David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we are looking at “eupraxophy,” which I cannot say three times fast because, you know, that’s a pretty hard word. But it …is a term coined by a Secular Humanist, Paul Kurtz. He later changed the spelling to add the S (eupraxsophy), so it looks more like phil-os-ophy, and that would be the correct spelling actually, if you’re using the Greek roots. What does it mean to be practicing that? eu is “good.” Then the next word probably is prax that becomes sort of English “praxis.” We do use the term even though it’s still in its Greek form, or it could be praktike, which becomes the English word “practical,” somehow about doing or embodying “sophy” (i.e.) “wisdom.” So it’s something about good doing wisdom or good practical wisdom is the idea. Paul Kurtz, 1925-2012. He was the author and editor of more than 50 books, a professor, well known worldwide. He was the founder and chair of the Institute of Science and Human Values, founder and chair of the Center for Inquiry. And you see him here featured on the front of the magazine Free Inquiry. Also, he founded the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which is one of those things we need to talk about some time as a group, looking at the supernatural and magical claims and debunking those to try figuring out how they’re done. “Eudaimonia” is the actual base of what Paul Kurtz was talking about. It is a Greek term and it does come directly out of Greek and then goes into Roman philosophy. Eudaimonia is often mistranslated as happiness. Actually, in the ancient world, people weren’t talking about what we would consider happiness, but rather they were talking about eu, “good,” and daimon, “a good spirit,” having a good spirit, being content with life. How do you become content in your life? was the basic question for all of the various Greek philosophical forms that then go into the Roman days and often on into Christianity, or they are blotted out at the time of Christianity, but continue somehow within Western literature and sometimes goes into Islamic thought. The “Eudaimonic Schools” of the Greeks and Romans is what I want to talk about today, the Eudaimonic Schools where those philosophies that said, how do we live a good life? How do we become flourishing, fulfilled, purpose-filled human beings? Most of the Greek philosophical schools were based in this idea. The up front for all of these schools is you have to decide on two things before you start as baseline. Number one, what is the nature of the universe or reality? and two, what is the human being capable of doing and knowing? Now, we have to look at this closely because…Oh, well, everybody knows that. Well, no, everybody doesn’t know that. This is exactly where people begin their disagreement about what reality is like. What is the nature of the universe? Well, God created it, God as a transcendent God outside and rules the universe just like a monarch. That’s one way of seeing the nature of the universe. Ah, the nature of the universe? It came from a “big bang” and is flying apart at an accelerating rate and will eventually stop and die and meet death. That’s another way of looking at reality, etc, etc, etc. There are many ways of doing that. That’s called an ontology, as we have discussed over time, the way that things are being. The second question is epistemology,