Latest / The Remnant Radio's Podcast / The Philosophy That Built the Liberal Mind: Descartes to Marx w/ Dr. Jordan Cooper

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The Philosophy That Built the Liberal Mind: Descartes to Marx w/ Dr. Jordan Cooper · The Remnant Radio's Podcast

• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody, welcome back to the wonderful world of Remnite Radio.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Today I'm joined with Dr.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Jordan Cooper, and we're talking about the philosophy that shaped uh the mind of the left.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be an exciting program.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: You guys see tuned?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Dr.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Cooper is uh not a guest in the sense that we've never had him on the program again.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, he's one of the frequent flyers we have back over and over.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you guys hear me talk a lot about how Lutheran theology has shaped a good deal of uh my thinking of the world.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Dr.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Cooper has been a fantastic gateway drug into the mind of Lutheran theology.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: So uh again, you know, reading Book of Concord, reading Philip Melanchthon, those kinds of things really strengthened uh some of that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: But then Dr.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Cooper pointing me in the right direction in various areas.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: I've read quite a few of his works.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, out of all the modern scholars, and I don't know if he'll take this as flattering or uh, you know, just think I'm on the wrong trail here, uh I don't know that there's been a single modern scholar that I've read more of.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've read a good chunk of your work.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I typically, because of the interviews, will pick one guy, read one of his books, think it's fantastic.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I might read a second one if it comes, he comes out with a new book.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but because I have a fascination with Lutheran theology, you know, I gravitate to quite a bit of your work.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I appreciate what you do.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for people who aren't familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your ministry before we dive in?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I appreciate that.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm glad you've you've uh enjoyed the things that I've written.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, so if you don't know anything about me, I am a Lutheran.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's already been made pretty obvious here.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I am an ordained Lutheran pastor in a church body called the AALC, the American Association of Lutheran Churches.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm not serving a parish.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I did serve in parish ministry full-time for six years.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Since then, I've done uh campus ministry, and I also teach and run a theological education organization.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so my teaching is in dogmatics at American Lutheran Theological Seminary.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: We do uh this is a distance program that I teach for, so I'm teaching on Zoom, and uh they are like live, you know, live classrooms, that's not pre-recorded stuff.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: But then I also run an organization called Justin Sinner, and uh we're a theological education organization.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have a YouTube channel that's part of that.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: We publish a lot of books, we republish a lot of uh older materials, and we do a number a number of other things as well.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So uh our our kind of goal and everything that that we do as an organization is to show people that uh Lutheran theology and the Lutheran tradition has a lot of insights for the church that that are relevant to the church today.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I think that is true for the church worldwide, even you know, outside of the Lutheran tradition itself.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's much that um that has been missing when our voice is quiet, which it often has been.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's that's really interesting.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I remember at ETS, you and I were talking, you had one of your, I don't even know who it was, but it was like two years ago.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say he was a part of uh AALC with you.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Is it one A or two A's?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Remind me.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh two A's, yeah.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Two A's, double A.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so AALC.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was one of the other uh you know ordained ministers in the ALC, and y'all were asking, hey, why does Lutheran has a have a branding problem?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because like right now, people are looking for high church tradition.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: They go straight into Anglicanism.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like Lutherans are where it's at.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what's what's and I think it really comes down to uh, well, just some of the more influential figures.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you've got your NT rights out there who have drawn a lot of folks into that space.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the Reformed space uh certainly has uh people who have leveraged media.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, even folks in the Methodist spaces have leveraged media.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think of guys at Methodist seminaries like Dr.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Craig Keener or Ben Witherington, whether it be published works through books or online media.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just thankful that you are uh kind of, you know, uh setting a good standard.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I appreciate that uh we are introducing people to kind of historical ways of thinking, because that's a real serious area, I think, in a lot of evangelicalism in the West.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: We think church history really began when my pastor started our local assembly, and that's their knowledge of church history.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly far back Jesus died on a cross.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, uh, when it comes to what happens in that in-between space, it doesn't really matter unless you're Catholic and we're not Catholic.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think that that's uh great travesty.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm thankful for your work here.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh instead of me just spending the introduction just blowing smoke up the uh proverbial Lutheran uh buttocks, let's uh let's let's circle back around to um the the top the topic of discussion today.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: You you've written this book on the kind of the left mind and how, man, culture uh didn't just end up where we are here uh in the West, the left-leaning mind of the West.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's been some core philosophical ideas that have led up into this point.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Would you like to kind of frame the work that you've written on the subject?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: So uh this this book, and it's a pretty, it's a pretty hefty book, you know, there's quite a bit in here.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um this work really came out of my experience doing campus ministry.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's really what led me to write this book.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, I did campus ministry at Cornell for seven years.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, while I was there, I was just interacting with a lot of students that had a lot of questions because they knew, well, they knew that I was engaged philosophically, and there were a lot of questions that were asked about a lot of more, more progressive, more left-leaning philosophies that had uh formed many of the departments in the academy, especially within the humanities.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just ended up having a lot of these kinds of conversations.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was out of that that I decided that I'm like looking at primary sources of a lot of these writers.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I had done a little bit of that, but not extensively.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was really for a ministry reason that I went to start to studying these things a bit more seriously.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to say, okay, what are these authors actually saying?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've read the critiques, I understand the general ideas, especially from those who disagree with them, but let me, I want to read the primary sources.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So as I was doing that, I decided that I was gonna, on my YouTube channel, do a series of videos on some of these thinkers that would hopefully be like a helpful guide for students who are navigating these these ideas as they're being taught, you know, in the classroom.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this became a much bigger series than I expected.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then it ended up becoming a book.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that that wasn't my initial intention, but I started to see the need for that, especially as I had a number of people tell me, you really should make this into a book.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think this would be really helpful.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, that that's what kind of led me, led me to write this book.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I do want to say the the book really is not it's not written like polemically, like it's not written as a critique.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: The point of the book, and there there is some critique in there, but the the main point of the book is really to just expose what these ideas are.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because something that I have found repeatedly in just working with college students is that there are a lot of assumptions underlying a lot of what is being taught in the classroom that are never actually discussed or never really defended.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're just kind of assumed.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of this is from you know, postmodernism, post-modernity, especially in the humanities, more than in the philosophy departments.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: But um there are a lot of postmodern assumptions that students don't even realize exist.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the kind of de facto default framework that is being that is being used, you know, in the classroom.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I really wanted to be able to provide something that would give the ideological background of a lot of these ideas so that if you're in the classroom, you're hearing things and you understand the kind of genealogy of ideas that I have here, that you can start to say, okay, I see where that idea is coming from.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I see the presupposition of where this is coming from.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something I've just been concerned about in general.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is in my theological work as well as you know, philosophical, is uh I'm just concerned that a lot of times people don't get to the root of things.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to talk about a lot of surface level issues when there are underlying base level disagreements or problems that we don't actually address.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've always wanted to try to kind of get at those core base ideas to say where is our level of disagreement?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is something I teach my seminary students as well, like when they're writing papers and stuff, is um there are distinct levels of disagreement.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when you are disagreeing with somebody, you have to discover where that level of disagreement is.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you have a foundational disagreement, your entire worldview is different, and you know, you're arguing about something that's maybe like three levels up, you know, built on something, it's built on something, it's built on something else that has a foundation where you totally differ.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, well, you can talk about that kind of surface issue, but you're never really going to find the core point of disagreement because it's your underlying assumptions where you disagree.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's really important to kind of dig down and say, wait, what is the level of disagreement?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And is it like a foundational level of disagreement?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so the study of philosophy really helps to uncover some of those things.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that makes sense.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you know, even when I was studying church history, early um schisms between East and West, even the Latin Greek divide, you know, the cataphatic and apophatic theology, like just the way that we approach the scriptures, the way that we reason from the scriptures, um, that that affects a lot of things downstream.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember hanging out, you know, when the the Black Lives Matter was a huge thing for a long time.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, people would say, Oh, you know, that's Marxist.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: I would start asking people after reading Carl Truman's book, uh Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, I'd be like, Can you tell me what Marxism is?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And most of them couldn't.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: They just knew it was bad.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like they just they they didn't like it's bad.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's the boogeyman.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and don't get me wrong, it is bad.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like I will, I will argue that it is.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, bourgeoisie proletariat, you know, that's not a good frame of those who have power, those who don't, and the resetting of society.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember after reading this book, watching uh Frozen 2 and going, uh, this whole movie's Marxist.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like this entire movie about like you know, going back, you know, so we're trying to watch this movie with my kid.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, you're trying to destroy the foundations of society and return things back to the status quo.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, at the end, you know, you've got this.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I'm not here to exegete Frozen 2.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: So um let let's let's talk about how you first kind of stumbled upon this because you had mentioned in the introduction of your book, which I don't know that we've even mentioned yet, uh, Makers of the Modern Mind is the primary title.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's a subtitle there, but you can go check out the link in the description for people who want to pick it up.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um but in this work, you talked about what what triggered your investigation into this process was noticing that like the the doctrines of union with Christ had not been emphasized to the to the degree that they should have been.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Can you unpack that for us?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it seems like kind of a weird place to start, right?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm looking, uh I'm writing a book about like philosophical ideas uh on on the in the academy on the left.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, so my my exploration of philosophy, I mean, I've had an interest in philosophy certainly since uh since undergrad.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um but uh I really started more seriously digging into philosophy uh when I was I was really interested in a particular theological issue.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this was leading to my doctoral work, where initially I wanted to write something in on the doctrine of union with Christ.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the doctrine of union with Christ has always been something something I'm very passionate about, I still am.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um, some of the reason why I was interested in that is I came from a reformed background and you know, came into Lutheranism, and the reformed background that that I had was one that really emphasized the doctrine of union with Christ, and I wanted to see like what did Lutherans say about this?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I first was exploring Lutheranism, I started reading all of these works and they all talked about union with Christ, and and I was like very interested in what they had to say.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but something that I found was that like when I talked to pastors about the doctrine of union with Christ, I often got like these weird blank stairs or like, I don't know what you're talking about, but because it wasn't really a doctrine that they had talked about at all in seminary.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I started looking through more modern Lutheran material and noticed that like they didn't really talk about union with Christ very much.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is, well, why?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm reading all these old sources and they talk about it all the time, but then it kind of disappeared.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So what's what's the issue here?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And what I discovered was that there really was this strong philosophical shift that started changing the way that people were first reading Martin Luther and then just understanding how it is that God relates to human beings in general.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of this is influenced by by Kant.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually a neo-Kantian philosopher who's probably the most important named Hermann Lotze, who has a uh he influenced a German theologian named Albert Richel, who wrote a work um on the history of the doctrine of justification or reconciliation, and uh applied some of these categories to his reading of Lutheran union with Christ.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially, this boils down to the fact that there was a philosophical shift to where when people read the notion of union with Christ, like in Luther and then in Scripture, uh, they started thinking of this not in categories of like the divine essence, indwelling, like a true indwelling of God uh with within the human essence.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, when they read the word union, they started thinking about a union of wills.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like to be united to Christ is to align my moral will with the will of Christ.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's a pretty different thing.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that I think stands behind a lot of the reason why the the doctrine, as it was historically taught, kind of disappeared at some point in the 20th century, and it was hardly emphasized at all.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's there's been a bit of a recovery of it in in certain ways, but uh so my my interest, yeah, in philosophy really did come from this theological concern, and I realized like, oh, to really understand these theological differences, sometimes you have to understand a philosophical difference.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the thing is that oftentimes our philosophical views are not things that we recognize.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like we just we just kind of inherit them.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're there are assumptions we have about the world that we often we often don't know that we have.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't matter if you're a philosopher, if you know the thing about philosophy, you have a philosophy, and your philosophy is influenced by your culture.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think these discovering these underlying ideas is not just an issue of like debating philosophers, but it leads you to start to think about the presuppositions that people are working from.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so that presupposition then started to affect when people read language of union with Christ and Paul and in other other places in scripture, they just automatically interpret it in light of this view that they already have about how a relation to God works.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, I I remember reading Andrew Wilson, um, not the political commentary, the pastor in the UK, pastor of King's Church, for people who think there's only one Andrew Wilson.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um anyway, uh uh so uh I was reading his book, and his book is on it's titled 1776, the year that changed the world.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not about the Declaration of Independence necessarily, but certain technological, philosophical, you know, uh political advancements and changes that just changed the West.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that he he says in that is there's this Christian worldview.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you're in one sense talking about philosophical systems that exist in the water that are that that we drink, we don't recognize it.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: He was arguing almost from the opposite perspective that the secular West is actually drinking in the same way from a Christian worldview that is affecting them.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, when he would say, hey, you know, I think LGBTQ stuff is sinful, I think it's wrong, you know, they would uh attempt to verbally assault him because he was not defending the marginalized.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: But he was like, defending the marginalized is a Christian worldview.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: That was not a thing prior to us.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're hitting me with my stick.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like, stop doing that.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I I love that point of his book, but but I think you're right.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: There in the same way that there are Christian presuppositions through culture, they're also kind of more secular philosophical.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and secular philosophical ideology can be good, it could be bad, it could be I don't want to say neutral, because I I think that it points us into some areas.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: I you know, I think of Plato, who has some ideas that are true, and all truth is God's truth in that sense.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we can say, hey, that's good.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um but let's start where you start in your book in chapter one.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um you talk about Rene Descartes, and you know, I uh I think therefore I am, right?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um tell me uh about the kind of the genus, the initial start of modern philosophy.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so René Descartes is usually considered the father of modern philosophy.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he is a really essential figure for really shifting the kinds of questions that philosophers were asking.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and again, philosophy, because I know people hear philosophy and they think, oh, that's all abstract.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what we have to realize is that what happens in philosophy affects every other area of the academy.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens in philosophy then starts to impact theology, it starts to impact the sciences, it impacts all sorts of different things.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then those ideas are kind of popularized, and whatever form of media is around in that particular culture at that particular time, and then it kind of trickles down.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: So whatever happens in the realm of philosophy does tend to have some kind of broader cultural impact.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so Descartes, he's not he's not really the in some ways he could trace modern philosophy a little bit further back than than Descartes, because it's not like his system comes out of nowhere, uh, but he's a pretty good starting point.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and Descartes has has, as you said, probably the most famous saying of a philosopher of all time, right?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think, therefore I am.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: And Descartes has a system where he begins with essentially doubt.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: He begins by doubting everything.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a very different kind of starting point than philosophers traditionally generally had started from.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are skeptics uh in the ancient world too, so I don't want to say there's no skepticism in any sense.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And Descartes is actually in some way attempting to kind of answer skeptics.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but in most philosophy, at least as it was accepted and it generally operated in within the Christian world, assumed a general, you know, reliability of like, say, your sense experience, your experience of the world that like you understand reality as it is, and those kinds of things.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: But uh Descartes has this kind of thought experiment where he wants to say, okay, well, what I need to find in order to build a new philosophy is some indisputable starting point of knowledge.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: So something that basically cannot possibly be doubted.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says, I can kind of reason based on that basic assumption through a series of principles and derive all sorts of other kinds of knowledge from that.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Descartes' system was never built to be a skeptical system.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he's actually trying to counter skeptics who essentially said, Well, there are too many competing truth claims, and we have to uh essentially suspend judgment and not say what's right or what's wrong.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Descartes said, no, we don't want to do that.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: What we can do is start from some certain point of knowledge.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so he has this thought experiment where he's like, Well, how do I know that anything exists?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Well, maybe, you know, maybe the world around me doesn't actually exist, and maybe I'm being controlled by like some evil genie, and this evil genie has just is just fooling me and making me think my family exists and and uh you know that my the external world exists, you know, like people experience things that feel like reality and dreams, right?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And those things aren't real, so maybe that's happening to me.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's uh ancient simulation theory.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, it it is.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a it's an interesting thought experiment.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And like actually, Descartes' you know, meditations are for a philosophy text, it's pretty easy to follow and read.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and essentially he comes up with the one thing that he can't doubt as he's as he's doubting.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Well, I know that I'm doubting, so if I'm doubting things, I know that at least I exist.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so he starts there, and then he says, Well, the fact that I exist, you know, he ends up creating maybe it's probably too much to get into the specifics of it, but he ends up um deriving the existence of God based on that principle.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so he he reasons that essentially he has this notion of perfection, and he's like, Well, where did this idea of perfection come from?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know I'm not perfect, and it must have come from an external source, uh, and uh it must have come from a perfect source.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only way that the idea of perfection could could uh could arise in the mind.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very simplified version of his argument.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, and then he says, Okay, so the perfect does exist, and that is God.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if there is a perfect God that exists, goodness uh and truth are part of perfection, and therefore a God who is truth, a God who is good, is not going to deceive me like the evil genie, therefore I can trust my sense experience.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: So Descartes' philosophy essentially leads him to assume the reality of the world as we already know it.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he does kind of change the starting point of where philosophy begins with this question of doubt.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And from Descartes, there is then a very different series of questions that people start asking about the world.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe one other point that's probably worth mentioning here is Descartes has what's called a mechanistic view of nature.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this is true with a lot of those early modern philosophers during this era.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's writing in the 17th century, by the way, for some the, I don't know if I said that for some context here.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And a mechanistic view of nature is opposed to what's called a teleological view of nature.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: A teleological view of nature essentially says that there is purpose, there are ends or goals within the natural world.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: A mechanistic view of nature essentially says, well, nature is basically like a machine.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a physical thing and it's got all of its parts, and they just kind of do what they do, just as you kind of build a machine and just kind of let it go and let it do its thing.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, you have like the watch that you wind up and just Kind of let it go on its own.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so with Descartes, there is this shift away from looking at purpose in nature and goals in nature, and instead looking at nature as a kind of machine.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's some weird things that happen here.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like people, a lot of philosophers deny that animals have internal experience.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: They essentially believe that animals are kind of like robots, that like they don't have any internal life at all.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're just like machines and they have no will or of any kind at all.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very different view of the natural world that does, in a sense, remove God from the natural world.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's not what Descartes is trying to do, but I think it does eventually lead to that.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is it fair to say that he I'm using different categories here, and I know that they're wrong.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm saying this on the front end.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: I hear you describing pre-Descartes as almost presuppositionalist, that they presuppose that there's uniformity to the laws of nature.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: They presuppose that the world is intelligible and to be discovered.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Where on the other end, Kant, I don't want to call him an evidentialist, but it he is looking for how do I know that I know that this is the thing?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he has he has shifted the uh the focus of authority on the presuppositionals will say, well, this must be the case.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this universal law, this universal reality must be the case to make sense of all things.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas Kant moves that, I'm sorry, uh Descartes moves that to himself.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: He's the one who is determining what where truth comes from.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's not quite evidentialism in that he is looking for evidence.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Help me parse this.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Am I close?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: Am I scratching on something?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, I know what you're saying.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say the the categories of like evidentialist versus presuppositionalism, um, I think only make sense post-Kant.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think that divide is actually uh comes out of Kantian philosophy to some degree.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I what I would when I'm talking about apologetics, I would distinguish like a classical apologetic from both presuppositional view and an evidentialist view, uh, and say that there, in some ways, they're kind of elements, I think, of both of those those things within there.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, I think if if what you're trying to get at is that like in a more classical approach to philosophy, apologetics, um, the like things like the existence of God, this is not something that you have to prove, it's an assumption.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that is the case, right?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: That this is an assumption about the world that we all know is true.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is one of the major critiques that Descartes gets from a lot of theologians and philosophers at the time, is that they say, well, it's impious to begin with a perspective of doubt about God.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's not how we do philosophy.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and instead, we we assume God's, you know, God's existence as the starting point.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, there are arguments for the existence of God that are all over the place in like philosophers, you know, prior to Descartes.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: But when you look at those like classical arguments for the existence of God, you find it in like Thomas Aquinas or a lot of early Protestant writers have do do this in various ways, um, they're not really trying to, they're they're not using those arguments starting from a perspective of doubt to say, let me prove to myself or to the skeptic that God exists.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're already assuming faith to some degree.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're assuming the existence of God, and they're saying, here is rational evidence that backs up the existence of God in some way.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, what earlier thinkers are going to do, uh, at least Protestant thinkers, is that they're going to differentiate between two kinds of knowledge of God.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is innate knowledge and then there is derived knowledge.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, innate knowledge of God is this idea that we all know God exists.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: We all are aware of God's existence.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's some debates about exactly how that works and what kind of knowledge that is, but that's generally agreed upon by everybody.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you assume a kind of innate knowledge, which is something that the presuppositionalists really kind of rely on primarily, that's where they're going to center things, well, uh, then you don't really have to prove through demonstrative reason that God exists, because you already have an innate knowledge that he exists.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's already in the conscience, that's in like the religious desire that's inherent to the heart and those kind of things.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And now they would say, yes, of course, you can rationally demonstrate God's existence from the external world as well.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and scripture points to that kind of thing.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: In Romans 1, Paul does that as well.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you don't start from that standpoint of doubt in order to derive God's existence.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's let's keep pushing through.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we we've we've covered Descartes.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about uh Kant's uh Capernaan revolution.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I want to try to pronounce my words and put the right emphasis on the right syllables, and sometimes I get tongue-tied when I'm talking about all these theological subjects.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Immanuel Kant is a he's such a towering figure in so many ways, and he affects the way that everybody thinks about everything.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And like it when you understand Kant and you start to read philosophy of like all kinds, even unto today, um, like he shapes the problems that people are still trying to answer in so many ways.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um so Immanuel Kant is a, he was a German philosopher.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: He was raised in a pious Lutheran home.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and he initially was a rationalist.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: So rationalism is the broad name for the kind of philosophy that Descartes is doing, which is rationalism, essentially says we start our philosophy or our thinking with these indisputable principles and we reason from there.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they're gonna they're gonna highlight reason as the ultimate source of truth.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there is another group of philosophers that are referred to as the empiricists.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And empiricists, you think of the word empirical, you know, empirical, some something that is uh that is sensible, like you can see, taste, touch, you know, you you experience with your senses.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the empiricists in philosophy are going to say that knowledge is not derived primarily from reason, but it's derived through our encounter with the world, right, through through the senses, through our experiences.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh some of the empiricists were pretty radical skeptics, uh, like David Hume is a pretty radical skeptic.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I know there are some people that tell me that he's not, but I can't, I think, I just think he was.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, where he kind of says, well, we we don't really know that the external world exists really at all.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: We know is our experience of it.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Kant kind of tries to resolve the dilemma and tries to make a system that's that's a kind of a mix in some ways of rationalism and and empiricism.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so he does some strange things.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and one of those is that he makes this strong divide between what we call the phenomena and the numena.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: So the numina is what he calls the ting on the dingonzi, which is the thing in itself.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: So this is like objects external to us as they are in themselves.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and Kant is going to say that the numena is something that we can't really access.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know reality as it is in itself.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: What I know is what he calls phenomena.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the phenomena is what I experience, what I what I touch, what I feel, what I hear.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so my knowledge of the world is really not me coming to know external objects as they are, but instead me encountering objects and learning about them through my own experience.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I know what something is like to me.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: I know what it sounds like to me, I know what it feels like to me in my experience.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Plato's cave times 20.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like the whole world around you is just a shadow, and you never actually engage with the substance of the thing.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know what the substance of the thing ever is.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, close.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, so so for Kant, he's not going to say that the substance of the thing doesn't exist in any sense, uh, but he is going to say that we can't really access it.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are challenges to this view.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you get all sorts of people coming up with different solutions to Kant.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and some people end up saying, well, there is no thing in itself, there is no world.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is kind of what you're saying here.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there are some that are gonna, they're gonna take it, it's called phenomenology.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there are some who are gonna essentially say, well, phenomena is all that there is.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like there is no external world, there is just the the phenomena.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Kant doesn't want to go there, he doesn't push it that far.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: But Kant is going to say there are some things that we can know through reason.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so he has what's called a synthetic a priori, and this is probably too much to get into here.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially he says there are some universal truths that we can know.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and those truths, though, are things that are not dependent upon our reason.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is where he comes up with like the categorical imperative.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: People may have heard of that, which is something in ethics, which says that um the only like ethical principles that we can know reliably are those that are true in all times and places and circumstances.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's never a circumstance where it doesn't apply.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: So he says there are some universal realities that we can grab onto that we can know through reason, but our experience of the world is mere phenomena.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he has this weird divide between reason and experience.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of unresolvable divide is what's going to lead to uh pretty much all of the ideas in some way that I address throughout the rest of this book.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's pick up where we left off then with maybe Hume as the next kind of primary figure, and he's building off of these kinds of ideas and where that leads.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: Hume, yeah.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: So so Hume is a uh Hume is is an empiricist, right?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got Descartes the rationalist.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Hume essentially says that we can't really know, we can't really know anything about reality as it is.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: All he says that all we really know is our impress what he calls impressions.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and he to the point that he even says the human being, like the human subject, who we are, we are essentially just a bundle of impressions.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: There is no like real inherent self, no unified self.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: So Hume is gonna look at Descartes' argument for the existence of the self, or Descartes just says, well, I think, therefore I am.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Hume says, that's not true.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reason to assume that thoughts require a thinker.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're just assuming that.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: But who says that thoughts require a thinker?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's gonna say, well, the existence of thoughts just the only the only conclusion you can derive from that is that there are thoughts.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then he calls these kind of impressions.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so there are these series of thoughts that he calls impressions, that are really the only things that we know exist.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's going to say that like there is no unified human subject necessarily.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: So he has a treatise on human nature, which is probably his most his most famous work.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and he's gonna say things like, well, what we think of as causation in the world, right?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: We assume that things in the world have inherent causes to them.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like when I am near a fire and I feel heat, I assume that heat is causally related to fire.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like fire has uh the potentiality with well, not just but it's always being actualized, meaning that there that fire is always hot.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like heat is a necessary property of fire, right?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can't divorce the property of fire.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: Water is wet.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, water is wet, exactly.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so Hume is going to say, well, there's no reason why, like there's no reason for us to assume that that causal connection is necessary.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: All we know is that when we have an experience of seeing the thing that we call fire, we have another experience or another kind of impression that is this thing that we call heat.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so we just assume through the regularity of our experience that there is a causal link between the fire and the heat.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: But there are a lot of assumptions underneath that.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: We assume, even if you were to prove, say, that like right now We could all agree that this color is red, but what I am seeing might actually be something different than what you're seeing.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: But because we've both agreed that that color is red, we both call it red, right?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um that is true, and it's kind of hard to disprove that, isn't it?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way there's no way to know.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, there's there's no way to know.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: So so he's gonna say that like, well, we also don't have any like reliable certainty that the future is gonna be like the past.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe it just happens to be that every instance we have of fire uh right now also has heat attached, but maybe in a hundred years that won't be the case.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: So he's trying he really introduces this like pretty radical skepticism.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's a lot of debate about what Hume is trying to do.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there are some who take a perspective that he really is just a radical skeptic.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's some who say what he's really trying to do is is show the rationalists about like the inadequacy of reason.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: That like you can't have this absolute, like reason is not this um kind of you know perfect tool that we can use to discern absolutely everything about the world.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and you know, to some extent, okay, Hume succeeds maybe in doing that.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but Hume does lead to a significant amount of skepticism.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: And even some of his arguments, you know, against he's certainly not a traditional religious person in any sense.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so he was certainly seen in in his day of as being an atheist.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And there were a lot of thoughts that he didn't wasn't public about on those issues during during his life.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: So the thing is, once you break that kind of causal connection of like, when we see an effect, we can assume a cause.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that in many ways destroys like our knowledge of God.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because like a lot of, especially a lot of the classical arguments for God's existence assume that like God is the first cause of all things.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you say there's no way to really discern causes underneath things, we really have no way to discern God underneath the world.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: So uh the you know, I think that you've written that he is like post-structural, like again, those structures, these categories um just exist with lots of assumptions behind them and this kind of radical skepticism.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, I can see it being rooted in quite a few different things.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: That like, you know, you'd you'd mentioned a moment ago that my yes, my thoughts are myself.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Did is is that true of Hume?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I can see that later, you know, getting into Freud, where it's like my desire, which would exist somewhat in the thought space, is the ultimate version of me, right?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like what I want.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that it just changes the locus of self as we you know progress through philosophy from uh I exist within this created order, and I'm trying to discover truth that already exists, and it inverts it to I'm I'm the person that determines truth, I I discover these categories, and what's a category?
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why do we even need those?
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: I can reframe categories as I see fit, and I can see that going downstream into kind of liberal thought of why do we need a nuclear family?
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what determines the difference between a boy and a girl?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because those categories are in his mind constructs, and these things kind of flow downstream.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: Am I am I picking up on what you're putting out or anything you need to correct from you know my run on sentences here?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, no, that's that's that's good to say that, yeah, so there is this idea that like we have these, yeah, we have these kind of preconceptions of the world, and through these preconceptions, we interpret the world.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and Kant is gonna talk a bit about that um with his called transcendental method.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's going to speak about certain realities like uh space and time.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna say, well, there are things that like we interpret the world through the concept of time and through the concept of space.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: We can't actually derive that from the world.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: That that's that's Kant.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you do have those categories.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you point at something that is really essential to all of this.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I see this as kind of the core issue as we like work through a lot of modern philosophy, especially what ends up being on the left.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, interestingly, like the right-left categories don't quite work with these early modern philosophers.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Hobbes, by some, is considered a conservative, but that's a that's a kind of a whole other issue there.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um but oh man, no, I totally lost my lost my train of thought here.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oh yeah, so the the the main theme here is uh the nature of the human person, like the nature of the self.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think is the core theme as you trace, you you see people departing from the Christian view of the the self.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: What is a human being?
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: So in many ways, I think that is the core issue that you really have to get at.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: And um there is this interrelation, and you know, John Calvin does this well, Viaz Lutheran can quote Calvin positively, but uh in book one of the Institutes, which I think is the best, the best part of the Institutes, um, Calvin begins that work with talking about this interrelation between knowledge of God and knowledge of the self.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there these ideas are like, you know, reciprocally related.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: So how philosophers think about the self affects how they think about God, and how they think about God affects how they think about the self.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think really the self, in some ways, like what is a human being, is the primary theme, which ends up having these ramifications for how it is that we view God and how we view uh how we view nature.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's right.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: I again I I'm gonna keep quoting other books here, but Carl Truman's work helped me see that that like contraception, how that affects human psyche, like how how hygiene products for women allowed them to get into the workspace in a way they'd never had before, and how that affects human psyche.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: How you know my crop wasn't faded to me by whether it rained or it didn't rain.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that was determined by the fates, by the deities, by fill in the blank.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but now I have access to agriculture, I have access to irrigation, and I can kind of I can exert my mastery over creation rather than being a part of that creation, and what is faded to me has been given by God.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not arguing that we should all have farms that don't have irrigation or technology.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm only acknowledging that those pieces of technology, even having a light bulb, be able to work through the the night, affects the way that I think about creation um and my mastery over that thing.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's that's fascinating.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um oddly enough, I had a conversation with Neely on the Dancing Toaster about the history of magic.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he talked about magic starting as working with creation, and then it became exerting mastery over creation, which uh it just seems to be like a human desire that just seems to crop up in any aspect of human life, whether it be sociology, whether it be technological or even mythological when it comes to these sorts of things.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um is there something you wanted to touch on there, or do you want to move on maybe to Payne?
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I do I just want to say that like I think that I think you point out something really important as you're talking about the development of technologies.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: And anytime you're you're doing like a work like this where you're looking at thinkers and how thinkers influence the world, um, you have to be somewhat careful in doing that because the world is and and people's ideas are determined by lots of different factors, right?
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're not just determined by philosophers.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that that's one significant element of this, but there are so many factors involved in why people think the way that they do.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that is the development of certain technologies.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: We could talk about political situations, war.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, even a lot of these philosophical ideas really arise out of non-philosophical reasons, like circumstances.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, for example, like a lot of modern political theory begins in some ways with the uh 30 years' war that we have in Germany, where you know, you have the Protestants and Roman Catholics essentially killing each other over these wars of religion.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so people start theorizing in different ways about the nature of the political order because essentially they don't want us to keep killing each other.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it is important to say that um ideas are not just like in a vacuum.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: They don't just develop by themselves, but they're really related to a lot of cultural, technological, political, all sorts of other circumstances.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the one informs the other in in a pretty cyclical way.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: In the same way that uh uh uh the knowledge of man affects our knowledge of God, and our knowledge of God affects our knowledge of man.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think that you could say in the same philosophical technological world, they feed into each other in the way that we act, in the way that we think.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's let's move on to Payne, as we talked about, because you you mentioned kind of political, and this would affect some of that idea.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Payne talks about like inherited um the word I'm looking for, these kinds of inherited standards, these kind of cultural things that we take upon ourselves, probably not the best.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: We can actually use empirical reason alone to kind of force the masses like to do the right thing and kind of bring in kind of maybe more utopistic sort of uh vision of the future.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: And again, that was an oversimplification.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'll let you do the heavy lifting here.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're talking about Thomas Paine here in the second chapter.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just moving chapter to chapter through your book, if you can't tell.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no, yeah, no, that's that's good.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: I just yeah, I just have to lay there's a little bit of groundwork you've got to lay in terms of what liberalism is as as a as an ideology.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: I could draw to do that pretty quickly.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um but in older views, like in in the inheritive views, like at the time of the Reformation, for example, um, it was it was assumed that the like validity that was in government came uh about kind of directly by God.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: But and God would appoint certain people as magistrates.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are a lot of this gets a bit complicated as to like what exactly is like genuine authority, what's not.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when somebody like overthrows a leader, do they have genuine authority?
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: What happens, you know, in 30 years?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do they have genuine authority then?
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how does this work exactly?
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: So there are debates about exactly how this works.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but coming out of the Reformation, there are a lot of political battles having to do with the freedom of religion, because you do have the outbreak of religious wars.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned the 30 Years' War in Germany.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: You eventually have a kind of peace that is agreed upon where you have different regions that you know follow, some are Protestant, some are Roman Catholic.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, then in England, you know, you have constant wars of religion.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of political turmoil.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you not only have the Roman Catholics versus the Anglicans, but then you have Cromwell and you have the Puritans as well.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you have a lot of uh competing religious claims that are all essentially vying for political authority.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so the fact is, like the world is at war, and it's kind of necessary to create some form of some way of viewing government that's going to allow for the freedom of religion enough to allow for peace in the Western world.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so out of that really flows the philosophy of what we call liberalism.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's really essential to liberalism to understand is that this view of government contends that the authority for government essentially derives from the people through what's called a social contract.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that the government, the authority of the government is essentially a kind of bottom-up thing where the people come together to make a kind of covenant to say, we're going to like live in peace mutually, and we're going to agree to grant authority to some magistrate, some political body, whatever that might look like, so that we can kind of live in peace under that political authority.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the political authority then is viewed not in light of an authority that is granted by God so much, as it is viewed as an authority that is granted by people.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's just inherent to the liberal order as a whole, that concept.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: That is first, um, well, okay, maybe it comes a little bit from Hugo Grodius, but primarily that idea is attributed to Thomas Hobbes, and then it gets its most popular form in someone like John Locke.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, within this idea of the social contract, well, you you have this question, which is, okay, well, like people before me made this contract, but why why is it that I am bound now by a contract that was made, you know, in 1776?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what why does this bind me many generations later?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because I did not freely consent to this contract.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you start to define nations primarily as conglomerates of individuals, like the individual is the kind of primary unit of all society.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: And society is granted its authority or its structure from mutual consent of individuals, you have a lot of challenges here about like, well, how is it?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Why does a constitution bind me when I didn't write the constitution, those kind of things.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you get out of the birth of liberalism two different forms of liberalism, essentially, or tendencies.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: You have right liberalism, which we call conservatism, uh, and like Edmund Burke is kind of the great representative of that.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have left liberalism, which is what we usually consider liberalism or the political left.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and Thomas Paine is a figure who I discuss in here, who is a is a good representative of that kind of mindset.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: And Paine is like the most radical individualist.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so Thomas Paine says essentially that the contract or a constitution cannot bind future generations.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he calls it a kind of slavery to say that I'm bound by things my parents or grandparents did.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so Paine says that we should essentially rewrite the constitution anew with every generation.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so he wants to break like every single bond with the past, to be like there are no inherited obligations.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: We are just free individuals, and every individual generation can figure out how it is that they want to live their lives.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Paine is just this example of something that's happening.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, at and you might know Thomas Paine even from like school, when you learn about his book, Common Sense, right?
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and and common sense has a lot more common sense than his other books, I'll just say.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so his other books are a lot more radical than uh than that particular work.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: But he represents one trend that shows itself in like the French Revolution toward this kind of radical like refusal to live in light of the past.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like the past is seen as this kind of burden, this this shackle that we want to throw off so we can live authentically according to our own choices and our own decisions.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's uh he's a sovereign citizen.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um sure.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, if you've ever watched these YouTube videos where cops pull over sovereign citizens, they're pretty fantastic.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um this idea I can see being traced pretty easily, you know, to uh a Marx uh with a bourgeoisie and a proletariat.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is that a connection we make now or should we do that later?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, we we can we can kind of make that connection.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: We can make that connection here if you want.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um the thing is Marx, like Marx and Pain in some ways they're polar opposites, but in other ways they're they're not at all.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I say like I say this because uh Pain is like the most radical individualist, and Marx is the opposite of that, right?
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: Marx is is concerned about classes, and he's not really concerned about individual subjects per se, and that's due to the influence of Hegel, and we could talk about that.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: But um, so he's he's not an individualist at all.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: So in that way, they're very much opposed to one another, but they align in the way that they view the past.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so while like Pain is going to look at the past as something that that is like oppressive to the individual, so we need to individually choose to get rid of it.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Marx sees much of what has been received, he sees to throw a dynamic of political and economic power, but he also sees the the need for a kind of liberation from past systems that enslave us.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: But Marx is going to do it in a more kind of communitarian sense, right?
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's not thinking about the individual, but he's thinking more about the uh the masses, as he calls them, these distinct groups.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: So uh a lot of there's a lot of tension between those two approaches that still is there on the political left and in the academy as well, is this tension between this individualism and this kind of communitarianism you have within uh you know within a communist system.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: But within that, there is an there is an agreement that the past and the structures of the past and the authority of the past that's been inherited inherited is oppressive.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to have real liberation, we need to remove those shackles from us.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they they come from the same uh framework of like oppression.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's just how that oppression gets undone.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: Or you know, your pain, it's it's new social contracts for your marks, it is get the community to uprise uh aga against those who are in power.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um so uh can you contrast?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned Hobbes, uh the the liberalism of the right versus liberalism of the left.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: Can you make sense of those distinctions?
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, sure.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: So Hobbes is kind of the is the figure that stands behind a lot of liberal political philosophy.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you actually read Hobbes, like his book Leviathan is his major work, if you read him, he doesn't really sound like a modern political philosopher, like a liberal.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: He just, but he does, he has some of the basic ideas, the notion of what he calls a state of nature, which is this idea that when we think about um when we think about things like government, we think about it in a, we construct our kind of ideal view of government.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is important.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: We construct our ideal view of government through this kind of theoretical lens.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's gonna say, well, we we conceive of, we do this kind of thought experiment like Descartes does, but with politics, where we conceive of what would man be like, what would human beings be like through mere nature uh with if there were no government?
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so we call this a state of nature.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then out of his description of what the state of nature is, uh, and some there's some debate as to whether like he views the state of nature as a real historical reality or if it's just kind of a theoretical thing, um, but whatever the case, that you think of the state of nature.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you're abstracting people, and then in this kind of thought experiment, you are then constructing what the ideal form of government is that would deal with the state of nature.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: So something that's really essential to understand with what Hobbes does is that he starts to lead people to think about government not in terms of like what's been inherited in their culture or history, but more in terms of like theoretical construct to say, what's the ideal and then how do I impose it through this theoretical construct.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what you have with a lot of the political left.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's the main difference you have with the conservatives who are still part of the liberal tradition.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I say still part of the liberal tradition because um the conservatives, especially in the modern sense, believe in some notion of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, uh, and the value of the individual.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: There is still some valuing of the freedom of the individual, uh, a uh uh a desire not to allow too much power given to the government because that creates tyranny.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: Those are kind of commonalities with right liberalism.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: So Edmund Burke is going to be the most significant figure there.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he's a he's a British, not really a philosopher in the most precise sense, but uh it's not like he writes a bunch of philosophical treatises.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: He has one on beauty that's that's quite good, but uh politics, it's more occasional that that he's writing.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you have there, there are plenty of others later, but he's kind of the major figure there.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the the difference is going to be that the right form of liberalism is not going to view the past as like oppressive.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so there is a sense of like continuity with the past.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this view is going to say when we think about governments, when we think about the political order, we need to think in terms of the culture of the people.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: We need to think about history, we need to think about what has been inherited.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not thinking about politics in this kind of abstracted way as a system, a perfect system you need to impose, but you are thinking about it more in terms of actual history, to be like, okay, well, who are our people?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we at?
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_00: What is most beneficial for the people at this particular, at this particular time?
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so there's going to be more of a, as I said, a kind of appreciation for the past rather than a desire to remove the past uh or see it as inherently oppressive.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with that being said, you know, liberals who are on the right also are not, they're not just saying we can never change in any way.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's just not the case historically, as you look at the right liberals, is they also argued for a change.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the kind of change that they that they fought for was change that was going to be uh careful, slower, more cautious, rather than having this kind of revolutionary spirit of like, well, if we change everything, we're gonna have this perfect society, right?
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those who are more the right liberals are gonna say, there is no perfect society.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: Society is always gonna be a mess.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_00: The only change that's actually going to last is change that is like long and difficult, uh, rather than change that is going to be kind of radical and sudden.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the right says, hey, there's a fence here.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: We need to ask why this fence is here before we remove it.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: The left side of liberalism says, hey, we need to reconstruct fences every time we have a new generation of power because maybe that fence was great for them, but it might not be good for us.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: And to put up a fence and demand us to follow that is oppression.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um that makes a lot of sense.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now I don't think that you can go downstream of that and then go into, you know, that there's a direct correlation to a whole lot of different things.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it does make sense to me when I see a lot of these social debates online where people are arguing for socialism in particular.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then the conservative commentary always asks, where has conservat or where has socialism worked?
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: That you would point to and say, This is working.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and they're like, Well, it's just not my version of socialism.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it goes back to this idea that we haven't created the right system yet.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: We have to just keep revamping over and over until we get all the metrics right, and that will, that'll essentially work.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, whereas the right side is saying, we've looked at the past, we've looked at those boundary markers before.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: They've never when we've moved those boundary markers, it's never ended well.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that kind of uh frames some of that discussion.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: Cooper, we're already at 56 minutes.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we we we got uh into chapter two, and we haven't even really quite touched on uh three through ten.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: So um maybe we uh at this point in time make some connective tissues from what we've discussed to how that affects the way that the world around us is thinking.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: We've barely touched on Marxism.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um I know in your book you talked about Marxism kind of being uh eschatological in nature, which was an interesting thought, which gives it some religious roots.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that'd be a fine way to uh to conclude.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: But uh but I'll leave it up to you.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: How would you have us trace?
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, these are really early thoughts within the the foundation of the liberal mind.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't really quite come uh up to more modern thinking.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so there's a there's a huge gap between where we've been and where you go in your work.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so where where's a good place to land?
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if if you if people are interested, you know, we we could do another one of these continuing this if if people want to see that.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: But um yeah, uh so I guess maybe the a couple couple places maybe that that that we can go here that we see like traced out in into the into the modern world.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um the one of maybe I'll give you three, I'll give you three points that we've discussed so far.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: So one of these is the um the move away from understanding reality as it is, right?
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: So this is this is kind of a common feature of a lot of modern philosophy in general.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's not universal, obviously, but in a lot of these thinkers, um, we can trace this kind, this kind of skepticism about the world as it is, uh, so that there is this doubt that people have about whether we can really understand reality, right?
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: Whether we can really grasp as human beings reality as as it actually is.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so we see this in someone like Immanuel Kant with his view of phenomena that I talked about.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: You certainly see this in someone like uh David Hume.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: But this is really a common thread that you see in so many modern thinkers.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first point that I want to make.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's especially true in post-modernity.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, then we have, you know, a second element that we see today is viewing the past as something that is inherently oppressive that we need to overcome.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're looking at the birth of modernity, modern philosophy, modern political theory, and theology during the 18th century, certainly.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so thinking, think about like the 18th century, this is the age of enlightenment.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is an era where technology is progressing rapidly.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is a time where people are discovering like new tools of historical research, of like critical research and texts.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there are so many developments that are that are a lot of positive developments that are going on at this time.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: And as that is happening, people are uh viewing that particular time period as well, as a kind of setting free of mankind from its inherited uh views, it's its ignorance in centuries past.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: So with that comes this uh antipathy toward the past, uh, or at least a a desire to say, well, we always need to be moving towards something new and better.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be moving toward continual enlightenment.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that means we we always need to be um discarding what has come before us for something better.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that general process that we see in a lot of these thinkers is one that is going to continue today.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: So this is something that's that you find with people like Descartes is like all of classical philosophy as it has been inherited in many ways for a lot of the early modern philosophies, it's kind of like totally discarded.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not like working within it to offer different ideas or changes, they're just like kind of throw out the whole thing.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna do something totally new, we're gonna restart.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, like Descartes believed that his system was essentially going to take the place of Aristotle, which was the inherited basic philosophical system people people worked with at this time.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so so that's that's a major point.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then the the final point is the nature of of the human being, right?
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I said is is really core to all of this is who are we as human beings?
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and like the question is are we, am I determined?
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: Someone like like a lot of the left liberals are going to say that we are essentially determined by our own free actions.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I am one who has personal rights and personal liberty, who can make whatever choices I want to make.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: That defines what a human being is for some of these people.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and for someone like Marx, we didn't really get to, but Marx is going to see the nature of the human essence as really constituted by your place in economic relations.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's who you are.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that really changes your view of yourself and the world, if who you are is determined by where you fit in the economy.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and all of this is really a move away from the Christian view that says, well, who am I?
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like I am I am body and soul.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: I am one who was created in the divine image, who mirrors in some you know imperfect way the divine attributes.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very different way of looking at ourselves.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also a very different, it's going to create a very different way of looking at other people and society and how we relate to others.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there's so much here that we could continue to discuss.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and maybe if there is an interest, you know, you guys uh if you like this, share it around, like it up, um, leave us a comment because we would want to engage with more content like this.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: I do anyway.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's fascinating.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because I think it's important for us to know how we got here.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when we understand some of the presuppositions of people we're talking to, it allows those conversations.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it allows us, one, to have a filter on what we're going to digest and accept.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then it also gives us a foundation for communication for people who have a different worldview and don't even know where their worldview is coming from.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: Help them identify some of those pieces.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's an extremely powerful uh tool, uh, philosophy.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm a bit of a biblicist, so I like to hang out in the world of objectivity as much as possible.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: But uh I I like these ideas um because of their power in in discussion.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, okay, Dr.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: Cooper, thank you so much for coming on, man.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna put a link into this video for your channel, for your book.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll I'll send you a uh collaboration link so people can go over to Justin Center and check out that channel as well.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh guys, thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: Peace out.
• 1:04:46
  unknown: Thank you.