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?