Welcome in, everyone. We are so glad you're joining
us for this custom tailored depth dive today.
Absolutely. Thanks for being here. So today we
have a really incredible mission. We're pulling
from this incredibly fascinating Wikitutia article
all about the British philosopher Stephen Priest.
All right. And, you know, he was born August
22nd, 1954, which makes him 71 years old today.
Happy birthday to him. or well, happy birth year,
I guess. Yeah, exactly. But our mission for this
deep dive is to explore the life and work of
a thinker whose entire career is pretty much
defined by completely ignoring rigid intellectual
boundaries. He really did. And it's crucial to
look at his story, you know, not just as some
standard academic timeline of like. degrees and
jobs. Right. It's really a blueprint for how
to navigate a world that is just full of divided
opinions. We live in these hyper specialized
isolated echo chambers today. Oh totally. Everything
is siloed. Exactly. And Preece offers this master
class and how to connect concepts that most people
even experts just assume are totally separate
and incompatible. OK. Let's unpack this because
if you look at how his mind was formed chronologically
it actually makes perfect sense that he didn't
respect those academic borders. He definitely
He took the scenic route. He did. He didn't start
out as some philosophical prodigy, you know,
locked in a dusty library reading Kant at age
18. No, not at all. His early path was surprisingly
varied. He spent his early 20s getting his hands
dirty in the real world. Like, his first degree
in 1976 from Lancaster University, it wasn't
even in pure philosophy. Right, it was a BA in
history, right? Yeah, history, but with French
and archaeology mixed in. Wow. And then two years
later, in 1978, he gets a post -grad... a graduate
certificate in education, a PGCE. And that was
in history with social sciences. Exactly. So
he's out there literally unearthing the past
with archaeology and studying how societies work.
Yeah, and getting that linguistic and cultural
immersion with French. And he's even operating
in the bureaucratic real world. Because around
1977, he's actually working as an administrator
for the Press and Information Department at the
Council of Europe out in Strasbourg. Which is
wild. for a future philosopher of mind. Right.
He's watching modern European politics happen
in real time. He doesn't even get his B .A. and
philosophy from the University of Cambridge until
1980. And then his M .A. follows in 1984. Yeah.
It's like priests spent his early 20s physically
gathering the raw materials of human civilization,
you know, history, archaeology, European politics,
before realizing he needed to go to Cambridge
to forge the philosophical tools to actually
understand what he'd gathered. What's fascinating
here is how that broad, late -blooming entry
into pure philosophy likely protected him. Protected
him from what? Well, from becoming trapped in
a single, narrow academic echo chamber. When
someone enters a highly theoretical field like
philosophy too early, and they never leave that
bubble, they risk just getting trapped in pure
abstraction. Oh, like they only know the theory,
but they don't know the real world. Exactly.
But Kreese arrived at Cambridge insulated against
that. His mind was already grounded. He had literally
studied how societies rise and fall. And that
real -world grounding really set the stage for
what he did next, because he takes that worldly
perspective and applies it to his most famous
academic achievement, which is merging two notoriously
separated schools of thought. Yeah, the analytic
and continental traditions. Right. So the source
notes that he's best known for bringing the rigorous
methods of analytic philosophy to complex continental
thinkers. Right. Heavyweights like Hegel, Husserl,
Sartre, and Merleau -Ponty. But let me push back
on this for a second. Because to you, the listener,
or just to someone outside academia, combining
analytic methods with continental thinkers just
sounds like, I don't know, mixing two types of
textbooks. Right. It sounds like an administrative
task. Yeah. Why is this actually a monumental
feat? Well, to really appreciate it, you have
to understand the deep friction between these
two approaches. They were basically rival factions
for most of the 20th century. They hated each
other. They really did. They refuse to speak
the same language. On one side, you have the
analytic tradition, which is fierce in the English
-speaking world. It's all about logic, clarity,
philosophy of language, formal proofs. Very math
brain. Very math brain. They want to strip away
all the poetic ambiguity and just figure out
exactly what is logically true. And the other
side. The continental tradition is rooted in
Europe, Germany, France. This is your Hegel's,
your Sartre's. They deal with massive messy concepts.
existential dread, human experience, the flow
of history. They're the artists. Exactly. And
the analytic guys looked at them and said, your
work is vague and logically undisciplined. And
the continental guys looked back and said, you're
missing the forest of human experience because
you're too busy doing math equations. So they're
completely walled off from each other. But then
Priest acts as this intellectual translator.
You see this bridge building in his editorial
work, like, He edited Hegel's critique of Kant
in 1987, and then John Paul Sartre's basic writings
in 2001. He takes a thinker like Sartre, who
writes about sweeping concepts like nothingness,
and forces analytic clarity onto him. He demands
precision from the poets. Yes, beautifully put.
He proves you can be rigorous without sacrificing
the big mysteries of human existence. And his
main interests span so widely because of this.
Vetaphysics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology,
history of philosophy, philosophy of religion.
You get a massive output. Yeah. Having established
himself as this master synthesizer, he actually...
applied these translated ideas to the mysteries
of the human mind, the concept of the subject.
Right. And he authored or edited 19 books. 19.
19. With heavy focuses on Kant, the post -Kantian
continental tradition, and the philosophy of
mind. That is a staggering amount of work. It
is. I mean, notable authored works include The
British Empiricists, which had editions in 1990
and 2007. OK. Theories of the Mind in 1991. Myrtle
Pawnee in 1998 and 2003. and the subject in question
in 2000. He also co -edited a dictionary of philosophy
with Antony Flew in 2002, right? He did. And
what's amazing is his global footprint. He held
fellowships and lectureships at Manchester, Bradford,
Leeds, Salzburg, and Edinburgh. And visiting
professorships in the US, Europe, and Asia. Yeah.
and his work is translated into Japanese, Korean,
Macedonian, Russian, and Spanish. So what does
this all mean? Like for you, the person listening
right now, a book like The Subject in Question
might sound dry, but it's clearly tapping into
something huge. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, a book like that resonates from Macedonia
to Japan because the fundamental inquiry of who
are you is universally human. Right. He isn't
just writing for other academics. Those widespread
translations prove he is tapping into questions
that everyday people globally are desperate to
answer. Exactly. The subject is the conscious
self, the eye experiencing the world. By analyzing
the mind, he's giving us a framework to understand
our own existence. It's like he took that analytic
scalpel and trying to dissect consciousness itself,
which is the ultimate locked room mystery. Totally.
But just when you think priest's career is neatly
defined by the philosophy of mind, we hit this
dramatic plot twist. Yes. The inevitable shift.
Right. Because when you study the human mind
deeply enough and you push the boundaries of
consciousness, you inevitably brush up against
the divine. You really do. In the 2000s, priests'
focus shifted dramatically to the relationship
between philosophy and theology. A massive pivot
for an analytic philosopher. And here's where
it gets really interesting. He actually wrote
a manuscript titled Philosophical Questions Theological
Answers. Right. And an entire symposium was held
at Oxford in April 2008 just about this manuscript.
Which is a huge deal. But yet, according to the
source material, as of January 2020, it remarkably
remains unpublished, even though talks on the
subject are online. That is fascinating. Is it
the ultimate perfectionist's dilemma? I mean,
imagine writing something so profound that Oxford
holds a symposium on it, but you keep it locked
in a drawer for over a decade. This raises an
important question regarding his intellectual
courage, really, because keeping a manuscript
unpublished doesn't mean he was hiding from the
theological debate. Oh, not at all. Which brings
us to the Sheldonian Theater Showdown in October
2011. This is such a wild moment. Picture this.
You've got this highly publicized debate on theology
and atheism. You have the philosopher and Christian
theologian William Lane Craig. ready to go. But
the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins
refused to debate him. Right, Dawkins outright
refused, leaving this massive, intimidating empty
chair on stage. And stepping into that crossfire
as a stand -in is incredibly risky. Academic
suicide for a lot of people. I want to be clear
to you listening, we are absolutely not taking
sides on the political or religious views of
Dawkins or Craig here. We are just reporting
on the historical event. Exactly. The point is
the courage it took to sit in that chair. Right.
Priest was one of three speakers asked to bravely
stand in for Dawkins, and he did it. The video
is even immortalized on Craig's reasonable faith
website. It proves Priest is willing to jump
into the most heated, high -stakes intellectual
arenas of our time. He doesn't just theorize
about friction, he steps right into it. He really
does. He thrives in those spaces where complex
human realities intersect. Yeah, he ignores the
walls. Which gives us this really cohesive picture
of his journey from starting in history and archaeology
to bridging the transatlantic divide of philosophy
to mapping the human mind and then stepping right
into the crosshairs of these intense theology
debates. It's an incredible nonlinear life. But
there's one final beautiful biographical detail
we have to reveal before we wrap up. my favorite
part. Despite this extremely rigorous logic -driven
academic life, I mean, he was a senior research
fellow at Blackfriars Oxford and a member of
the faculty of philosophy at the University of
Oxford. Right, very serious, very structured.
Very. But he is married to the poet Carey Priest.
It's just so perfectly fitting. Isn't it? A lifelong
bridge builder uniting philosophy and poetry
in his own home. He's taking the raw human experience
and applying philosophical rigor in his professional
life and sharing his personal life with someone
who turns that exact same experience into art.
It proves logic and poetry aren't enemies. No,
they're just different tools. Which brings me
to a final provocative thought for you to ponder.
Priest spent his entire life successfully applying
the tools of one discipline, like analytic philosophy,
to the problems of another, like continental
thought and theology. He borrowed tools from
everywhere. Exactly. So look at your own life,
look at your job, or maybe a problem you are
currently stuck on. What is a completely foreign
tool or perspective you could borrow from a totally
different area of your life to finally crack
that problem wide open? Sometimes the answer
isn't digging deeper into your own field. It's
looking over the fence. Yep. Ignore the borders.
Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
dive. Keep borrowing those foreign tools and
we'll catch you next time.