#541 Charles Foster - Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness
RECORDED ON SEPTEMBER 29th 2021.
Dr. Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, a member of the Oxford Law Faculty (where he is a Visiting Professor), a Senior Research Associate at the Uehiro Institute for Practical Ethics (within the Faculty of Philosophy), and a Research Associate at the Ethox Centre and the Helex Centre (both within the Faculty of Medicine). His main areas of interest are medical law and ethics. Recently he has been focused particularly on questions of identity, personhood, and authenticity, on whether theories of human dignity can do any real work in the law, and on the use of intuitions in moral and legal reasoning. He is the author of many books, including his most recent one, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness.
In this episode, we focus on Being a Human. We talk about how human sociality changed from the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic, and how human conscious experience evolved. We also touch on how the Enlightenment changed people’s perception of the world.
Time Links:
Intro
The Upper Paleolithic
Religion and art
The Neolithic
Was the Neolithic a net-negative?
The Enlightenment
Steven Pinker’s view of the Enlightenment
Is the Enlightenment problematic?
Follow Dr. Foster’s work!
Follow Dr. Foster’s work:
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/3lP3m8R
Website: https://bit.ly/3nVdhfS
Amazon page: https://amzn.to/3EEOMJO
Being a Human: https://amzn.to/3zALPWN
Twitter handle: @tweedpipe