In this episode of Open College, Stephen Hicks reflects on the significance of Sam Harris as a public intellectual, drawing from his foreword to Sam Harris: Critical Responses. Hicks explores Harris’s wide-ranging contributions from morality, free will, and consciousness to religion, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, and politics arguing that Harris embodies a rare “third culture” synthesis of science and humanism at a time when philosophy has been split by C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” divide. Along the way, Hicks contrasts Harris’s reductionist approach with Jordan Peterson’s values-first orientation, using their exchanges to illustrate today’s ongoing struggle between facts and values, reason and emotion, and science and religion, and why overcoming these dualisms remains a central challenge for contemporary philosophy.
All content for Open College Podcast is the property of Produced by Possibly Correct Media and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
In this episode of Open College, Stephen Hicks reflects on the significance of Sam Harris as a public intellectual, drawing from his foreword to Sam Harris: Critical Responses. Hicks explores Harris’s wide-ranging contributions from morality, free will, and consciousness to religion, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, and politics arguing that Harris embodies a rare “third culture” synthesis of science and humanism at a time when philosophy has been split by C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” divide. Along the way, Hicks contrasts Harris’s reductionist approach with Jordan Peterson’s values-first orientation, using their exchanges to illustrate today’s ongoing struggle between facts and values, reason and emotion, and science and religion, and why overcoming these dualisms remains a central challenge for contemporary philosophy.
How do we educate students for jobs that do not exist yet? Education is preparation for life, and one’s work is a major component of life. Yet the data indicate that the workplace is transforming dramatically. The number of people working in mature and large corporations has declined. The companies that now top the Fortune 500 list are relative newcomers, as most were entrepreneurial start-ups in this generation. Advancements in robotics indicate that jobs requiring repetitive manual labor will become fewer, and advancements in artificial intelligence indicate that jobs requiring low-level intellectual labor will also become fewer. Thus, more people will be working in entrepreneurial firms, and their work will be more higher-level cognitive and creative. At the same time, we educators cannot predict what entrepreneurial firms will come into existence in this generation or what domains of creative and higher-level cognitive effort they will require. So we educators face the challenge of preparing this generation of young people for more demanding kinds of work, to work in more entrepreneurial firms, or even for becoming entrepreneurs themselves. That poses a philosophical and strategic challenge for education: How should we do that?
Open College Podcast
In this episode of Open College, Stephen Hicks reflects on the significance of Sam Harris as a public intellectual, drawing from his foreword to Sam Harris: Critical Responses. Hicks explores Harris’s wide-ranging contributions from morality, free will, and consciousness to religion, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, and politics arguing that Harris embodies a rare “third culture” synthesis of science and humanism at a time when philosophy has been split by C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” divide. Along the way, Hicks contrasts Harris’s reductionist approach with Jordan Peterson’s values-first orientation, using their exchanges to illustrate today’s ongoing struggle between facts and values, reason and emotion, and science and religion, and why overcoming these dualisms remains a central challenge for contemporary philosophy.
