The Wes Cecil Podcast

No, we’re not becoming dumber. However, because of the incentives of the few major companies that have a disproportionate impact on how content is exposed to us, what we encounter IS remarkably awful. This is driven, unsurprisingly, by a drive to maximize profit by exploiting the young and uneducated. Hence, we are exposed to what is likely to appeal not to the dumb, but to the inexperienced, uneducated and indeed simplistically juvenile. Combined with the incentive to provide cheapest possible content, this perverse scenario produces a media world that seems apocalyptically barren. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

CAPITALISM: EP. 7The new entity created with the rise of the corporation was created under an old set of values and philosophies that had no precedent for thinking about what was coming with the rise of the multinational corporation. The old, intuitive models of human relations took generations to fade leaving us in uncharted territory as we tried to understand and respond to the power that had been unleashed.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This classic Zen tale asks us to consider the nature or our attachments and how what we carry in our minds is as important - perhaps even more important - than the experiences we have.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

No Left Wing!In many of my conversations with folks here in France I realize that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the political spectrum in the US and this lecture is a brief reflection on the utter absence of a Liberal or Left wing party as it would be understood in much of Europe and many other Democracies as well. Indeed, I think many Americans are confused by this as well.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

CAPITALISM: EP. 6We have met Capitalism and it is US. The co-evolution of modern conceptions of the individual and capitalism makes it difficult for us to recognize or act on values outside the Capitalist mindset. We tend to evaluate almost everything in terms of financial returns, investments, costs, rewards etc. and imagine our buying and participation in the economy is the fundamental mode of defining ourselves.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From Being and Time, this example highlights the very different ways we relate to objects in the physical world. We rarely reflect on how we interact with physical objects and how they impact our experience of the world but, indeed, there are radically different modes of being that come into play in our interactions with objects like hammers.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

READ ALONG SERIES - KANT'S "PROLEGOMENA"So why would a governor of a Russian enclave denounce Kant 200+ years later? Kant’s undercutting of metaphysics fundamentally questions all of the assumptions necessary for a tyrant like Putin to justify his brutal war in Ukraine. Notions like ‘Greater Russia’ a ‘Common People’ a ‘Shared Vision of Civilization’ ‘A Divine Mission’ are all so much metaphysical nonsense according to Kant. In its place, he appeals to the power of the individual to construct a moral order from their own reason and experience - the foundations of many of his ethical arguments. Difficult, virtually unreadable, quiet and full of integrity, Kant creates a new foundation for grounding ‘truth’ within the power of every individual human. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

CAPITALISM: EP. 5When this new concept of man and new structure of political relations is let loose on the North American continent history starts to be rewritten. While the history and social norms of ancient societies resisted the transformations pressed for by these new forms, having eliminated the ancient societies in the Americas, the forces of Capitalism were given an opportunity for unrestrained expression. And the rest, as they say, is history.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this tale, originally from the work of Chuang Tzu, a simple problem illustrates two different kind of thinking errors we make in day to day life and how Taoism seeks to help us avoid them.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

READ ALONG SERIES - KANT'S "PROLEGOMENA"Having moved on from Empiricism and Idealism, Kant now undercut the foundations of Metaphysics by putting strict limits on the power of its insights while simultaneously establishing that metaphysics is, nonetheless, the best we can do in the way of thinking. He completes his run through the foundations of philosophical history much like Napoleon smashing through Europe - he destroys a lot but it is hard to see just what he built to go in its place. Roughly speaking, phenomenology, epistemology, ontology, existentialism and language philosophers have been struggling to recover ever since. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.