Rationally Speaking #73 - Answers for Aristotle
Rationally Speaking Podcast
New York City Skeptics
4.6 • 787 Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2012
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode Julia interviews Massimo about his new book, Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life. Massimo's central idea is that a combination of science and philosophy, what he calls "Sci-Phi," is the best guide to the big questions in life, from issues of morality and justice to the meaning of love and friendship. The book's title derives from the fact that Aristotle was the first philosopher-scientist, adopting the sci-phi framework and posing a number of questions with which we are still struggling. What is the best way to live one's life? What sort of society do we want to live in? How do we relate to our friends and loved ones? Two and a half millennia later, modern science and philosophy have come up with some of the answers to Aristotle's questions, or at the least with a better way to think about them.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education. |
| 0:22.4 | For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org. |
| 0:36.2 | Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. |
| 0:41.4 | I am your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev. |
| 0:46.4 | Julia, what are we going to talk about today? |
| 0:48.7 | Well, Massimo, today we are here with a live audience in New York City at University Settlement on the Lower East Side. |
| 0:54.9 | Everyone want to say hi? |
| 0:57.4 | Woo! |
| 1:01.3 | Hello to you too. |
| 1:02.8 | It definitely is, this wasn't taped, right? |
| 1:06.2 | Yeah, we had paid extra for the strong applause track on iTunes. |
| 1:12.9 | So today we're going to be talking about Massimo's latest book which has just come out it's called |
| 1:16.0 | Answers for Aristotle how science and philosophy can lead us to a more meaningful |
| 1:20.3 | life so I'm very excited about this because if I if you had asked me to summarize the like dominant thread of all of the |
| 1:31.7 | rationally speaking podcasts that Massimo and I've been recording for the last, what's it been, |
| 1:35.4 | two and a half years now? Two and a half years. Yeah. 70 episodes or something like that. |
| 1:39.1 | Wow. Yeah. So, you know, there are a lot of things that I could say, like common threads that |
| 1:44.0 | weave in and out of our various episodes, but I think probably the top conversations, So, you know, there are a lot of things that I could say, like common threads that weave |
| 1:44.3 | in and out of our various episodes, but I think probably the top contender for like a dominant |
| 1:49.6 | theme, at least from Massimo's end of the podcast, would be that you need both science |
| 1:54.9 | and philosophy combined in, you know, an intelligent way to answer the toughest questions about |
| 2:00.8 | life, the universe |
... |
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