2017-04-14
30 分钟Thanks to everyone out there that supports the show on Patreon, patreon.com, slash, philosophize this.
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So I want to begin the episode today by telling you all a very famous story from the history of philosophy.
It's an old story, passed down from generation after generation from one philosopher to another,
and here I am today passing it on to you.
It's a story about a day way back in antiquity in Athens.
Plato and his fellow philosophers are all sitting around talking about stuff,
as they normally would, questioning the definitions of things.
Popular thing to do if you're a philosopher back then.
I mean, after all,
how can you ever philosophize about something meaningfully
if you don't have a solid grasp on the definition of the thing?
Now the topic of this particular day's discussion was the question, what is a human being?
What does it mean to be a human being?
How can we define that?
Well, they sit around, they talk about it for a while, throw some theories around,
and eventually they come to a conclusion that they're all pretty satisfied with sitting there nodding at each other.