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American Socrates
Think Deeper. Live Better.
Most podcasts give you answers. American Socrates gives you better questions.
Host Matt Rupert — Professional Philosopher, Part-time Podcaster — applies the lost art of Socratic thinking to the decisions, relationships, and cultural debates shaping everyday American life. This is not a philosophy class. It's not another self-help podcast. Just rigorous, honest thinking that helps you sift through the rhetoric and live more deliberately.
New episodes every Wednesday. Check your assumptions at the door.
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere you listen.
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
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American Socrates
How Do I Learn from Failure?
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What Does Failure Teach Us? The last segment has been about building something — goals, flourishing, practical wisdom, examined values, and good habits. This episode is about what happens when that isn't enough. Aristotle's concept of hamartia, usually mistranslated as tragic flaw, more accurately understood as error in judgment, describes not the failure of defective people but the specific mistakes that capable, well-formed people are prone to making. Tragedy, for Aristotle, was a moral laboratory: a way of experiencing failure at a safe remove and exercising the judgment needed to recognize it before it arrives in your own life. This episode asks what failure actually teaches, what resilience really is, and why the good life was never a life without failure, just one that knows what to do with it.
Art: George E. Koronaios, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Question Everything!
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