Are we blank slates? Or does the mind come pre-furnished?
The Stoics said blank. Aetius describes a newborn soul as a sheet of paper waiting to be written on. Every idea you have got there through experience. Plato said the opposite. Your soul already knew everything and forgot it at birth. Learning is just remembering.
Michael and Caleb work through both views, then run them against modern psychology. Core cognition theory. Preparedness theory. The monkey experiments where infants learn to fear snakes fast but never learn to fear flowers?
(05:30) Plato on innate ideas and recollection in the Meno
(11:00) The learner’s paradox
(12:00) The Stoic tabula rasa: Aetius on the mind as blank paper
(15:00) Are emotions innate categories or built from experience?
(20:00) Chomsky, Nussbaum, and cross-cultural anger
(22:30) Preconceptions: why every culture has an idea of justice
(28:00) Philosophy begins with disagreement
(30:00) Do the two views actually differ that much?
(36:00) Modern psychology: core cognition and a few innate ideas
(38:00) Preparedness theory and the snake experiments
(42:00) Proto-passions: when an impression carries force
(45:00) Self-knowledge, and the case against relativism
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:
