters , 20.1 Shut up! No, seriously. Stop telling the world. Stop updating the fam. Stop impressing the gram. If you’re broadcasting what you’re up to or the big plan ahead, you’re probably making a mistake. If you’re name-dropping and holding up accomplishments for the crowd's admiration, that’s still a mistake, but for entirely different...