He's just a guy

​@@cheesycheese7100a very wise, generous, humble guy 🙏

@rosaehermeticus7807 why waste your time on me if it's so valuable then?

Professor for the world🫡

Yes. Indeed! Thank you Mr. Micheal. Thank you so much

A contagious outbreak of sanity :)

@@EffectiveMuscle Haha factual

Ah yes. Robert Sapolsky also talks about this through a evo psy lens where the distinctions between us vs. them broke down momentarily.

I have been dealing with stage 4 metastatic cancer since 2011. Twenty years is highly unlikely and two would be fortunate.That is why I have been attempting a knowledge dump that is as general and complete as I can manage given that my cancer meds cause aphasia. It is like being a pianist with arthritis, I can no longer play as I once could, but I will keep playing until I cannot play at all.

You have made philosophy accessible to anyone who has the internet. You model intelligence, modesty, equanimity, curiosity, bravery, and honesty in every video. Even in Eternity they will call you Philosopher. Thank you. .

​@dr.michaelsugrue How do I join these Conversations Do I just join your channel? I am a huge fan. Of your lectures I'm guessing from the 1990s that you have posted on KZfaq. I I am especially a fan of plato's the republic Probably because I Come from an American world view or Western World view more broadly. I am a philosophical novice I did not go to college and try to educate myself In my free time I climb cellphone towers for a living And the chance to be involved in this knowledge dump. As you call it Would be an honor and a privilege. I feel like something is missing in the world today. Nihilism and materialism And machiavellianism Seem to carry the day I myself believe in something something greater. I wish you good health and hope that. you see this message.

⁠@@dr.michaelsugrueWith you.. but Arthur would always say, with pessimism of course, your metaphor is lacking..he might ask arthritic hands? Well that would inhibit the tune on the piano….. He says he needs to search for an arthritic tongue and vocal chord! He chuckles next to me… he tells me now the genius ..” because we are now fighting with Metaphors” needs to have an armoury that now currently delves deeper than a metaphor. When we are so desperate with words and language, he says, it is quite obvious the metaphor will not do.. Can you help? Literalism eh..well Mike ..putting Arthur to bed now…It’s my downtime..I have had enough of him..

In my opinion, we need to end the federal reserve and create a public banking system. Banking for the people by the people. Whoever controls your money controls you. In a public banking system, you wouldcontrol your own savings. Having a private safe at a public bank would have its advantages, I think.

What book do you want to get your hands on?

Well.. it is not coming in his lifetime! Trust me on this… I promise you a posthumous document tho ..! From me to you..he is brilliant, as an orator…second to none! His expositions are superb ..but surely we are missing the point here.. Listening to Michael.. for the first time..sensational! Do the reading ( without the quick and dirty read) and what is said..well..many times before. Put it this way .. I know EXACTLY where he going to diverge from BLOOM. The bloom is dead though..can you imagine taking on your contemporaries at their time of their pomp? When they can answer back? Now for me.. silence..well that has A backup! The ego would never afford a silence..one on one of course….

True. The word "understanding" is a metaphor and is "to be fully surrounded". You can grasp a concept, which is a metaphor for holding it in your hands. A crab wouldn't understand "going forwards or backwards in life" since it goes sideways.

But reason has limits, and philosophy is a set of beliefs and values.

@@jimmynox8257 Yes, a set of beliefs and values based on truth. For the most part, of course. Theology on the other hand is based on no more than falsehood.

​@@francpez7564 If you think about it, reason is ultimately based on faith (at least, in the most basic principles). In this context, faith is but intuition, an intuitive belief in something incapable of being proved. That is, incapable of being proved due to being either too complex or too simple. So rejecting faith here is totally unreasonable.

@@sapientum8 if truth is on your side, you dont need faith.

Victor Frankl said "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

How?

@@francpez7564 Stoicism: “No school has more goodness and gentleness; none has more love for human beings, nor more attention to the common good.... If you think you can't have love and Reason I would suggest that you question your concept of love. It took me a long time to understand because initially I considered love to be completed irrational, but no, it's the very opposite.

@@davidconroy8554 I'm a little confused here. Maybe you can help. I'm not seeing a relation between love and reason. How are you using the words? What's wrong with reason without love and love with the reason? I feel like I'm missing something here.

Read the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. Disinterested and costly benevolence without any expectation of reciprocity or reward makes no sense, zero, which is why Greek ethics, like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics makes no reference to altruism or anything like Christian Agape. From the perspective of a rationally self interested homo economicus, the Good Samaritan might as well throw his coins in the ocean. I think the Parable of the Good Samaritan is more valuable than anything in the Greco-Roman legacy and few people like the Greeks and Romans as much as I do. I am no more embarrassed to acknowledge Jesus as my teacher than I am to acknowledge Socrates or Confucius or Buddha as having explained to me the limits of reason and the power of love. In a Venn diagram, logic and love mostly overlap, but two tiny crescents remain, and human life prioritizes either self or others. We all make a decision to live as Givers or Takers. The highest kind of human life is to choose to leave more than one takes, without any heteronomous motive of afterlife payoff, just because it is the noblest human aspiration. Of the many admirable people in the horrific twentieth century, the one I admire the most is a saint, Father Maximillian Kolbe. I have no right to count myself a man, much less a Mensch, until I have the titanium spine and absolute focus of the will that this exemplary human being displayed. Father Kolbe is a better man than I am and I will call anyone who says differently to their face a liar or a fool or both. He is the patron saint of drug addicts and political prisoners who reminds us of what we could be if we stopped feeling sorry for ourselves and allowed love for others to triumph over selfishness, however rational.

Altruism would be rich coming from Aristotle. I was raised a Christian, I learned that parable in school, I was going to blame the early indoctrination for the misunderstanding but then I recalled the lesson about the woman preparing a meal for Jesus and turning the child and the tramp from her door. My Ma was the teacher and in fairness, she did her best. I read your reply in the bed and my first instinct was to shoot it down straight away with virtue is its own reward, but I don't want just a parry of words like what Wittgenstein reduced philosophy to, I would like you to understand me. I recently asked a philosophy graduate what virtue was and she replied " virtue is what the virtuous man does" and I sat there and thought to myself, where did you get that! And that's what is coming through here. I'm beginning to see now where she got it. I'm going to explain the relationship between love and Reason the best I possibly can, though how do you explain the colour blue to a blind man, but I'll try. I'm just going to take a couple of hours to articulate my argument.

Tell it to Plato.

@@dr.michaelsugrue Tell it to Plato? At first, I was a little puzzled by your comment. Then I remember that Plato was all about censorship. Geez, how does the philosopher come to terms with that? It seems that "to censor or not to censor" has become the question of the day. Should we censor the opposition or allow the opposition to speak freely? Well, the way I see it: if freedom of speech makes poor philosophers of us, what does censorship make of philosophy. Even when we're allowed to speak freely among ourselves, truth is hard to come by. Let alone when we are being censored. Without freedom of speech. I don't think philosophy is possible. Perhaps Plato meant that censorship should be allowed only when instructing the Young, to keep them from learning falsehood or immoral poetry when their minds are most impressionable. And perhaps he also meant to say that when the pupil reaches a certain age, the gates of censorship should be unlocked to give way to open dialogue. Or perhaps I'm just speculating. Lol.

Everyone with any wit is in favor of censorship After you actually think through what the abolition of censorship (see below) would mean in practice let me know if you are still enthusiastic about it theoretically. The most Platonic reality in our time, after Singapore, is Sesame Street. We decided that small children were in need of morally wholesome entertainment that would be educative. Thus Sesame Street teaches colors and numbers and letters and shapes and caring means sharing and its nice to be nice to the nice and other such wholesome, ghost of Plato approved stuff. Back in the day, Medea, the Bacchae, Oedipus, were fun for the whole Athenian family which exposed children to incest and madness and gouging one's own eyes out and child murder until Plato told them correctly that art is educative and that morally bad art yields morally bad children who become morally bad adults. I once wanted to be a screenwriter for the Children's Television Workshop that produces Sesame Street and I pitched an episode with all the oppressive, totalitarian Platonic censorship removed because it was the only way for our society to be free. Picture this, I said, a new direction for government funded preschool education, an anti censorship, anti Platonic action flick called "CTW Gotterdammerung". Just imagine: A block over from Sesame Street, Bert and Ernie hold up a liquor store and use the money to buy narcotics from Big Bird. Flush with money and drugs, Bert and Ernie both load their pistols for a big night out. Unfortunately Oscar the Grouch tries to carjack them and a gunfight ensues and in which Snuffleupagus gets caught in the crossfire and bleeds out on the corner. Miss Piggy, a hooker who works that corner was terrified by all the blood and Snuffleupagus, writhing in pain, howling, swearing and cursing and casting every conceivable aspersion on Oscar's unknown ethnicity and race. His pal, Big Bird races out with a shotgun, vowing revenge for Snuffleupagus, whose last words in his deep reassuring bass voice were, "Oh Bird, I'm dead. Kill those sons of bitches for me." Big Bird says, "Don't worry, Snuffy, reflexive unthinking payback through gun violence is an important thing for young people to learn early and from now the government is going to promote liberty so we are going to focus preschool children's programming on massacres and firearms and addictive drugs and Miss Piggy's internet porn because Platonic censorship is odious." He replied, "Oh Bird, you always were a discriminating reader overburdened with clever ideas." Then he died. Big Bird snaps and then goes on a rampage, blasting away at the number seven, the color blue, Tuesday, the letter W and caring means sharing. Bert and Ernie decide that the quality of the narcotics they purchased the day before was poor so they confront Big Bird, demanding their money back, but Big Bird has already spent the money at Miss Piggy's brothel and now he has an STD. They made a Kama Sutra video that was posted on Miss Piggy's OnlyFans account and a link was posted for the preschool audience to see for themselves. "Psycho" Bert as his friends called him, was enraged, and he made a move for his pistol, but Big Bird had 00 Buckshot loaded, and before Bert could get a shot off, Big Bird blew his head clean off his shoulders and deposited bloody fragments of brain and cloth, Quentin Tarantino style, on the opposite wall. This buys Ernie enough time to draw his pistol and fire, which puts Big Bird down. Ernie then looks curiously at his headless friend squirting arterial blood from the neck, and in that instant Big Bird, mortally wounded and down but not out, blows a hole the size of a grapefruit through Ernie's torso covering Miss Piggy with gore. Gasping for breath, Big Bird tells Miss Piggy to bring him the molotov cocktails and pipe bombs in his apartment. He lights them and throws them into buildings on both sides of Sesame Street and burns the whole neighborhood down (except Miss Piggy's whorehouse) while explaining with his dying breaths to his preschool audience that they do not need Molotov cocktails, just playing with matches in secret is enough. Then the show ends and there is an acknowledgement of the financial support from various charitable foundations, as he dies Big Bird blasts a bunch of holes in the video acknowledgements and sets it on fire revealing the voice over announcer then Big Bird blows his head off too. I didn't think there were any tyrannical Platonic censors at Children's Television Workshop, so I am mystified as to why they never called me back.

@@dr.michaelsugrue If Plato was right, does that mean the forefathers were wrong? If so, does that mean we have to rewrite the constitution or do away with it. Have we been wrong about freedom of speech all this time? I get what you are saying, but it just seems odd that censorship should have a place in a free Society. However, I do believe that a certain amount of censorship is necessary and a must to maintain a healthy Republic. We should definitely aim to guard ourselves against falsehood, obscenity, and immoral poetry. Especially, when it comes to instructing the Young. As an adult. I found the Sesame Street (Salty Street) parody comically entertaining. As a child. I most likely would have been traumatized and my first words out of my mouth probably would have been "pimpin ain't easy". Lol. I suppose I have much to ponder about. To censor or not to censor? When should we censor and by how much? Who should we censor and on what grounds? Yep, there sure is a lot to think about.