The Ancients: Axial Age

The final lecture in The Ancients series explores the concept of Karl Jaspers about the impact of thinkers from the ancient world who lived within a relatively brief period of time from the 6th to the 3rd century BC. Presented at Peninsula College by Wesley Cecil PhD.

[@traditionsHome]

Eureka, spot on! I love that he gave this lecture while washing pots and pans. ❤

[@firstal3799]

This professor is a legend,

[@jlupus8804]

"All of the philosophy that we have may have been thought of a hundred times over thousand years earlier" Beautiful

[@ruygranja]

Wes Cecil is unique. Brilliant, funny, honest. The way he teaches make me see philosophy as a movie that keeps repeating in my memory. The apology of Socrates told by Cecil or the Wittgenstein questioning stories are hilarious. God bless you, Wes Cecil.

[@MichaelBNegron]

Always look forward to these! Wonderful content, as always!

[@DylanFryerFilms]

Michael N totally

[@asdkfjasdl_kfjas]

Very much looking forward to next year's lecture series! From how you described it, it sounds like it'll be the kind of philosophy that challenges your take on daily life and the institutions that influence our life decisions. I quite liked that about the 'uses of philosophy for living'-series as well!

[@user-vl7so1wf1u]

This is great! Thank you very much for posting these lectures 👍

[@Thungon]

Thanks for this series! Looking forward to next years!

[@goodsirknight]

just discovered Wes Cecil, a brilliant man

[@SeekersofUnity]

Great work Wes

[@lingtong-fc6te]

And your ability to make philosophy relevant to the present time is brilliant!

[@Stroganoffskji]

Thank you Wes.

[@alan2here]

I agree :)

[@keysean999]

I used this for my global history final and it was great

[@danchiappe]

Simply wonderful

[@sebastiaosalgado1979]

Excellent lecture!

[@alan2here]

Comparative legal, religious etc… systems to learn and improve stuff. And more abstraction. Fantastic historical innovation :)

[@post-leftluddite]

Thats debatable at best and dependent upon your definition of "improvement". According to modern anthropology, specifically the work done by Marshall Sahlins in "The Original Affluent Society" shows that hunter-gatherers lived in abundance in which there was no necessity for accumulating surplus. We worked far less (if you consider our definition of "work", e.g. the exchange of freedom for wage labor", it probably isn't possible to define the direct pursuit for sustenancefor Noone but yourself and free of a system of hierarchical coercion, were far happier (current research into still extant hunter-gatherers shows they have a level of mental illness dramatically below that of civilized people, if at all and Fred's Civilization and its Discontent argues just that. Jarrod Diamond lays this out perfectly and concisely in his essay: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Also, with the obvious fact that every previous civilization prior to our own has collapsed in large part due to environmental reasons, it seems safe to say that with a shelf life of 190,000-290,000 years of environmentally sustainable existence, hunter-gatherers representa the only truly sustainable lifeway our species has ever adopted.

[@trajan74]

Viking myth: Aesir and Vanir represent civilization and savagery. One group is made up of the farming, healing, and poetry gods. The other is made up of warriors, hunters, and destroyers. After the war, the two agree to live together and marry key figures from the other side. This, I would argue, is an allegory for human nature: the scholar and the savage living in the same body.

[@alan2here]

Even more ambitious series next year, sounds good.

[@zoop2174]

Great Lecture. Puts thinking into context xD

[@traiancoza5214]

Amazing.

[@andreciagl]

Amazing 👏🏾👏🏾

[@lingtong-fc6te]

Professor Cecil, you are an extraordinary story teller of philosophy and human civilization. I am deeply in awe with the width of your knowledge and wits of your classroom delivery. Thank you very much for your generous intellectual offering to the public. The pleasure of listening to your lectures is no less than the pleasure of reading the writings of Will Duran.

[@alan2here]

Means of description like formulas and programming languages as I see it, become more expressive and where desired even poetic, when there simple, elegant, concise, not too fussy in that if it makes sense it compiles, coherent, embrace symmetries etc… The compiler/interpreter such as the computer, reader or fellow conversationalist often has to do more work though when you express a highly compressed tangly knot of a sentence that is eventually parsed to deliberately mean 20 different complicated and long winded things, or is akin to how a recurrence relation that describes the coldatz conjecture is short and simple, but actually proving it is near impossible.

[@ocamtille9114]

I read Jared Diamond too

[@orlandosalazar9295]

Why can't I find this one in the "The Ancients" Playlist???

[@edwardbaxter3159]

Love the ideas, really. Brilliant. PLEASE, clean up the noises…?

[@kipling1957]

John Vervaeke brought me here. Does anyone know when this was delivered?

[@troyesquibel9303]

Why the hell does it sound like someone is sawing next to the audio recorder half the video???

[@LoudPaintings]

Ya it's incredibly distracting. Trying my best to ignore it but it's really hard hahahah

[@SPW812]

You know, ai can remove annoying sounds like that these days. Easy peasy.

[@tresjordan982]

First law of you tube…. The more literate the lecture ….the worse the audio 😮😮😢 a good one too!

[@a.n.c.australia]

So we do know whom they all are, by now. I think that to be the case. Are we going to allow them to communicate openly???

[@funkyboodah]

[51:30] We live in the new axial age

[@russellcook3922]

Bankers' behaviour in 2008/9 was perhaps a good, non-bizarre reason to be suspicious of them?

[@user-dz9yx3et9y]

Zoroaster was the progenitor of the axial thinkers

[@NwoDispatcher]

conquerors most assuredly conquer first through the mind.

[@lowrydan111]

Happening now in the USA. (Demoralization.)

[@The_Space_Born]

I have a job at a german factory.

[@Daydreamer0605]

what you describe sounds like what is happening today.

[@NwoDispatcher]

a genocide is happening today

[@alan2here]

Wages suddenly flatlining where productivity continued to accelerate suddenly happening on a massive scale a few years ago due to dodgy law changes and is still going on, "the middle class squeeze", progressivism seeming weaker, a tendency in many to sneering at anything abstract caused by cultural exclusions, and the such is worrying to me for these sort of reasons. Hopefully it's not a return pre-axial times, it just feels like it.

[@vrikey]

Nice lecture, but those scraping and knocking noises have got to go.

[@tanner5104]

Coin clipping Merchants

[@alan2here]

Silence, condescension, laughter, being ignored, year on year on year, and then suddenly from the same people all at once "boo" for a few more years, so it turns out the thing they didn't like wasn't such a big joke after all. And then they mellow out about it. And _then_ everything is expected to just suddenly be cool between everyone. Yep, been there done that.

[@tru_710]

Writing things is good because deepfake technology can edit anything on the internet, and people can lie about history, but if u write down what happened, they cant lie about it or change the story.

[@SuperSpidey313]

We still have oligarchy. Marx was right. The longest struggle in humankind is the struggle against oligarchs.

[@alexanderbrandt9816]

Ryan S Aren’t you forgetting the some odd 100,000 years before agriculture? Not a lot of oligarchs back then.

[@oldmanfromscenetwentyfour8164]

Marx's ideas are fine for a closed system but what Marx failed to see let alone acknowledge, is that humanity is not a closed system. Humanity left to it's nature will follow the path of least resistance. Humans are selfish, lazy, territorial and destructive, to themselves and others. Humanity in order to survive and prosper NEED to be ruled over. Humanity created gods as a means of control (self control and control of others) and explanation of the world they lived in. A god is an Oligarch. One that must be obeyed, can not be opposed and must have attention. Oligarchs, Leaders, Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers (insert favorite name here) are required by humanity to make rules, give guidance, protection and set goals. Mankind left on its own will not evolve as a collective, there is no motivation to evolve. Individuals can evolve to a point but be held back by those around them but collectives can not unless they are motivated or forced to by a Leader of some sort.

[@HxH2011DRA]

@@oldmanfromscenetwentyfour8164 An actual credible critique of communism that isn't "mah individualism"? Absolutely amazing

[@mikesoussan]

the guy is completely missing the implications of Jaspar`s axial period ... that happens usually when you havnt carefully read ancient sumerian accounts of creation (as history not myth) and think that humans started as cavemen and hunter gatherers ... it is a shame really ...

[@OSNLebuna]

Im curious since I haven’t read the Sumerian creation myths entirely. What do you suppose humans started as if not hunter gatherers? And what else do you think Cecil got wrong?

[@mikesoussan]

@@OSNLebuna what we are told by the ancients is that homo sapiens appeared within a civilized setting ... they were made, fashioned, fabricated throu genetic engineering by so called gods (flesh and blood and not ethereal or spiritual) ... and as ee see today, homo sapiens are the latestt newcomers to that glorious pantheon of gene-meddling divinities ... it is the story of creation ... gods creating other gods to infinity ... it is a long story ... indeed ... Read Italian essayist Mauro Biglino ...

[@mikesoussan]

What else Cecil got wrong? Frankly I do not remember and have no time to go through the video again .. but one thing i can tell you, both creationists and atheists read the Bible wrong ... and translating Elohim as the God we imagine, is most unfortunate ... Things get very confusing from then on and all so called sacred scrpture become a hodgepodge of conctradicting accounts and ideas ...

[@Jessesloveshack]

frist

[@a.randomjack6661]

Fristy are we :)) I dunno if I'll be the first to re-listen to it, but here I go :)

[@Jessesloveshack]

im fristy fristy for more wes cya in 2019 fam

[@a.randomjack6661]

Now, I know what a drought feels like... See ya :)

[@rebeccasoden963]

Pp

[@a.n.c.australia]

I'd be a little careful on this one. Alexandra Cortes does have a freaking dress that does send a message publicly to all of us. So what is Valentin to do?? Fantasize about AOC, or attend to his stuff in an orderly fashion... Are you able to blame me?? For being human???

[@a.n.c.australia]

AOC is not literate. It is true that in general our team is much better on this respect, and in fact we are better at all possible parameters. Yet there do exist literate people among them, and strategists. The reason they are not quite as good as us is that the "sensuality cocktail" they are in fact making use of damages the intellect... heavily!!! One true Philosophical principle, if I've ever seen one!

[@a.n.c.australia]

What they are doing, as you do notice :), is confusing us with weird distorted interpretations of what Freedom, Liberty, Sexuality, Community, etc... actually mean. So then us honest people go like... okay, yes, it is true you are free to do as you please... Unaware of what's actually happening in the dark!!!

[@a.n.c.australia]

Okay, so we have a thing called "money" and a very elaborate system called "financial." Yes, we have them. Yes, we can't go back to the stone age. Very true. Yet, with a simple stroke of genius one can in fact make a rotten apple pie entirely delicious ;)

[@a.n.c.australia]

I'm still here, last I checked ;) And by all means I'm not the smartest person here. It's just that I've accumulated the right cocktail of factual knowledge, and experience....

[@a.n.c.australia]

That is Alchemy. Related to the Archetypes. To Archetypal reasoning. Archetypal reasoning speaks to the Psyche... ;)

[@alan2here]

Framing money as in some ways progressive, and even more than that as being technologically disruptive. Slightly freaking me out :-P