The Examined Life

While defending himself against his accusers (at least in Plato's Apology), Socrates uttered a sentence that has captured the essence of philosophy and that has reverberated through the centuries: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

More than two thousand years later, now that we live in a society that's technologically advanced and that has benefited from the lessons learned through science and history, is there any need to question our most basic presuppositions, to wonder whether we are on the path to achieving wisdom, to ask whether we are worthy human beings, to remove the mask of superficiality and peer into the depths of our being? You'd better believe it!

And to prove it, today we are showcasing the documentary The Examined Life, which consists of a few sections in which a bunch of philosophers (people like Cornel West, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek and others) talk for a few minutes about various issues that we may normally take for granted as settled. And as you'll see, these short discussions will make it painfully obvious that things aren't nearly as neat and settled as we tend to assume. And once the philosophical gadfly bites you, even though you might feel uncomfortable, you'll be better off than you were before since now at least you have some kind of idea about what's really going on. And it is in that realization and doubt that the seed of wisdom can be planted. The question then becomes whether you'll help cultivate it and grow...

We are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures, born between urine and feces, whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us.

Awesome :)