Episode #039 ... The Limits of Empiricism

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  For more information and full transcripts of the podcast, check out philosophisethis.org.

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  For updates about new episodes, check out Instagram at philosophisethispodcast, all one word, on X at I am Stephen West.

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  Be well, and I hope you love the show today.

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  Maybe the best place to start the show today is to talk about this really confusing moment in time that we've been talking about for about the last seven or eight episodes.

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  All of these thinkers that are living relatively at about the same time period as each other,

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  Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz,

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  these philosophers and all the humans for that matter that were in the know at the time were living in a very weird place.

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  That's really the best way to put it.

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  At this time, there was a giant change in the way that these thinkers viewed themselves as humans in the natural world.

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  And that fact created a level of weirdness that was just unprecedented.

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  And the reason why it was unprecedented is

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  because it was being driven forth by a couple different inventions that just before these guys were alive,

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  they just didn't exist yet.

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  One of those inventions was the telescope.

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  With the telescope during this time period, for the first time in history,

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  we're looking out into the vast expanses of space.

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  Imagine how that must have been.

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  And the more we looked out there, and the more sophisticated these telescopes got, the more information we got.

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  And that information categorically reinforced the fact that Earth was very, very small.

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  Practically a speck of dust in this giant sea.

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