Somewhat Seriously

Professor Adam Andreotta is a philosophy researcher from Perth, Western Australia. He has a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University of Western AustraliaIn this episode he explains, from a philosophical perspective, how it is that we come to know our emotions and challenges the social constructivist view of the interpretation of our emotionsFurther we touched on AI and the hard question of consciousness. And inevitably of course, Free Will came up where we touched on the takes of the likes of Sam Harris on the notion of Free Will

This episode suggests that different culturally assumed philosophies of matter produce different culturally assumed natural philosophies. This is illustrated three times in Western intellectual history. Firstly, a Platonist idealist philosophy of matter is integral with, and produces, the natural philosophy of Greco-Roman antiquity and Byzantium. Secondly, an Aristotelian hylomorphic philosophy of matter is integral with, and produces, the natural philosophy of Medieval Christendom. And thirdly, a modern Democritean atomism is integral with, and produces, modern science and technology

Luce Irigaray offers us a challenge. She says, “it is not a matter of changing this or that within a horizon already defined as human culture. It is a question of changing the horizon itself – of understanding that our interpretation of human identity is both theoretically and practically wrong.” It is to this challenge that her concept of the sensible-transcendental is offered, and it is through this concept that she believes the crisis of our age, sexuate indifference, might be overcome