Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks | EP 501

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with philosopher, professor, and lecturer Dr. Stephen Hicks. They discuss their collaboration through the Peterson Academy, the case for philosophy on the practical level,the evolution of human thought across intellectual movements and waves, the notion that we see reality through a story, and the danger of getting the story wrong.

Stephen Hicks’ writings have been translated into twenty languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, German, Korean, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, French, Hebrew, Estonian, Urdu, Turkish, and Arabic. He has published in academic journals such as “Business Ethics Quarterly,” “Teaching Philosophy,” and “Review of Metaphysics,” as well as other publications such as “The Wall Street Journal” and “Cato Unbound.”

In 2010, he won his university’s Excellence in Teaching Award. He was Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois; has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.; Visiting Professor at Jagiellonian University, Poland; Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio; Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College at Oxford University in England; Senior Fellow at The Objectivist Center in New York; and Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great, Poland. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Guelph, Canada, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

This episode was filmed on November 15th, 2024

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For Stephen Hicks:

On Peterson Academy

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(0:00) Coming up

(0:39) Intro

(2:19) Lecturing for Peterson Academy

(5:16) The giants of philosophy each shook the earth — learn why

(10:54) The case for philosophy on the practical level

(14:24) Narrative, weighting facts, and how various philosophies reconcile perception versus reality

(25:24) Epistemology (the theory of knowledge), how you know that you really know something

(26:35) You cannot do epistemology in isolation, you need metaphysics

(35:09) The hierarchy of neurological responses: perception, stimuli, and response

(41:59) Most of what you see is memory, neural-plasticity when training for reward

(46:02) Empiricism and truth claims, evolving automated and emotional responses

(54:34) Levels of competing abstractions, memes, and feedback loops

(1:00:11) Challenging Dr. Peterson’s notion of seeing reality through a narrative

(1:01:58) Objecting to the objection: intellectual discussion at its finest

(1:06:27) Rebuttal and clarification: a state of focus rather than a screen

(1:10:11) The Tabernacle as a model of perception, spheres of resolution

(1:15:31) Focusing on the field, survival versus task orientation

(1:19:42) The orienting reflex, object perception pertaining to use

(1:25:33) How couples become attuned to each other’s voices, focusing on a chosen center

(1:27:34) How postmodernists warp interpretation into subjectivity

(1:29:30) Postmodernist rhetoric and the weakness of power claims, “it’s a confession rather than a description”

(1:38:30) Stephen’s courses are available now on Peterson Academy — with more to come

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Ep. 0501