From the Dictatorship of Relativism to the Tyranny of Pathos – Dr. Kevin Kambo
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Dr. Kevin Kambo argues that our culture has moved from a “dictatorship of relativism” to a “tyranny of pathos,” in which appeals to hurt feelings and empathy displace reasoned deliberation about truth, justice, and human nature.
This lecture was given on October 23rd, 2025, at Fordham University.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
Kevin M. Kambo is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas in Irving, TX. Before completing his doctoral studies at the Catholic University of America, he earned a bachelor of science in Chemistry at Stanford University and worked as an intellectual property paralegal in Manhattan, NY. Dr. Kambo specialises in classical Greek philosophy, particularly on Platonic moral psychology and on the dramatic elements of Platonic dialogues. He also works on the reception of Platonic thought through history, from late antique (e.g., in Clement of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo) through contemporary (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois and Simone Weil) thinkers, and has broader scholarly interests in philosophy of technology, philosophy and literature (especially tragedy), philosophy of race, and liberal education. He is a partisan of the original Star Wars trilogy, P. G. Wodehouse, and receiving postcards--not necessarily in that order.
Keywords: Aristotle and Logos, Benedict XVI Regensburg, Dictatorship of Relativism, Ethics and Politics, John Paul II, Nature and Human Flourishing, Politics of Pathos, Relativism and Tolerance, Tyranny of Pathos
Transcript
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| 0:25.1 | By way of context as to what I'm going to attempt to do here, |
| 0:30.1 | the chapter of the TI here has mentioned that they've been reading |
| 0:33.3 | or are planning to read, very tight splendor. |
| 0:36.3 | And one of the questions they were sort of interested in |
| 0:39.1 | is this one about relativism and how sort of significant |
| 0:41.6 | or important it is today. |
| 0:43.7 | And I decided instead to do something a bit more shady, |
| 0:49.2 | which is to say that while relativism |
| 0:52.0 | is sort of really interesting and worth speculating about, in my |
| 0:57.0 | personal opinion, I think in some ways we've moved from a sort of more relativist sort of posture |
| 1:03.5 | to one that I think is more dominated by pathos. So it's what I'm going to call a pathetic politics or politics of pathos, and we'll sort of see where we kind of land with that. |
| 1:15.9 | And so that's sort of explaining what is going on with my talk. But in the background, though, there is an interesting kind of problem, I think, which also helps us frame this, at least in the context of the intellectual tradition that I will claim starts with Plato, |
| 1:32.3 | but will be taken up by Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, in the Regensberg Address, which is sort of where |
| 1:37.6 | I'm going to kind of be orienting and trying to land eventually. And there's just a kind of problem |
| 1:42.4 | with godlessness and what it means for Plato in the |
| 1:46.7 | context of the laws. So in this dialogue, among other things, the interlocutors are trying to figure |
| 1:54.5 | over what makes for good laws in a city. And one of the concerns they have is, well, should we |
... |
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