Episode #197 ... New Atheists and cosmic purpose without God - (Zizek, Goff, Nagel)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So what's an example of one of these ideologies we were talking about through Zizek last episode? What's an example of an ideology where the people immersed in it see themselves as seekers of the truth that we're the intellectually honest ones and that our opposite the other, these are the people that are truly lost in an ideology that they don't see. What's an example of that? Well, there's dozens we could use here to get this point across, but given that this is a philosophy show, really wanna use this opportunity to give a nontrivial example of an ideology that's likely to be one people listening to this can relate to, whether that's because it's a position you used to hold, you currently hold, whether you just see it in people around you. What I mean is I wanna give an example of an ideology that isn't obviously an ideology. Because the Zizek, the most powerful form of ideology is one that operates in the background where the contradictions that are at the bottom of it are things that the people using it don't even notice despite the fact they form big parts of their worldview around them. This episode will hopefully be a nice visual example of two competing ideologies in today's world. Hopefully, this can be an example where you can practice detecting the ideology I'm trying to bring in as I'm steel manning all sides of this as we do on the show. Anyway, if you're Zizek, it could be said that some modern philosophers out there like Philip Goff are trying to find a way to preserve the best parts of both of these two different ideological approaches and find a way to move these conversations forward in a productive way. And on that note, we also promised to talk about the new book from the philosopher Philip Goff on this episode, and we will. We'll use it in this investigation of different ideologies. But I guess it's important to say this. In that book, we're gonna talk about a little later. Philip Goff is building off of the work of a philosopher named Thomas Nagel. Thomas Nagel wrote a book in 2012 called Mind and Cosmos. And when he wrote that book, Mind and Cosmos, he was responding to an ideology that he thought was exploding in popularity at the time. It's an ideology popular among fans of the new atheist movement that was going on at the time, and it's a position that he thought was also an overall attitude that's taken hold of academia more generally. What he's fighting against is what's often been referred to as material reductionism or the idea that the truth about anything that's worth knowing about the universe can and should be understood by studying the materials that things are made out of and the fundamental forces that govern them. That is where the truth lies. You …