Episode 10 - Enlightenment values with Professor A.C. Grayling

In this milestone tenth episode of Skeptically Curious, I had the immense privilege and unique honour to speak with world-renowned philosopher, Professor A. C. Grayling, who has exerted a profound intellectual influence upon yours truly since I first began reading his work around 2007. The author of over thirty books, his astonishing oeuvre possesses the rarest combination of lavish depth and extraordinary breadth. Anything one is liable to read that issued forth from the man's pen cannot help but impress for its remarkable erudition, elegant prose, and profound acumen, qualities made the more awe-inspiring by being so unflaggingly consistent. As my focus for this episode was predominantly on the Enlightenment, I decided to centre our discussion on one of the coruscating jewels of Grayling’s rich output, Towards the Light of Liberty, which provides an account of the struggles in the West over the last five hundred years to expand freedom in a host of spheres. I began our conversation by asking Professor Grayling how growing up in Africa shaped his thinking, which prompted his sharing candid details concerning some devastating personal tragedies. I then asked him about the role of the philosopher, whether ancient or modern, before moving onto a discussion on key values associated with the Enlightenment project. He elaborated upon why to fully understand the Enlightenment we need to take a wider historical view, as he does in Towards the Light of Liberty, which surveys predominantly European history over the last half a millennium. I asked my guest to explain the relevance of the Reformation in the 16th century to subsequent developments. Other subjects we discussed included the importance of struggle in achieving Enlightenment ideals, the notion of Enlightenment as a process of continual renewal and ongoing striving for a better dispensation, which I summarised as becoming and not being, the serious problems with religious approaches to acquiring knowledge and developing ethical standards, and the importance of the scientific method to Enlightenment ideals and its supremacy in comparison to all other modes of understanding reality. My guest addressed a few oft-cited criticisms directed against the Enlightenment, including some major Western nations’ history of colonialism and imperialism and the ongoing hypocrisy in the way many supposedly Enlightened states conduct their foreign policy. He then fielded a question about whether attaining economic democracy across the globe to displace the current capitalist order represents a necessary continuation of the Enlightenment effort to promote human flourishing in all dimensions. In closing, Professor Grayling urged everyone to continue their self-education beyond the formal kind as he averred we should “stay awake, alert, and never give up learning.”

A.C. Grayling’s official website: https://acgrayling.com/

A.C. Grayling's Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Grayling

Towards the Light of Liberty: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/towards-the-light-9780747592990

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