Men Of Ideas (EP15): Ernest Gellner on “Philosophy: The Social Context”

It is with heavy heart that I write this, the announcement for the last episode in the fifteen conversations that make up Bryan Magee’s monumental Men of Ideas.

Everything is better when you share it with friends, and I’m very grateful for having shared these exquisite talks with such genuinely appreciative and curious and serious-minded admirers of the BBC Three.

In this, his final conversation, Magee asks Ernest Gellner the perfect question to end the series, namely, Why is contemporary Western philosophy so obsessed with epistemology?

Did philosophy simply distill itself down over time and reveal itself to be epistemology at heart? Or was the Cartesian epistemological turn the effect of life-world forces that came outside of philosophy proper?

The answer, it seems, is that philosophy still has PTSD from that dark day when the universe changed—when the God-filled, thoroughly well-known, and universally attested Shared Reality died.

In the thousand years before Descartes, Europe was a monodox paradise. Metaphysics and ethics, the story about the way things really are at bottom, and ought to be through us, enjoyed universal consensus. The deepest layers of reality were explained by the Bible and its infallible interpreters. And the intelligible, sensible, and inferable surface parts of reality were explained by the metaphysics, physics, and logic of Aristotle.

Then, one day, it was all revealed to be a fraud.

If the known universe undersigned by the Pope and the King was wrong, what chance do we mere freelancers have? Equipped only with logic, math, and clocks, how rich can the modern philosophical account be? And if we were wrong bigly once, might we be wrong again? And if our maps are only provisional, how will that affect our morale and quality of life?

Maybe the social and aesthetic and mental-health benefits that we enjoyed inside our benighted bubble of Neoplatonic theism were worth the price of metaphysical error.

Then again, if metaphysics is nothing but the reflection of the Zeitgeist, then what can philosophy hope for? So maybe epistemology really is its proper function.

Join us as we, Bryan Magee, and Ernest Gellner ask these and other final questions in hopes of uncovering the past, present, and future of Western philosophy.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode prior to the discussion and we’ll go over your favorite parts during the show, many of which will be replayed live for review and discussion.

FULL PLAYLIST

Mar 10 — Episode 01. Isaiah Berlin on “Introduction to Philosophy”

Mar 24 — Episode 02. Rick Roderick on “Marx” (Hegel and Modern Life)

Apr 07 — “What is Autonomist Marxism?” ⟩ LIVE WITH HARRY CLEAVER

Apr 21 — Episode 03. Herbert Marcuse on “Frankfurt School”

May 05 — “What is Critical Theory” ⟩ LIVE WITH DOUGLAS KELLNER

May 19 — Episode 04. William Barrett on “Martin Heidegger“ + BONUS

Jun 02 — “At Home with Heidegger” ⟩ LIVE WITH STEVEN TAUBENECK

Analytic Philosophy Short Course:

Jun 16 — AP #1: Episode 05. Anthony Quinton on “Wittgenstein”

Jun 30 — AP #2: Episode 06. A. J. Ayer on “Logical Positivism”

Jul 14 — AP #3: Episode 07. Bernard Williams on “Linguistic Philosophy”

Jul 28 — AP #4: Episode 09. W. V. O. Quine on “The Ideas of Quine”

Aug 11 — AP #5: Episode 10. John Searle on “Philosophy of Language”

Aug 25 — “Derrida/Searle”— LIVE WITH STEVEN TAUBENECK

Sep 08 — Episode 11. Noam Chomsky on “Chomsky”

Sep 22 — “The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction” — LIVE WITH CORY JUHL

Oct 06 — Episode 12. Hilary Putnam on “Philosophy of Science”

Oct 20 — “Kant and Wittgenstein on Method” — LIVE WITH IAN PROOPS

Nov 03 — Episode 13. Ronald Dworkin on “Political Philosophy”

Nov 17 — Episode 14. Iris Murdoch on “Philosophy and Literature”

Dec 01 — Episode 15. Ernest Gellner on “Philosophy: The Social Context”