Alignment

Driving just the other day flipped on the radio in my zipcar and NPR was broadcasting an episode of Philosophy Talk. I like this show. My lovely wife gifted me a year subscription to their podcast a couple years ago. I am not totally sure who the guest was on this particular show as I jumped in halfway through but I think it was Richard Hanley as he was talking about a book he wrote regarding philosophy and pop culture, particularly South Park.

Both of the hosts of philosophy talk are professors at Stanford, and for the most part they run an awesome show. However, I feel sometimes that they underestimate their listeners. To be honest this particular episode was a bit uninteresting barring one important, throbbing question which was asked and then moved passed. I didn't listen to the whole show so it may have been addressed earlier or later, but I find this to be the MO of the show. A surface scraping.

They show was concerned with philosophy in pop culture and in discussing different manifestations of philosophical conundrums in pop culture the question was posited: Do these philosophical questions arise intentionally or do they surface in pop culture naturally?

I tend to think that there is a sort of case by case basis for these sort of things but the latter part of this question really got me thinking as it touches on something I posted long long ago on this here blog.

Philosophical questions do arise naturally. As I have said before: we are sentient beings and sentient beings must deal with a whole slew of questions that arise out of the act of being conscious. The concept of "I" brings with it a chest of philosophical gold.

So when we see deep questions in things like Finding Nemo, The Big Lebowski, or more blatantly The Matrix, etc... they are byproducts of the telling of the human experience.

We are all philosophers.

let's start at the very beginning...

Socrates.

A familiar name.

The truth about Socrates is that we do not know much (if anything) about him. All that we know is from second hand accounts; if Socrates wrote anything (which is unlikely) none of it has survived. Most of what we know has been conveyed to us by Plato. Many of Plato's works are still with us today and Socrates is a main character, or vocal piece in most of them.

The most significant contribution to philosophy that Socrates gave us was the Socratic Method which is a method of teaching someone what they already know. Thats the beauty of it. It works like this: Socrates would ask a question of someone such as, "what is piety?" the person then answers, ands then Socrates pokes at the validity of the answer. The point of the socratic method is to be a teacher that does not lecture, but would rather ask: "As a student what do you know? Why do you know that? Are you justified in believing that?" Socrates had a way of forcing you to describe your beliefs in such a way that they become arguments.

At least thats what we think Socrates did. As I said, all of the accounts we have of Socrates are second hand. Socrates is an ambiguous fellow, more on him when we talk about

Plato.

399bc