Episode 27, Conscience (Part II - Saint Thomas Aquinas)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2017
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everything you could need is on www.thepanpsycast.com! Please tweet us your thoughts at www.twitter.com/thepanpsycast. Most people understand conscience as something which tells us right from wrong. The conscience is that little voice in your head that tells you to do your homework, go to bed on time and eat 5 a day. In fact, the Oxford Dictionary defines conscience as: "A person's moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one's behaviour." We're going to be questioning this definition extensively. What is conscience? Where does the conscience come from? Where does the word conscience come from? Is conscience fundamental in its own right, or is it acquired through our development? Does the conscience carry any moral authority, and if so, what should be the function of conscience in ethical decision-making? Is conscience just an illusion? To aid our exploration of these questions, we're going to be consulting C. S. Lewis' Studies in Words in Part I, Aquinas' Summa Theologiae in Part II and Sigmund Freud's The Ego and the Id in Part III. In Part IV we'll wrap up the show with some further analysis and discussion and the return of philosophical ultimatum.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So, Part 2. Aquinas' understanding of conscience. Our inquiry question, what was Aquinas' view of the conscience? |
| 0:22.5 | So we're going to be looking at Aquinas' view, the summer theologica, or the summer |
| 0:26.7 | theologia, and then give our strengths and weaknesses of this view. Normally we wait for |
| 0:31.3 | strengths, weaknesses, analysis until part four. We'll do some briefly in this section, because |
| 0:36.5 | it's important to criticise the think of themselves, and we'll do the same for Freud in Part 3 as well. |
| 0:43.1 | We did an episode on Aquinas already. It's episode for Aquinas' natural law. Any thoughts? |
| 0:49.8 | A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, three men decided to make a podcast about St. Thomas Aquinas, and it was fine. |
| 0:57.5 | Yeah, it was a... |
| 0:58.5 | Review said, meh, it was all right. |
| 1:00.9 | Really? I remember review saying this is rubbish, and I remember print screening that. |
| 1:04.8 | Shut up, Jack. |
| 1:05.8 | Like we said earlier on in this episode, the first four episodes of the show are poor compared to what we're |
| 1:12.2 | doing now because we just started the podcast for the first time. It's like, I like to compare |
| 1:16.5 | it to having your nude baby photos put up online on Facebook. Can you imagine you running around |
| 1:22.5 | near the swimming pool, just nude and putting that on Facebook? That's what the first few episodes |
| 1:26.6 | like this are. That's a the first few episodes like is like. |
| 1:28.3 | Okay. |
| 1:30.4 | That's a very strange analogy, Jack. I think as we have said a couple of times, we can do a lot of justice to these topics |
| 1:37.1 | in kind of different ways. |
| 1:39.2 | And we can do, I would argue, what we're about to do with Aquinas, you could listen to |
| 1:42.8 | this and almost ignore |
| 1:44.9 | episode four. Don't go back to episode four. We'll fully explain and help you understand Aquinas |
... |
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