Episode 27, Conscience (Part IV)

The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast

Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Courses

4.8 • 612 Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2017

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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	Part 4.
0:16.1	Further analysis and discussion.
0:19.5	Hello and welcome to further analysis and discussion this week in further analysis and discussion. Hello and welcome to further analysis and discussion. This week in
0:24.2	further analysis and discussion, we're kicking it off with a little bit of Freudian slip,
0:29.5	if you know what I mean. So we're slipping into our strengths or weaknesses of Sigmund Freud.
0:34.8	So what do we like about Sigmund Freud? What do we dislike about Sigmund Freud?
0:38.6	That's a poor word. What are the weaknesses of his theory? Where's he gone wrong? Why aren't we all Freudians? Okay, so strengths first. Do we starting with strengths? Sorry, I didn't make that very clear. No, you didn't until Jack. Strengths of Sigmund Freud. Perfect. Okay, so what I like about Sigmund Freud is as much as there's lots of things that I do
0:55.9	disagree with him on, I like the fact that he's looking at the behavior that he sees in his
1:01.8	patience and the people around him and forming his theories based on that. There's a lot of research
1:06.6	that went into the five stages of development. There's a lot of research that went into the ideas
1:10.6	of the id, the super ego and the ego.
1:13.1	And what I like about him is, although he may not be a philosopher in the traditional sense,
1:16.8	he's in similar leagues to a long line of empiricist philosophers that take the a posteriori knowledge around them
1:23.0	and form their ideas based on the evidence they see.
1:25.8	Now, we may disagree with that today in terms of our understanding of psychology and the mind, etc.
1:31.9	But at his time, in the early 20th century, no one had even made even a fifth of the amount of progress that Freud made in his lifetime in the study of dreams, in the study of the mind, the study of psychoanalysis
1:44.7	and psychology. I think that his research in this field really pushed this very new science
1:50.2	ahead very, very quickly, and that even though I'm not completely convinced by some of the final
1:55.5	details, and I think that he paints in quite broad strokes, so to speak. I do like the ideas of the
2:02.5	unconscious, and I think that's something that definitely affects people more than they are
2:06.2	aware. Yeah, I think the real strength to be taken away is the movement of looking towards
2:14.2	the unconscious mind. The fact that before this, as he's probably quite rightly
	...

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