The Wes Cecil Podcast

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.

CAPITALISM: EP. 4The birth of the Dutch East India Company in 1602 is a watershed moment in the history of capitalism. A new power is brought into the world that the Dutch political powers used to create wealth and compete with their neighbors. However, this company also had many unintended consequences that we are still living with today.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 a very simplified version of the famous Yaksha parable from the Mahabharata, we encounter the strangely rich and human nature of Hindu stories. In the original, there are something like 30 different questions so I have just mentioned a few of them here.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 we now get to the point Kant has been angling towards the whole time. What do we gain from all of this thinking for metaphysics? Answer, we gain insight into the entire possible range of human understanding - only granting that the range is quite limited. He begins his argument by refuting the two major approaches to science and thinking generally prevalent in his time; idealism and empiricism. I find Kan’t powerful critique of these two outlooks helpful to keep in mind when encountering arguments that just assume the relevance and correctness of their world view and then prove something - empiricists are particularly guilty here - with little or no reflection on the often shaky foundations of their assumptions.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. 3The need for revenue and the fracturing of the European social order that accompanied the Reformation led to the slow development of a new vision of the individual and of trade and markets that launched the capitalist world as we know it today.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.