Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patrione.com slash philosophize this,

philosophical writing on substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today.

So there's a lot of people living in the world today that have learned to hate pieces of themselves

because the things they've accepted over the years about what it means to be a good person.

A good person,

they're told, is someone who is strong and dependent. They don't ask for exceptions to be made

for them. They stay healthy. They show up to work every day. And they become a rock that is a

fixture in everyone's life that endlessly provides for all the people around them.

There's obviously much more to this image of a good person that most people

accept. And for the rest of the episode, let's call this image the sort of common sense version

of what a human being is supposed to be like. Because of the job of a good philosopher is to

disrupt our common sense, then reframe something and get us to see the thing in a new, more

detailed way, then Alistair McIistair and the book we're covering today

does just that when it comes to the assumptions we make about what existing as a human being

is even like. If you've listened to the last two episodes, which I highly recommend before

this one, then you know we believe that any moral claim about how we should or shouldn't be acting

is always rooted in a way of life and a moral tradition that we need to be self-aware of. Well, this whole book is written by him, starting from the foundation of Aristotelian Thomism, a sort of late Middle Ages, early Renaissance blend of the work of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. And if the common sense view of what it is to be a person is rooted mostly in assumptions built out of Enlightenment liberalism and how it thinks of the modern subject, we're about to see what happens when these two worlds collide.

All throughout this episode, be sure to notice the very different underlying assumptions when it comes to what we've been talking about lately, what human beings are for, what counts as flourishing, etc.

Because by the end of this episode, not only will we have a clearer picture of the sorts of attitudes these two approaches

produce in people, but we'll also understand why if there's any validity to this more Aristotelian

approach, what specifically about the modern world makes it so easy for us to forget that this

side of our experiences human beings even

...