Complete video at: fora.tv Author, scholar and journalist Karen Armstrong discusses the need to apply Socratic philosophy to the counterproductive fierceness of modern debate. “Real philosophical debate…that is conducted in the spirit of malice or hate will not work,” she says. —– Ms. Armstrong describes how Islam, Judaism and Christianity have been diverted from a shared moral purpose. She now is working with the TED community to build a Charter for Compassion. – Chautauqua Institution Karen Armstrong is one of the most provocative, original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world. Armstrong is a former Roman Catholic nun who left a British convent to pursue a degree in modern literature at Oxford. In 1982 she wrote a book about her seven years in the convent, Through the Narrow Gate, that angered and challenged Catholics worldwide; her recent book The Spiral Staircase discusses her subsequent spiritual awakening after leaving the convent, when she began to develop her iconoclastic take on the great monotheistic religions. She has written more than 20 books around the ideas of what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common, and around their effect on world events, including the magisterial A History of God and Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Todays World. Her latest book is The Bible: A Biography. Her meditations on personal faith and religion (she calls herself a freelance monotheist) spark discussion — especially her take on fundamentalism, which she sees in a historical context, as an outgrowth of modern culture.
On March 10, 2010, In Uncategorized, by admin
Complete video at: fora.tv Author, scholar and journalist Karen Armstrong discusses the need to apply Socratic philosophy to the counterproductive fierceness of modern debate. “Real philosophical debate…that is conducted in the spirit of malice or hate will not work,” she says. —– Ms. Armstrong describes how Islam, Judaism and Christianity have been diverted from a [...]
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0:45 – 1:14
That’s such a relevant anecdote for today’s society and in particular how it relates to politics
I come from a country that is run by a COMPLETE bonehead, where the senate and house of reps banter across the floor and get paid big money to solve nothing… and create new mistakes! Perhaps K.Rudd and his minions (and the libs) should adopt the Socratic mentality, because it’s just too obvious that they know nothing
I wonder if today’s politics are similar to Athenian
socrates was a hateful and emotionally-unstable person
Not in the US. He’ll get put on a no fly list or sent to an undisclosed location to be “questioned” himself. Or lambasted in the media by poorly educated blowhards.
I bought a book by Karen Armstrong on Muhammad, she makes him out to be a gentle prophet, who despite this, becomes a military leader, and ruler, who conquered all of Arabia and inspired his companions to conquer and subjugate half the known world after his death.
She romanticizes nearly everyone, because she can’t seem to bring herself to be negative due to her view that everything should be nice and fluffy otherwise someone might get offended by the truth.
I listened to this video again, and I’m taken back by how such an educated woman gets it so wrong. From 2:10 to 2:18 she says the Socratic Method is about “gentleness” and how “nobody is trying to defeat the other.”
If Socrates were really as pleasant as Armstrong made him out to be, it seems less likely that his fellow Athenians would have brought him to trial for “corrupting the youth” and sentenced him to death!
Exactly. Brilliant staging and (dare I say it?) rhetoric on Plato’s part, but that doesn’t redeem it from the subtle sense of smugness that resides in most of the dialogues.
> The Socratic dialogues have nothing humble in them, except for the sake of irony.
Well said!
A classic example is when Euthyphro criticizes those who know little of what the gods think about piety and impiety, and Socrates then asks Euthyphro if he in turn knows the will of the gods. When Euthyphro responds that he has “exact knowledge,” Socrates’ reply is:
“Rare friend! I think that I cannot do better than be your disciple.”
The “humbleness” is little but a ploy.
We aren’t automatons that can sit prudently, and emotionally unaffected in debates that are important and meaningful to us. Our passion, our forceful emotions, our anger , playing off that of others with differing opinions drives us closer to wisdom.
No man, he would be on twitter by now and all of us would get pwnd!
STanley Rosen is an old fool! Don’t trust old fools because they do not know what they are talking about all the time no matter their position. So don’t take for granted what he says, you need to to question. Socrates is the man!
I would say I am a rationalist, like Sam Harris. I refuse to legitimize a belief simply because I refuse to acknowledge it.
Its unfortunate that strong atheist seem to gravitate toward hard line skeptics. If a fundie is the right, then the hard line skeptic is the left which I find as absurd as the right.
Science is my guide as well, but quantum physics is a conundrum and I believe the standard model is flawed or at least incomplete.
Math or the immortality of the soul, definitely. His insistence on differentiating knowledge from belief, and that learning does not in any way rely on being convinced, is entirely reliant on the binary relationship between the Forms and the empirical world. And he all too often tends to disparage the empirical world accordingly.
Another thing Karen Armstrong would do well to note is that modern dialogue seeks something other than an aporetic ending. Socratic dialogue isn’t well suited to that.
Those he talks to usually start out giving perfectly valid ostensive definitions.
His game is to try and force everything into a very math-inspired synthetic system. In fact, he’s always going to math to explain what he wants. He wants necessary and sufficient conditions. He wants a single common feature present in all X and nothing but X.
And when nobody can fit things into his mold, it’s obviously their fault. Never that he’s demanding more than the concepts themselves can deliver, no!
If Socrates were on the internet I bet he would get fuckn pwnd.
Being a philosophy major I have to seriously question her reading of Plato. The Socratic dialogues have nothing humble in them, except for the sake of irony. And while she’s right that most of the dialogues end in aporia, it’s not as even-handed as all that; Socrates completely discredits and humiliates his opponent, and then by admitting his own ignorance manages to save face very neatly. But it’s still quite condescending if you read it closely.
As Stanley Rosen my teacher in Graduate School at Boston University told me, Socrates is a goddamn liar.
I LOOOOOOOOVE KAREN ARMSTRONG ^.^
is she transvestite ???
But where do you find a Socrates to ask the real questions?
i’m Dallas and I approve this message
someone tell inmendham
Agreed!
highly irrelevant mumbo-jumbo
I am perfectly satisfied with conceding either of those things.
I am not a strong atheist, I am a weak atheist.
If someone told me their ultimate source of knowledge was the Bible, I would laugh in their face. A science textbook isn’t the ultimate source of scientific knowledge despite holding many, many truths which can be independently demonstrated and verified. Just being written down doesn’t make something true. There is not a single demonstration of anything in the Bible.
Whenever I detect cognitive dissonance in a fundie, I think “My work here is done” and let him/her off easy. Whenever that happens you want to keep them on the edge long enough to let it sink in.