David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we have been looking at eupraxsophy, which I cannot say three times fast, but ideas about how to live a secular or non-religious life, religiously, if you will. One of those ideas does come from a man by the name of Paul Kurtz. He is the one who took the idea called Secular Humanism and ran with it, writing such books as The Fullness of Life, that I have over here. Also, it mentions that he is the author of The Humanist Manifesto. Not entirely true there, but that’s the way book covers work. But he did indeed figure strongly in two of the humanist manifestos. Eupraxsophy means good practical wisdom. What he was shooting at here is, how do we live a secular life that is mindful and has an ethical and moral core to it that is statable: “A eupraxsophy is a non-religious life…” says Paul Kurtz, “…life stance or worldview emphasizing the importance of living an ethical and exuberant life, and relying on rational methods such as logic, observation and science (rather than faith, mysticism or revelation) toward that end.” So there you see the project that he is going after. What this is really referring back to is what are known as “The “Eudaimonic Schools” of the ancient Greeks and Romans.” That is, those philosophical schools that existed previous to being shut down by the Christians during the Roman Empire period when Christianity was taking over the empire. Epictetus, one of the stoic philosophers, has this to say: “We must not believe the many who say that only free people ought to be educated. But we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.” Epictetus there, one of the stoic philosophers from the first century of the Common Era. You see where they are going with this: Knowledge is Power, if you will, and to be eudaimonic in life, we need to educate ourselves in such a way that we can understand the questions of morality. One of the people who took this idea and ran with it, it was Pierre Hadot, (who) lived from 1922-2010. He was a classical philosopher and an historian in Paris at the College de France. He first became a Roman Catholic priest as a young man, but he quit that in disillusionment. He did not see the Roman Catholic Church being what it said it was. He began looking for truth in pre-Christian philosophy. We know historically that Christianity, one of the sayings goes, is what you get when you put Judaism together with Greek philosophy. That’s a little bit broad, but it does have a lot of validity to it. So what do we do if we look at what the Greek philosophers then going into the Roman Empire period, what were they talking about? What were they doing? Hadot’s Central Thesis is that “ancient philosophy was a bios or a way of life,(maniere de vivre), “…a way of living.” It wasn’t about the abstruse how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It was about how do we live a decent life on this planet, given the reality. One of his major books on this is called What Is Ancient Philosophy. He wrote several. There are two Hadots out there, the very scholarly one who is reading the classical texts for very specific reasons. Then there are those texts that are talking about this idea of how Greek and Roman philosophy can teach us bios, how to live. What is Ancient Philosophy, I think, is probably the most accessible of the group. If you’re particularly interested in Marcus Aurelius, The Inner Citadel is the book for you.