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.
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American Socrates
How Do I Fit Into My Society?
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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 you become is inseparable from the community that formed you. This episode examines the relationship between personal ethics and the society that shapes it, and why Aristotle thought you couldn't fully understand one without the other. Ethics fit the person to the society. Politics asks whether the society is worth fitting into. The two questions are linked in ways that matter, and a purely personal ethics that ignores the political question is never quite enough.
Art: Albert Bettannier, Der Schwarze Fleck; Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Question Everything!
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