Episode Details

Why do we need a nuclear family? What actually determines the difference between a boy and a girl? These feel like brand-new questions, but the ideas that make them askable were actually seeded four hundred years ago. Dr. Jordan Cooper joins us to trace them back to their source.

ABOUT THE EPISODE: 
Lutheran theologian and pastor Dr. Cooper walks Josh through the philosophical roots of the modern progressive mind and the broader philosophy of the left: Descartes and Cartesian doubt, Kant's Copernican Revolution, Hume's empiricism and skepticism, Hobbes's social contract theory, and Thomas Paine's radical individualism, the intellectual scaffolding beneath everything from critical theory to postmodernism. It's the same scaffolding underneath the questions above. Once Hume argues that even something as basic as cause and effect is just an assumption rather than a certainty, and Kant argues that categories like space and time are imposed by the mind rather than discovered in the world, the door opens to treating categories like family and gender the same way: not given, but constructed, and open to being remade.

Dr. Cooper's book Makers of the Modern Mind grew out of years doing campus ministry at Cornell, watching students absorb progressive assumptions and secular philosophy they'd never actually examined. Drawing on his background in Lutheran theology and Christian apologetics, this conversation is a guided tour through where those assumptions came from, and why the question underneath almost all of them, in philosophy, politics, and the modern culture wars alike, is simply: what is a human being?

0:00 – Introduction
1:14 – Dr. Jordan Cooper
2:45 – Lutheran Branding Problem
4:21 – Makers of the Modern Mind
10:23 – Union With Christ Doctrine
16:30 – Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum
26:38 – Kant's Copernican Revolution
31:33 – David Hume's Skepticism
42:35 – Thomas Paine & Liberalism
51:21 – Right Vs Left Liberalism
56:52 – Applying Philosophy Today

ABOUT THE GUEST:
📖https://www.amazon.com/Makers-Modern-Mind-Thinkers-Formed/dp/1952295823

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