American Socrates
Think Deeper. Live Better.
Most podcasts give you answers. American Socrates gives you better questions.
Host Matt Rupert — Professional Philosopher, Part-time Podcaster — applies the lost art of Socratic thinking to the decisions, relationships, and cultural debates shaping everyday American life. This is not a philosophy class. It's not another self-help podcast. Just rigorous, honest thinking that helps you sift through the rhetoric and live more deliberately.
New episodes every Wednesday. Check your assumptions at the door.
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere you listen.
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/corals/mountain-pine
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Episodes
89 episodes
Do the Needs of the Many Outweight the Needs of the Few?
This episode of American Socrates deals with the trolley problem, drone strikes, COVID triage, and more to press the objection against utilitarian ethics: that it licenses using innocent people as instruments whenever the arithmetic favors it, ...
Are Some Pleasures Better Than Others?
If pleasure is all that matters, a contented pig lives better than a struggling philosopher — and you should plug into a machine that gives you perfect simulated happiness for the rest of your life. Most people find both conclusions obviously w...
Does the Happiness Calculator Run Your Life Without You Even Knowing It?
You've been living under utilitarian ethics your whole life, even if you didn't know it had a name. This episode of American Socrates introduces Jeremy Bentham's felicific calculus: the system that measures pleasure and pain across populations ...
Is Happiness the Best Measure of Good Life?
What does it actually mean to be happy — and is happiness even the right thing to be measuring? This episode of American Socrates traces the philosophical history of happiness from Aristotle's eudaimonia to Epicurus's radical simplicity to the ...
Do You Need God To Be Good?
Do you need to believe in God to be a good person? Most people have a gut answer to that question. This episode of American Socrates asks what happens when you actually examine it. First, we examine what history says about it. Then we examine t...
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Am I Kinder Than God?
Have you ever looked at the suffering of an innocent person — a sick child, someone who never had a chance — and thought: no loving God would allow this? You're not alone. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov asked the same question in 1880 and has neve...
Are Faith and Reason Enemies?
Can a serious, thinking person believe in God? William James says yes — and has a rigorous philosophical argument for why. Bertrand Russell says the evidence isn't there — and has an equally rigorous argument for that. This episode of American ...
Can a Rich Man Go to Heaven?
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan invoked the crucifixion to defend working people from the gold standard. Today, prosperity gospel preachers invoke Jesus to extract money from working people and live in mansions. Same religion. Opposite directio...
What Does It Mean to be Christian?
This episode of American Socrates asks what Christianity actually teaches — from the Sermon on the Mount to the Jesus/Paul distinction and poses the question the tradition itself demands: if blessed are the poor is the standard, how much of wha...
What Did Confucius Say?
Most Americans already live a Confucian ethics — they just don't know it. If you define yourself by your roles as a parent, child, friend, or worker, if your deepest moral instinct is about loyalty and not letting people down, Confucius gave th...
Can the Buddha Explain Why Life Is Hard?
A 2,500-year-old prince walked away from everything — and what he found still cuts to the heart of why modern life feels so hollow. This episode of American Socrates breaks down Buddhist ethics for non-Buddhists: the Four Noble Truths, the Eigh...
What Does a 13th-Century Monk Have to Do With the Laws Regulating Abortion?
After six episodes exploring Aristotle's ethics — eudaimonia, teleology, the golden mean, and the politics of the good life — we turn to the thinker who took that framework and transformed it into the philosophical backbone of Western Christian...
How Do I Learn from Failure?
What Does Failure Teach Us? The last segment has been about building something — goals, flourishing, practical wisdom, examined values, and good habits. This episode is about what happens when that isn't enough. Aristotle's concept of ha...
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Is Character a Matter of Habit?
Am I What I Do Repeatedly? Character is not what you intend. It is what you do repeatedly. Aristotle's account of habit formation is one of the most practically actionable ideas in his ethics and one of the most uncomfortable, because it...
How Do I Fit Into My Society?
What is the Ethics of Politics? Aristotle believed that human beings are political animals, not in the electoral sense, but in the deeper sense that we can only fully develop and flourish within a community. That means the kind of person...
How Do I Make Ethics Practical?
How are you supposed to act when you’re not sure what to do? Every ethical system eventually has to answer this same practical question. Aristotle's answer is the doctrine of the golden mean, that is, the idea that virtue lies between ex...
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How Do I Thrive?
How do you live your best life? Aristotle's answer to the question of what human life is for is eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness, but closer in meaning to flourishing. His argument that the highest form of eudaimo...
How Do I Find Purpose in Life?
Before you can get good at living, you need to know what you're living for. Aristotle's concept of teleology, the idea that everything has a purpose, and that purpose determines what success looks like, turns out to be one of the most practical...
What is Love?
Erich Fromm argued in The Art of Loving that love is a skill — and that most people are bad at it not because they are unloving but because they have never treated it as something that requires practice and develop...
What are the Ethics of Loyalty?
How loyal should one be? Loyalty is one of the most emotionally compelling ideas in human life and one of the most philosophically slippery. This episode defines loyalty as a binding commitment that resists constant recalculation — which...
Am I Guilty for the Sins of My People?
What is Collective Guilt? Can guilt be shared without becoming meaningless? This episode untangles four concepts that keep getting collapsed into one — collective responsibility, liability, complicity, and guilt — and argues that the con...
What does Forgiveness Bring Us?
What does forgiveness actually do to the people who practice it — and what does real transformation look like when it happens? In this episode, we move past the question of why forgiveness is hard and into the territory of what it produc...
What is the Silver Rule?
Is Fairness Enough? Tit-for-tat is mathematically elegant and emotionally satisfying: you get what you give, and nobody gets taken advantage of. Game theory even proves it works — under the right conditions. This episode examines what th...
What is the Golden Rule?
Isn't Morality Just the Golden Rule? Most people think the Golden Rule is about fairness — treat others the way you want to be treated. But fairness and forgiveness are not the same thing, and the difference matters. This episode explore...
Do I Owe Anything to the Future?
What do we owe people who do not yet exist? This episode begins with the “seventh generation” principle of the Iroquois Confederacy—evaluating decisions by their impact 150 years into the future—and asks why that standard feels so alien in a wo...
Can I Judge Others?
“Don’t judge” is often treated as the highest moral command, but this episode argues that tolerance has never meant moral silence. Drawing on the classic formulation of the paradox of tolerance by Karl Popper, we examine how a society that refu...
How Responsible Are We For Our Own Happiness?
We’re told that happiness is a choice and that we are fully responsible for our own lives. This episode questions that assumption and asks whether the good life is really a private achievement. Drawing on virtue ethics, the African philosophy o...
Is the Good Life An Easy Life?
After a long day of emails, meetings, and micro-decisions, an easy life feels like salvation. This episode examines the seduction of convenience and the psychology of decision fatigue: how constant low-stakes choices for institutions, platforms...
Is Foul Language Immoral?
This episode examines how so-called “clean speech” is less about ethics than about power, class, and control. From the linguistic fluidity of taboo in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to the euphemism treadmill that turned our “cocks” in...
