EP#62 | Why Sam Harris Matters

About this episode

Stephen Hicks discusses the significance of Sam Harris as a public intellectual and his contributions across various fields.

In this episode of Open College, Stephen Hicks reflects on the significance of Sam Harris as a public intellectual, drawing from his foreword to Sam Harris: Critical Responses. Hicks explores Harris’s wide-ranging contributions from morality, free will, and consciousness to religion, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, and politics arguing that Harris embodies a rare “third culture” synthesis of science and humanism at a time when philosophy has been split by C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” divide. Along the way, Hicks contrasts Harris’s reductionist approach with Jordan Peterson’s values-first orientation, using their exchanges to illustrate today’s ongoing struggle between facts and values, reason and emotion, and science and religion, and why overcoming these dualisms remains a central challenge for contemporary philosophy.

People in this episode

Host: Stephen Hicks

Topics covered

• public intellectuals
• morality
• free will
• consciousness
• science and humanism
• philosophy
• facts and values

Keywords

• Sam Harris
• Stephen Hicks
• Jordan Peterson
• philosophy
• morality
• free will
• consciousness
• science
• humanism
• politics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Possibly Correct Media

Books & works: Sam Harris: Critical Responses

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