Unmaking Sense

Episode 12.47: Balancing collective responsibility with individual freedom

We owe everything to society, but that doesn’t mean society has a right to control our lives. What we owe society most is that we become the best version we can of ourselves.

Episode 12.46: Enjoying travelling not only arriving.

More nuanced discussion of why process is more important than outcome, travelling than arriving, enjoying the present than planning the future.

Episode 12.45: Interest-driven Education

Why arguments against interest-driven education make unwarranted assumptions about what we are supposed to need to know.

Episode 12.44: Teething problems!

A lament about changing platforms.

Episode 12.43: Process and Product

The first Podbean episode recorded while walking local country lanes.

Episode 12.42: The Dewey Paradox

How can “Living the Present” be the best way to prepare for the future; indeed, the only way to prepare for the future? We explore John Dewey’s notion that only by extracting as much as we can from the present can we prepare for the future, because to do anything else is self-contradictory. 

Episode 12.41: The characteristics of conservatism and why John Dewey rejected them; as should we.

As a UK General Election looms we look not at conservative economics but at the political, sociological and metaphysical assumptions that characterise them; at why John Dewey rejected them all, and why we should too.

Episode 12.40: Do we create problems to alleviate boredom? Is that why we play games that go badly?

As general elections loom in the UK and France, as the Euros start in Germany, we consider the question of self-inflicted stress and trauma and why, when things seem to be going swimmingly well, we seem to have a propensity to indulge a kind of death-wish. This is a First World problem, of course: are we simply bored?

Episode 12.39: Pragmatism and weak moral relativism. Why consequentialism doesn’t work.

If pragmatism is a better name for weak moral relativism then what does it tell us about the way we should view our decisions? Should we look to evaluate what we do now in terms of consequences? And how do we deal with uncertainty in the face of the fact that the way we act may have the very opposite consequences to those that we intend and hope for? Why consequentialism fails and what we can do instead.

Episode 12.38: Elephants give one another names. We regularly change our minds on much.

The example of elephants using names illustrates how we change our minds in the face of new evidence, as we should. So moral certainty is unwise at best.