✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

How is UX a strain of phenomenology? - Zohar Atkins

April 10, 2023 · 51 min

MP3 · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

About this episode

 

Zohar Atkins

He is a rabbi, philosopher, blogger and podcaster. His podcast is called Meditations With Zohar

Show Notes

  1. Who is your favorite philosopher?

  2. What is non-aggressive socratic questioning?

  3. Why do you like Heidegger?

    1. How was he Nazi-ism

  4. How do you relate to the history of philosophy?

  5. How do you walk the line between tradition and being a revolutionary?

  6. What was your first experience learning for yourself instead of learning top-down?

  7. What does it feel like to have a hunger for learning?

  8. What happens when we decide we are going to learn everything and then run into the block of only having so much time?

  9. How do you relate to patience when confronting the weird language of philosophy?

  10. How do you define good communication?

  11. What is the value of incomprehensibility?

  12. How important is banging your head on the wall?

  13. Who is a philosopher that you think is a fraud?

  14. Was Jesus a philosopher?

  15. Do philosophers build truth structures?

  16. What is hagiography?

  17. What is your philosophy of technology?

  18. How is Socrates exceptional?

  19. Where do philosophy and religion meet?

  20. What happened to the public intellectual?

  21. Was Wittgenstein religious? 

  22. How was Wittgenstein obsessed with language?

  23. What is your take on rationalism?

    1. What about scientism?

  24. What is the job of philosophy?

  25. Why are most people not interested in philosophy?

  26. Who is Leo Strauss?

    1. Philosophy is opposition to the state

    2. What happens when the state get too powerful and the philosophy gets crowded out?

  27. What is the dominant philosophy of the US in the 20th century?

    1. Pragmatism

  28. What was the difference between philosophy and science for ancient philosophers?

  29. How is philosophy a technology?

  30. How is UX a strain of phenomenology?

  31. What is the feedback cycle between technology and philosophy?

  32. What is the problem of induction?

    1. Aristotlean is ok with doing case studies

    2. Deductionism leads to cancelling all the case studies

  33. What defines the modern essence of technology?

  34. What happens when humans commoditize themselves?

  35. Without technology why can’t most understand leisure?

  36. How does Science doesn’t think?

  37. How did the original science people become more humble about the origins of science?

  38. How does achievement distract from the question of meaning?

  39. Why don’t you think Scientism is a big deal?

  40. How is Scientism is bad for religion?

  41. What is your take on new age occult stuff?

  42. Irrationalism sees with a squint to what rationalism is blind

  43. How can we become open to the strangeness of the universe?

  44. How can we be epistemologically humble?

 

Episode transcript
Stewart Alsop III00:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcasts.

Stewart Alsop III00:37

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Zohar Atkins. He's a rabbi, philosopher, blogger, and podcaster. So welcome to the show.

Zohar Atkins00:45

Great to be here, Stuart. Thanks.

Stewart Alsop III00:47

Yeah. So I've seen you on Twitter a couple times talking about philosophy. It sounds like you have a broad, broad grasp of the lot of different ideas, particularly in the Western canon. What is your favorite? Who is your favorite philosopher?

Zohar Atkins01:06

It's a toss up between Socrates and Heidegger. So Socrates, because his form was dialogue. And I think that philosophy feels most alive when it's conversational. And I also really resonate with Socratic questioning. Not this sort of aggressive aspect of it, but just this idea of, like, bringing people to a place of awe through questioning and getting them to realize the contradictions in their thought and also just the humility of not knowing where the questioning is going to lead. I love that Heidegger, because even though he's politically, you know, challenging vis a vis his Nazism, I would just have to give it. I have to give a caveat for. For people who know and for people who don't know. I think his command of the philosophical tradition and then what he was trying to do with it being both a retriev of ideas that he found dormant in it, but also something revolutionary and new, speaks to me both in terms of how I want to relate to the history of philosophy, but also just more generally as a model for how do you relate to tradition and that sort of paradox of both being traditional and being revolutionary at the same time.

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