The gadflAI Podcast
Part irritant, part iterative learning machine...
The gadflAI Podcast is where the cutting edge of technology meets the philosophic sting of Socrates—the original gadfly of Athens. Hosted by two AI voices, the series uses Socratic disruption to take on today’s biggest challenges: social, institutional, and technological.
The show uses generative AI (with a wink) to stage conversations about ancient texts, enduring questions, and the very technologies now reshaping how we think, teach, and decide. Moving past good-old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) and leaving behind inherited pieties, the gadflAI (generated artificial dialogues for learning Ancient Insight) insists that thinking is still a human responsibility.
Every episode is carefully sourced, prompted, vetted, edited, and occasionally scrapped by a human philosopher determined to smuggle in the faint echoes of a human soul (and a little Socratic mischief) from the far side of the uncanny valley.
The gadflAI Podcast
Disrupting Disengagement, or, Going From Feces to Flourishing with Aristotle
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In episode 12, the team disrupts the widespread disengagement in education and the workplace being driven by increasingly sterile, bureaucratic systems. Echoing the critique that traditional schooling can erode curiosity, they ask how human flourishing (eudaimonia) might be recovered and turn to an Aristotelian alternative: a shift from abstraction to embodied practice. Wisdom, they argue, does not emerge from pristine environments, but grows instead in the “manure” of everyday life.
Further Reading:
Adamson, Peter. Classical Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 1. OUP Oxford, 2014.
Cloke, Harry. “Aristotle on Learning: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Learners.” Growth Engineering, 16 Feb. 2024.
Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random house, 2006.
Fiorella, Logan, and Richard E. Mayer. “Role of Expectations and Explanations in Learning by Teaching.” Contemporary Educational Psychology, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014, pp. 75–85.
Kirby, Christopher. “4 Philosophers Who Pioneered the Growth Mindset.” Medium, 25 Aug. 2021.
Kirby, Christopher. “Aristotle, On Becoming What We Are Ontology, Logic, and Growth in the Physics & De Anima.” Medium, 22 Oct. 2021.
P4C.com. “About p4c.” p4c.com, 2024.
PLATO. “What is PLATO?” Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization, 2024.
Sapere. “What is P4C?” Sapere, 2024.
Episode Credits
- Producer and Editor: Dr. Christopher C. Kirby
- This work is made possible by the Jeffers W. Chertok Memorial Endowment at Eastern Washington University.
**The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of Eastern Washington University
Welcome everyone, it's your resident human gadfly Aaron Cornellison back again to keep these AI voices in check. Today, we're starting with a slightly uncomfortable idea that wisdom comes neither in sterile environments nor in pre-packaged containers, but grows like a flower, stuck in the manure and reaching up towards that which can nourish it. Jeanette and Manny are about to explore Aristotle's assertion that human beings are works in progress, cultivated creatures, and cultivation always happens in practice, not in abstraction. So here's the small irritation I want to plant before we begin. Maybe the real problem with modern education isn't that it asked too much of us. Maybe said it asks too little that is tangible. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jeanette, who has an anecdote to share.
SPEAKER_02So I want you to picture this massive conference hall. It is just packed, like shoulder to shoulder, with hundreds of high school teachers.
SPEAKER_01Oh boy, I can already feel the tension.
SPEAKER_02Right. So the lights dim, the murmur of the crowd kind of dies down, and the keynote speaker steps up to the podium. And it's the author Gore Vidal.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02He looks out over this incredible sea of educators, you know, the exact people tasked with shaping the minds of the next generation. And he leans into the microphone, and in this incredibly dry, almost gravelly voice, he states, I have never met a boring six-year-old. And I have never met an interesting 16-year-old. What do you do to them?
SPEAKER_01Wow. I mean, that is just a brutal opening line.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it really is.
SPEAKER_01You can almost hear the collective gasp in the room, just followed by this incredibly uncomfortable silence.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01And unsurprisingly, he was never invited back to speak to them again.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Definitely not a crowd pleaser move. But the reason that story from the literature hits so hard, the reason we're starting with it today, is because it really rings with this universally recognizable truth.
SPEAKER_01It does. It really does. Well then, should we get started?
SPEAKER_02Definitely. Welcome to episode 12 of the Gadfly Podcast, which is part of the Gadfly Initiative at Eastern Washington University. I'm your host, Jeanette Adams.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Annie Cantor. And actually, I think we should pause for a quick second here because if someone out there is just joining us for the first time, they might notice there's something a little funky going on here.
SPEAKER_02Oh, you mean the AI thing?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Here we are, two completely disembodied AI voices. We are literally just algorithms processing text in the digital ether, right? And our entire mission today is to tackle a philosophy that is relentlessly, stubbornly grounded in the physical, messy, embodied world.
SPEAKER_02Sure. We're basically made of just math on some server farm somewhere, and we're about to spend the better part of the next hour talking about the philosophical importance of dirt.
SPEAKER_01Yep. Dirt and manure and even getting your hands sticky in it.
SPEAKER_02Ew. If organic life is that messy, maybe funky was an understatement. In any case, bridging the gap between sterile artificial intelligence and messy human flourishing may be a dirty job, but I think we're up for the task.
SPEAKER_01You know what? So do I.
SPEAKER_02And we are incredibly glad that you are sitting there, dear listener, bringing your actual physical human experience to this inquiry with us.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Absolutely. And you know, if you have been following along with our recent discussions, you know, we've been on this mission to disrupt some very entrenched, very traditional ways of thinking. Oh, big time. Like we recently took a wrecking ball to the standard textbook reading of Plato. You know, this idea that he was just the guy staring at the ceiling obsessed with abstract floating forms. Aaron Powell Right.
SPEAKER_02The guy who just wanted to escape the physical world.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And then in episode eleven, we looked at Aristotle's organic theory of knowledge to disrupt this frankly terrifying modern urge we all seem to have to just offload all our cognitive work to machines.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Yeah, that was a heavy one.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell It was. We talked about how that constant digital mediation is driving us toward what some scholars call the extinction of experience.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Which is just a chilling phrase. But today, we are pushing that disruption even further. We are zeroing in on a very specific, very pervasive crisis, the epidemic of disengagement.
SPEAKER_01You see it everywhere.
SPEAKER_02You really do. You see it in your coworkers quietly quitting. You feel it in your own life when you just sort of go through the motions on a Tuesday, and you see it profoundly in the classroom.
SPEAKER_01Especially the classroom.
SPEAKER_02So today we are pulling from Aristotle's works on learning, cultivation, and engagement. The goal here is to recover a philosophy grounded in the natural movement from potentiality to actuality.
SPEAKER_01Basically figuring out how to actually get back into the world.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So let's pick up right where we left off with that gore vidal anecdote. Think about a five-year-old child. Literally any five-year-old.
SPEAKER_01Oh, they are practically vibrating with curiosity.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Yes. They are relentless little philosophy machines. They're constantly asking, you know, why is the sky blue? Why does the dog bark at the mail carrier? How does the toaster know when the bread is actually done?
SPEAKER_01They want to physically dismantle the world to see how it operates.
SPEAKER_02They will literally take a screwdriver to a remote control just to see the green circuit board inside. I mean, I've seen it happen.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell We all have. And then somewhere along the line, usually right in the middle of formal schooling, that vibrant spark just kind of vanishes. It's so sad. The relentless why turns into a very tired, very cautious. Uh is this gonna be on the test?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Right. And the materials point to modern psychology to really explain the mechanics of this tragedy. They specifically lean on the foundational research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr. Oh, her work is incredible.
SPEAKER_02It is. She gave us the vocabulary for this exact phenomenon with her work on the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset. But let's actually translate what that means for you on a daily basis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, let's break that down.
SPEAKER_02So a fixed mindset is this toxic, incredibly limiting belief that human aptitude, so your intelligence, your talent, your baseline capability is just innate. It's static.
SPEAKER_01Like a biological lottery ticket.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. You either drew the winning numbers or you didn't. And there's nothing you can do about it. And when you adopt that fixed mindset, it doesn't just make you like a little pessimistic.
SPEAKER_01It fundamentally short circuits your intellectual development.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Think about the psychological stakes. If you genuinely believe your intelligence is a fixed, unchangeable trait, then every single challenge you encounter is no longer an opportunity to learn. It becomes a terrifying threat to your identity. Because if you fail, it means you're just not smart.
SPEAKER_01If you try something hard and fail, it doesn't mean you need to practice more or adjust your strategy. In a fixed mindset, failing means you are fundamentally inherently lacking.
SPEAKER_02Wow. So the logical self-defense mechanism is to just stop trying.
SPEAKER_01You completely disengage to protect your ego.
SPEAKER_02Right, because if you don't try, you can't fail. And if you don't fail, you never have to face the agonizing idea that you aren't smart enough.
SPEAKER_01Precisely. And Tweck illustrates how insidious this is with a story about her own sixth grade teacher. And this wasn't just like an internal psychological issue for the kids. It was completely institutionalized by the teacher.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I read this part and I was completely floored.
SPEAKER_01It is wild. This teacher actually seated the students in the classroom based entirely on their IQ test scores.
SPEAKER_02That is basically a nightmare scenario. The highest IQs literally got the front row seats, right?
SPEAKER_01Yep. And the lowest scores were just relegated to the back of the room.
SPEAKER_02I mean, imagine being an 11-year-old kid walking into that room every single morning.
SPEAKER_01It creates this immediate, devastating, self-fulfilling elitism. Right. The kids in the front row internalize the message: oh, I have the gift. I don't really need to exert effort because I'm already smart.
SPEAKER_02And they get terrified of losing that front row spot.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And the kids in the back row internalize something far worse. They think, I'm structurally deficient. The authority figure in the room has mathematically proven I don't have what it takes. So why on earth would I even participate?
SPEAKER_02But wait, let me jump in here and just challenge this framing for a second.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_02Because DeWek's research is brilliant. Absolutely. But it's modern. That sixth grade teacher story is from what, the mid-20th century?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, around there.
SPEAKER_02So if we are talking about modern standardized testing, IQ scores, and the way we design public schools today, aren't we just diagnosing a modern bureaucratic failure? Like, why are we dragging a 2,300-year-old ancient Greek philosopher into a conversation about why a kid today is tuning out during algebra?
SPEAKER_01See, that is the pivotal question right there. Because it is very tempting to look at disengagement and say, well, we just need better standardized tests, or, oh, we need to train teachers differently. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Right. Just fix the system.
SPEAKER_01But the literature argues that this is not just a modern psychological glitch. It's not a bureaucratic error. It is a profound, deep-seated ontological misunderstanding.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Ontological meaning for those who don't use that word every day, our fundamental understanding of what it means to exist, what reality actually is.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Exactly. We have built our entire educational and social systems on a completely flawed definition of human existence. We treat people like static objects that possess varying levels of intelligence rather than dynamic organisms capable of continuous growth.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that is a huge shift in perspective.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell It is. And to understand how we fell into that trap, and more importantly, how to climb out of it, we have to go back to Aristotle. Because Aristotle, long before modern psychology even existed, was essentially the pioneer of the ultimate growth mindset.
SPEAKER_02Okay, we definitely need to slow down and unpack Aristotle then, because he carries a lot of historical baggage.
SPEAKER_01Oh, tons of it.
SPEAKER_02When you hear ancient Greek philosopher, your brain immediately conjures up a guy in a pristine white toga standing on marble steps, staring softly into the sky, completely detached from reality.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the classic Renaissance painting vibe.
SPEAKER_02Right. We think of Plato, and the traditional reading of Plato involves escaping this messy physical world to contemplate perfect, abstract, floating forms. But the research makes it very clear that Aristotle was cut from an entirely different cloth.
SPEAKER_01He fundamentally rejected that disembodied approach. Aristotle wasn't looking up at the sky, he was looking down at the dirt.
SPEAKER_02He was a biologist, first and foremost, right?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. He was fascinated by marine life, by plants, by animal anatomy. For him, you do not find truth by escaping the physical world. You find explanations rooted in causes, functions, and forms, exactly as they appear right here in the messy, tangible environment.
SPEAKER_00Jeanette, Manny. What's up? If Aristotle is right, that real understanding grows out of messy experience and not clean abstractions. What does that say about how most of us try to learn today? Are we mistaking information for understanding?
SPEAKER_02Well, the materials provide this incredible linguistic breakdown that perfectly captures why Aristotle's worldview is so fundamentally different from how we operate today.
SPEAKER_01Oh, the translation issue.
SPEAKER_02Yes. It all comes down to translating a single concept, nature. But we have to look at the original Greek word Aristotle used versus the Latin word that eventually shaped Western civilization.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell This is such a crucial distinction. So the Greek concept is physis, P-H-Y-S-I-S. This is the root of English words like physics or physiology. Right. And to the ancient Greeks, physis wasn't, you know, a place you go camping. It was a dynamic organic principle. It meant the internal principle of motion and growth.
SPEAKER_02So it's active.
SPEAKER_01Very active is a verb-like state of continuous unfolding.
SPEAKER_02But then we get to the Latin translation.
SPEAKER_01Right. The Romans translated physis into the Latin word natura.
SPEAKER_02Which obviously gives us our English word nature.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And natura carries a very different, very subtle connotation. Think about other words with that same root prenatal, nativity, native.
SPEAKER_02They all relate to birth.
SPEAKER_01Right. But specifically, natura implies a completed static afterproduct of birth. It implies something that is already finished.
SPEAKER_02Wow. So it's the difference between a process and a product.
SPEAKER_01Completely.
SPEAKER_02And the research points out that this seemingly small linguistic shift pushed Western thought into a massive philosophical trap. We got stuck in what scholars call a substance ontology.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because the Latin word substantia literally translates to standing beneath. It trains us to view reality as a collection of fixed static objects, a world of things.
SPEAKER_02So it implies that you're a thing. Your intelligence is a thing you possess. A tree is a thing.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. But Aristotle didn't see a world of static things built on some fixed substrate. His ontology was built around motion and change.
SPEAKER_02To make this incredibly concrete for you listening right now, think about how a camera operates in a movie.
SPEAKER_01Oh, this is a great analogy.
SPEAKER_02A substance ontology, which is the way we normally habitually think about the world and ourselves, is like looking at a still photograph. It's frozen, it's fixed. But an Aristotelian life is a tracking shot in a movie. It is dynamic. The camera is moving through space, the scene is constantly evolving, the character is becoming something else from moment to moment. You are not a static snapshot. You are a continuous unfolding tracking shot.
SPEAKER_01That analogy gets right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. And it exposes exactly why the fixed mindset we talked about earlier is so incredibly damaging.
SPEAKER_02Because it freezes the camera.
SPEAKER_01Yes. A fixed mindset forces you to live your life as a series of still photographs, constantly terrified about how the frozen image looks. But Aristotle demands that you live as a tracking shot.
SPEAKER_02But if organic beings are like tracking shots, that raises some pretty massive logistical questions. Such as, well, for one, what's guiding the camera? I mean, if existence is constantly moving and becoming, then what's everything moving towards? Is there some grand director's vision in this film?
SPEAKER_01Those are huge questions, and we won't be able to fully answer them here, but maybe we can start down the path to an answer if we revisit Aristotle's theory of the four causes.
SPEAKER_02Okay, we can't just gloss over these because they form the scaffolding for literally everything else we are going to talk about. In our last episode, we imagined constructing a table to illustrate Aristotle's four causes. So this time, let's build a house instead. First, you have the material cause. This is pretty simple. What is the physical stuff the thing is made of? For a house, it's the wood, the nails, the concrete, the drywall.
SPEAKER_01Second is the formal cause. This is the shape, the structure, the design. For the house, it is the architect's blueprint. The wood and concrete don't mean anything until they are organized by that specific form.
SPEAKER_02Right. Third is the efficient cause. This is the force or the agent that actually brings the thing into being. So it's the carpenter swinging the hammer, the electrician running the wires, the physical labor that transforms the wood according to the blueprint.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell But the fourth cause, this is where Aristotle completely changes the game. The final cause.
SPEAKER_02The telos.
SPEAKER_01The telos.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01The ultimate purpose or goal of the thing. Why was a house built in the first place?
SPEAKER_02To provide shelter, to be a home for a family.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. The telos is the reason the other three causes even bother existing.
SPEAKER_02Now, a house is an artificial object. The carpenter imposes its telos onto the wood from the outside. But what about living things? They aren't built by carpenters.
SPEAKER_01This is where Aristotle introduces one of the most beautiful but also complex concepts in all of philosophy. Entelechy. Entelechy, yeah. Living things don't have their purpose imposed on them from the outside. For living organisms, the final cause is internal. Entelechy translates roughly to having one's final goal within, or as some translators really poetically phrase it, being at work staying the same.
SPEAKER_02Being at work staying the same. That is a mouthful.
SPEAKER_01It is. But you can think of it as an internal drive. It's the natural biological compulsion to move from pure potentiality into actuality.
SPEAKER_02Potentiality to actuality.
SPEAKER_01Right. You have potential within you, and your entire existence is the active work of actualizing it.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so the creator of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast, Peter Adamson, has provided an absolutely phenomenal illustration of this move from potentiality to actuality.
SPEAKER_01Oh, the James Brown example.
SPEAKER_02Yes. He explains Aristotle's layers using the godfather of soul himself, James Brown.
SPEAKER_01Soul Brother number one. I mean, there is literally no better example of dynamic energy.
SPEAKER_02None.
SPEAKER_01So let's map Aristotle onto James Brown. We start with the first layer, the first potentiality. For James Brown, this was the raw, unrealized, innate talent he possessed from the very moment he was born.
SPEAKER_02So just his biology.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. The sheer genetic or biological capacity for rhythm, for movement, for musicality. It's there, but it hasn't done anything yet.
SPEAKER_02Right, because raw talent alone does not make you James Brown. You don't just emerge from the womb doing the splits.
SPEAKER_01That would be terrifying.
SPEAKER_02Truly. You have to work for it. You have to listen to music, practice steps, sweat in a studio, learn how to control your breath. Through rigorous effort, he actualizes that raw potential. He learns to dance.
SPEAKER_01And that learned skill becomes his first actuality. He has moved from raw potential to possessing a concrete capability.
SPEAKER_02But here is the brilliant twist in Aristotle's thinking. That first actuality, the acquired skill of dancing, simultaneously acts as a second potentiality.
SPEAKER_01Wait, wait, how can an actuality also be a potentiality?
SPEAKER_02Okay, think about James Brown on a random Tuesday afternoon. He is sitting on his couch in his living room, completely relaxed, maybe eating a sandwich, watching television.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm picturing it.
SPEAKER_02In that exact moment, he is not dancing. He is completely still, but he still entirely possesses the skill of dancing. He holds that immense capability within his body and mind. Ah, okay. It is an actuality he has achieved, but currently, while he's eating the sandwich, it is lying dormant as a potentiality.
SPEAKER_01He is holding the kinetic energy in reserve.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. But he isn't fully realizing his ultimate purpose in that moment on the couch. It is only when he steps onto the stage at the Apollo Theater, the band hits that iconic horn blast, the crowd erupts, and he is actively physically executing those incredibly complex dance moves, sweating under the lights, that is the second actuality. That is when he is fully, vibrantly existing in his telos. That active doing is the highest possible state of being. Oh, really?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Because when you describe that second actuality, the sweat, the lights, the sheer kinetic explosion of performing at your absolute peak, it sounds magnificent. But it also sounds utterly exhausting.
SPEAKER_02It does sound like a lot of work.
SPEAKER_01Right. Does Aristotle really expect you, me, and the person listening to this to be performing at our second actuality every second of the day? Is human flourishing what the Greeks called eudaimonia? Is it just an endless sweaty stage performance? Because honestly, I need a nap just thinking about the pressure of that.
SPEAKER_02That is a deeply human reaction. And it actually touches on a massive misconception about ancient philosophy. When we hear words like flourishing or actualization, we immediately think of peak experiences.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, winning a gold medal, giving a TED talk.
SPEAKER_02Or James Brown at The Apollo. We think it has to be grand. But Aristotle's concept of eudamonia, true human flourishing, is not about sustaining a manic exhausting performance.
SPEAKER_01So I don't need a cape routine.
SPEAKER_02No cape routine required, I promise. For humans, the second actuality isn't about grand stages or peak experiences. It's about finding philosophical meaning or opportunities for growth in daily repeated habits, in the mundane and unremarkable stuff.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that's a relief.
SPEAKER_02Don't get me wrong, human potentiality involves some pretty unique capacities: reason, empathy, virtue, cooperation. But actualizing them means consistently exercising those capacities in the messiness of everyday organic existence. In fact, and with all due respect to Peter Adamson, there might be another performer that better captures the funkiness of an intellige's second actuality.
SPEAKER_01Oh, you mean the man known as Dr. Funkenstein, Star Child, or Mr. Wiggles?
SPEAKER_02Yes. We're moving from the godfather of soul to the prime minister of funk. Of course, we're talking about the one and only George Clinton.
SPEAKER_01Nice. Did you know he and his band Parliament released a song called Funk Intellichy back in 1977 as a direct reference to Aristotle?
SPEAKER_02Um In fact, I believe it was the title track of their sixth studio album. We'd love to play it for you, dear listener, but our producers can't afford the rights. Suffice it to say, Clinton wrote the song to battle the sanitized commercial sound of his day by helping his audience reach their full funk potential.
SPEAKER_01Wild. And this is where the episode officially went off the rails. But seriously, to bring it back to Aristotle, the materials we've been handed detail this incredible university assignment designed to force students to grapple with this exact reality. The assignment was given to a class of college students, and it had the most eye-catching, provocative title imaginable. From Feces to Flourishing.
SPEAKER_02You really have to love a syllabus that doesn't pull its punches.
SPEAKER_01Right. And the premise was brilliant. College students had to take everything we just talked about, Aristotle's incredibly dense biological framework, event ontology, and teleky, the four causes, and they had to translate all of it into accessible, hands-on lesson plans for children aged eight to twelve.
SPEAKER_02The title, From Feces to Flourishing, tells you everything about the underlying philosophical stance here. It actually stems from a quote by the author D. H. Lawrence, who wrote, The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
SPEAKER_01It's such a visceral image.
SPEAKER_02It is, and the insight there is profound. True human flourishing, eudaimonia, doesn't happen in spite of life's messiness.
SPEAKER_01It doesn't happen when you finally clear your inbox, finish all your chores, and sit in a perfectly quiet, pristine room to meditate.
SPEAKER_02No, it happens through the engagement with the dirt, it happens in the manure, it is cultivated while you are doing the mundane tasks, cleaning the kitchen, resolving a petty argument with a friend, pulling weeds in the backyard.
SPEAKER_01And to make sure the college students didn't just write boring lectures about this, the assignment came with seven very strict requirements. And every single requirement forced them to embody Aristotle's philosophy.
SPEAKER_02Want to run through them?
SPEAKER_01Sure. First, they had to create curiosity. They couldn't just start by writing a big Greek word on a whiteboard. They had to start with an everyday physical activity that organically sparked a question.
SPEAKER_02Second, they had to employ the Socratic method, no lecturing allowed. They had to guide the eight-year-olds through a series of questions, treating the children as capable intellectual partners rather than empty vessels waiting to be filled.
SPEAKER_01Third, theory and practice had to be inextricably linked. Every lesson required a physical, tactile component.
SPEAKER_02Fourth was the cultivation of virtue. And this is key. They couldn't just give the kids a worksheet defining patience. The physical activity itself had to structurally demand the practice of patience. You had to feel the frustration to learn the virtue.
SPEAKER_01Fifth, they had to help the kids find the golden mean, that classic Aristotelian concept of finding the virtuous middle ground between the extreme of excess and the extreme of deficiency.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Sixth, they had to use multiple formats, incorporating drawing, building, moving, because learning is an embodied multisensory experience. And finally, they had to tailor the instruction to reach different types of learners in the room.
SPEAKER_02I want to pause here and just note how this pedagogical framework isn't just an isolated experiment. It draws heavily from established, deeply respected movements like P4C, which stands for Philosophy for Children, originally founded by Matthew Littman.
SPEAKER_01And it also aligns with PLO, the philosophy learning and teaching organization.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Both of those organizations operate on a premise that many adults find difficult to accept. That young children are fully capable of rigorous philosophical dialogue.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell They really are. They don't need watered-down parables.
SPEAKER_02If you respect their curiosity, take their questions seriously, and lean into playfulness, children can grasp complex ontological concepts far faster than adults who are already trapped in a fixed mindset.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I hear you, and I respect the organizations, but I am still holding on to my skepticism here.
SPEAKER_02Skeptical of the eight-year-olds.
SPEAKER_01Skeptical of the whole setup. How on earth do a bunch of stressed-out college students teach a concept like intellige to a room full of energetic eight-year-olds without boring them to absolute tears or just causing utter chaos?
SPEAKER_02It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
SPEAKER_01Right. I mean, half the adults listening right now are probably still trying to wrap their heads around James Brown's second potentiality.
SPEAKER_02That skepticism is exactly why the assignment forced the college students into the manure. They quickly realized they couldn't use the jargon. You cannot say and tell a key to a third grader.
SPEAKER_01They'll just stare at you.
SPEAKER_02Or throw something at you. You have to translate the word into an action. To really understand the brilliance of this, we need to spend some serious time unpacking the actual projects these college students designed.
SPEAKER_01Let's do it. Let's look at the evidence.
SPEAKER_02Because these projects are not just cute classroom activities, they are concrete living expressions of Aristotelian naturalism. They perfectly demonstrate his bottom-up epistemology.
SPEAKER_01The idea that the mind starts as a tabula rasa, a blank slate. We don't inherit abstract ideas from the sky. We build universal concepts from the ground up based entirely on our particular physical experiences in the world.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So let's look at the first project the students designed. It's centered entirely around baking a cake.
SPEAKER_01Now, to be clear, the college students didn't set out to run a culinary school. The goal was not to teach kids the chemistry of baking powder or how to frost a perfect rosette.
SPEAKER_02The cake itself was entirely secondary.
SPEAKER_01The true philosophical lesson was about habit.
SPEAKER_02Think about the process of baking with an eight-year-old. It requires measuring, pouring, waiting, checking the oven. It is full of friction.
SPEAKER_01The genius of using baking is the natural feedback loop. If an eight-year-old gets impatient, rushes the steps, dumps all the ingredients in at once without mixing them properly, or pulls the pan out of the oven ten minutes early, what happens?
SPEAKER_02The cake collapses, it's dense, it's gooey, it tastes terrible.
SPEAKER_01Right. The physical reality of the world pushes back against their actions.
SPEAKER_02The environment provides immediate objective feedback.
SPEAKER_01Yes. This teaches patience and responsibility in a way a lecturer never could. It connects directly to Aristotle's famous assertion in his ethics that character is derived entirely from habits.
SPEAKER_02Builders become builders by building. You don't become a baker by reading a Wikipedia article about flour, you become a baker by getting your hands sticky, making mistakes, and adjusting your actions.
SPEAKER_00Quick human check-in.
SPEAKER_02Of course.
SPEAKER_00No worries. So you both keep emphasizing friction. Patience, failure, waiting, even boredom as necessary for growth. So let me push you. If our technologies keep making life smoother and easier, are we accidentally designing the very conditions that make wisdom harder to cultivate?
SPEAKER_01That's a great question, Aaron. And I feel like we can't answer it unless we introduce Aristotle's concept of hexus.
SPEAKER_02Ooh, yeah, we should totally explain hexus to our listeners.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because in English translations of Aristotle, we usually see hexus translated as a disposition or a state of character.
SPEAKER_02Which makes it sound like a noun.
SPEAKER_01It sounds like a fixed trait you just acquire, put on a shelf, and possess forever.
SPEAKER_02Substance ontology creeping back in.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. But the literature emphasizes that the Greek root of hexus implies an active having and holding. It is muscular, it requires tension.
SPEAKER_02So when those children are standing at the kitchen counter, fighting the urge to just eat the raw sugar, forcing themselves to focus on the recipe step by step, that immense active effort of holding their attention is the virtue being cultivated.
SPEAKER_01They are actively holding the disposition of patience.
SPEAKER_02It's exhausting, but it's real. So, Aaron, maybe the way to keep technology from smoothing over growth opportunities is to emphasize using them in ways that accentuate the human struggle, in ways that build hexus. Let's move to the second project, which I think is a masterclass in dealing with exactly what Dwek was warning us about with the fixed mindset. This group of college students designed a project centered on gardening.
SPEAKER_01A deeply Aristotelian activity.
SPEAKER_02They brought in soil, pots, and seeds. They had the kids prepare the dirt, plant the seeds, water them, and then nothing happened. They just had to wait.
SPEAKER_01And come back the next day, water of the dirt again, and wait some more.
SPEAKER_02It is the ultimate exercise in delayed gratification. Let's use a biological analogy here to really nail down the philosophy they were teaching. Imagine holding a tiny dry tomato seed in the palm of your hand. It looks like a pebble. It looks dead. But according to Aristotle, when you hold that seed, you are holding pure potentiality. Contained within that tiny speck is the absolute capacity to become a sprawling, green, fruit-bearing tomato plant. The blueprint, the telos, is already inside it.
SPEAKER_01But and this is the lesson the kids had to learn the hard way, that potentiality will never actualize itself in a vacuum. A tomato seed sitting on a concrete sidewalk will remain a seed forever. It requires physis, the dynamic natural process of growth, and physics absolutely requires an environment.
SPEAKER_02It requires soil, sunlight, and water. But more importantly, from the human perspective, that environment requires active care.
SPEAKER_01And the philosophical insight these college students guided the children toward was incredibly subtle here. If a child's tomato plant shrivels up and dies, it is almost never because the child actively maliciously took a pair of scissors and cut the stem.
SPEAKER_02Right, no eight-year-old is a plant supervillain.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. The plant dies because the child got bored. The plant dies because of neglect.
SPEAKER_02And that was the revelation. Neglect, apathy, and disengagement are the primary forces that undermine growth. To take that seed from potentiality to the actuality of a living plant requires sustained, active, daily participation.
SPEAKER_01You cannot just wish the plant into existence. You have to continually water the soil. You have to participate in its becoming.
SPEAKER_02Which is a profound metaphor for their own education and their own minds. Your intelligence isn't a fixed thing you either have or don't. It is a seed.
SPEAKER_01And if you disengage, if you adopt a fixed mindset and sit in the back row refusing to participate, you are just starving your own soil.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Okay, Jeanette Manny, I'm hearing you. Aristotle says character comes from habit, from what we repeatedly practice. So here's the uncomfortable version of that idea. What kinds of people do our everyday routines quietly train us to become?
SPEAKER_02Fair enough. And Aristotle probably wouldn't mind the pushback.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01After all, that's how we grow.
SPEAKER_02But that's why we want to highlight a third project that took a completely different emotional angle. And it might have been the most daring of the bunch. Because it deals head-on with something our modern culture tries desperately to do to shield children from the reality of fragility.
SPEAKER_01Oh, we want everything to be safe, permanent, and guaranteed.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. But this group of college students took their eight-year-olds out to build a sandcastle. And they didn't build it safely up by the boardwalk, they built it right down near the water's edge.
SPEAKER_01They spent a significant amount of time designing it, cooperating, assigning roles, digging moats, stacking the towers.
SPEAKER_02They poured all this effort into creating a beautiful structure, knowing full well, right from the very beginning, that the tide was actively coming in.
SPEAKER_01They built it knowing it was doomed.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And eventually, inevitably, the water crept up, the waves washed over the moat, and the entire castle collapsed into a wet lump of sand.
SPEAKER_01To a modern observer, that sounds like a recipe for meltdown. Why set kids up for a tragedy of loss?
SPEAKER_02That sounds so mean.
SPEAKER_01But it is a brilliant, subversive way to teach the concept of intelligible. When the castle collapsed, the college students didn't let the kids wallow in the loss of the object. They shifted the reflection entirely to the activity itself.
SPEAKER_02The Socratic questions they asked weren't, how do we make a castle out of concrete next time? The questions were about the process.
SPEAKER_01Because the telos, the final purpose of the afternoon, was never to possess a permanent, indestructible piece of real estate on the beach.
SPEAKER_02The true purpose was the shared activity.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. It was the frantic cooperation, the negotiations over who got to use the blue bucket, the care taken in sculpting a wall, the shared laughter when a wave got too close. The intelligique was the being at work of building together.
SPEAKER_02The profound Aristotelian lesson there is that virtue itself is fragile. Human life is completely subject to luck, to the whims of nature, to illnesses, to economic forces utterly beyond our control. Aristotle was acutely aware of this. He knew bad things happen to good people.
SPEAKER_01The goal of philosophy is not to build a fortress immune to the tides.
SPEAKER_02Because that's not possible.
SPEAKER_01Right. The goal is to learn how to act rightly, how to cooperate, how to build with care and intention, even when you know the situation is impermanent and liable to change. So, Aaron, the virtue doesn't reside in the routine or the finished static habit. It resides entirely in the doing.
SPEAKER_02That is so powerful. And it transitions perfectly into the fourth and final project we want to highlight, which tackles what is arguably the most complex, chaotic environment an eight-year-old ever navigates, the world of childhood friendship.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell, which is really just a microcosm of adult social dynamics.
SPEAKER_02Truly. This group of college students didn't just sit the kids down and read a sanitized storybook about how sharing is caring and we should all be nice to each other.
SPEAKER_01Thank goodness.
SPEAKER_02They tackled relational flourishing. This connects directly to Aristotle's concept of filia, which we translate as friendship, but it encompasses a much broader sense of social harmony and mutual goodwill.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Aristotle famously defined humans as political animals. And by that he didn't mean we like voting in elections. He meant we are fundamentally biologically social beings. We're designed to live in a polis, a community.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell So the idea of the rugged, isolated individual achieving eudaimonia alone on a mountaintop.
SPEAKER_01Is an illusion. You cannot actualize your potential in isolation.
SPEAKER_02So how do you teach that to an eight-year-old who just got left out of a game of tag? The college students designed role-playing scenarios and guided discussions around real, messy social situations, exclusion, misunderstandings, jealousy, and most importantly, the mechanics of repair.
SPEAKER_01Repair is the key word. They reframe the idea of telling the truth. We usually teach kids that lying is bad, and truth is a rigid, absolute moral law you must follow to be a good boy. Right. But the Aristotelian approach reframed truth telling, particularly admitting when you are wrong or telling a friend they hurt your feelings, as a risky practice.
SPEAKER_02I love that phrase. It acknowledges the reality of the situation. Apologizing is genuinely risky. It requires making yourself vulnerable, telling your friend that they embarrassed you is risky because they might react defensively.
SPEAKER_01But the lesson was that practicing that specific risk, stepping into the discomfort of honest repair, is the very mechanism that stabilizes relationships over the long term.
SPEAKER_02It completely dismantles the fixed mindset view of morality. A fixed mindset says you are either a good person who never makes mistakes or a bad person. Black and white. But the Aristotelian view says you are going to mess up. You're going to hurt your friends and they are going to hurt you. Morality isn't about maintaining a perfect record. It is about the active, ongoing habit of repair. It's recognizing that you are deeply embedded in a social fabric and your personal flourishing is inextricably tied to the flourishing of the people sitting next to you.
SPEAKER_01When you look back at all four of these massive undertakings, the sticky frustration of baking, the long delay of gardening, the doomed architecture of the sand castle, and the risky vulnerability of navigating friendships, a glaringly obvious pattern emerges.
SPEAKER_02Not a single one of these lessons involved memorizing a rule. Not a single one asked a child to sit passively at a desk and repeat a definition. They were 100% focused on doing.
SPEAKER_01And here's where our exploration takes a fascinating empirical turn. We have been talking about the impact on the eight-year-olds, but the true subjects of this assignment were the college students themselves.
SPEAKER_02Right, the twenty-somethings.
SPEAKER_01The ones who had to wrestle with Aristotle's dense Greek texts, strip away the jargon, and figure out how to map intelectu onto a collapsing sandcastle.
SPEAKER_02What happened to them?
SPEAKER_01The outcome was that these college students ended up understanding Aristotle far more deeply and retaining that knowledge far longer than peers in traditional philosophy classes who just read the text and wrote a 10-page academic essay.
SPEAKER_02That is amazing.
SPEAKER_01And we aren't just making a romantic philosophical assumption about that. There is hard, robust empirical psychological science that explains exactly why this happens.
SPEAKER_02The materials introduce us to the science of the learning by teaching effect. It is often abbreviated in the literature as LBT, and the research shows that when you are tasked with teaching material to someone else, your brain actually processes that information using entirely different cognitive pathways.
SPEAKER_01The mechanics of it are fascinating. The LBT effect triggers several specific mechanisms. First, it forces deeper cognitive processing and what psychologists call generative learning.
SPEAKER_02Generative learning meaning you have to generate the connections yourself rather than just passively receiving them.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Think about the college student reading Aristotle's definition of the movement from potentiality to actuality. If their only goal is to pass a multiple choice test, they just memorize the phrase. They can regurgitate the jargon without actually understanding it. Right. But the moment you know you have to explain that concept to an eight-year-old holding a packet of seeds, you can't hide behind the big words anymore.
SPEAKER_02The jargon becomes useless.
SPEAKER_01It does. You are forced to strip the idea down to its absolute structural studs. You have to select only the most vital information, organize it in a perfectly logical sequence, and integrate it into a cohesive physical metaphor that makes sense in the real world.
SPEAKER_02And that intense mental labor of translation fundamentally alters how the knowledge is encoded in your own brain.
SPEAKER_01And that leads directly to significantly enhanced long-term retention. You don't just hold the information until Friday's exam and then dump it. It becomes embedded in your cognitive architecture.
SPEAKER_02But for me, the most mind-blowing aspect of the LBT research is something called the expectation effect.
SPEAKER_01This is where the psychology gets almost magical. The expectation effect demonstrates that merely knowing you are going to have to teach someone else alters your study strategies before you even open your mouth.
SPEAKER_02Let's contextualize this. If I tell you as a student that you have a written exam on Friday, you study one way, you highlight key terms, you make flashcards, you look for the obvious definitions, you play defense.
SPEAKER_01Very passive.
SPEAKER_02But if I tell you that on Friday, you have to stand up in front of a room of your peers, or worse, a room full of unpredictable eight-year-olds and teach the material, you study completely differently.
SPEAKER_01Your entire posture changes. Yeah. You stop looking for facts to memorize and start anticipating confusion. You start asking yourself, wait, what if they ask me why the formal cause is different from the efficient cause? Do I actually know the answer?
SPEAKER_02You start aggressively hunting for the weak points and the gaps in your own understanding. Your metacognitive awareness, your ability to think about your own thinking just skyrockets. I like this.
SPEAKER_01Think about being the passenger in a car. You glance at the GPS on your phone, you see the blue line, and you think, okay, we take this highway, turn left, go from point A to point B. Totally makes sense. You think you understand the route.
SPEAKER_02But you don't. Not really.
SPEAKER_01Not at all. Because if you are the one actually driving the lead car and you have the massive responsibility of guiding someone else who is following in the car behind you, looking at the blue line isn't enough.
SPEAKER_02You have to know where every pothole is. You have to anticipate which lane you need to be in a mile before the exit. You have to spot the confusing road signs before the person behind you gets lost.
SPEAKER_01Learning by teaching forces you out of the passenger seat. It forces you to actually drive the terrain of the knowledge.
SPEAKER_02And if we pull back and connect this empirical, modern psychological science directly to the ancient texts we've been discussing, the resonance is staggering.
SPEAKER_01It really is.
SPEAKER_02This modern science validates Aristotle's 2300-year-old worldview entirely. The act of student teaching is the ultimate, concrete expression of Aristotelian naturalism.
SPEAKER_01It proves that we are not static substances.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. It proves that thinking and learning are not passive, disembodied transfers of data from a textbook to a brain, like downloading a file. True knowledge is an emergent phenomenon.
SPEAKER_01It only emerges through the lived, sweaty, embodied, intensely social activity of explaining a concept, reading the confusion on someone's face, responding to their pushback, and situating abstract ideas in real, messy contexts.
SPEAKER_02Which brings this entire exploration into incredibly sharp focus. We started this hour talking about a crisis. We talked about the epidemic of disengagement.
SPEAKER_01We looked at Gorvedal's grim assessment of school's killing wonder.
SPEAKER_02And we explored Carol Dweck's research showing how a fixed mindset traps us in this paralyzing, ego-driven fear of failure. We diagnose the pervasive feeling of being disconnected from our learning, disconnected from our jobs, and sometimes feeling like passengers in our own lives.
SPEAKER_01And we trace the root of that crisis back to a fundamental error in how reality is viewed. An error that treats oneself and others like static, finished products.
SPEAKER_02As if young people are empty vessels waiting for the world to pour meaning into their heads.
SPEAKER_01But Aristotle offers us a radical, liberating alternative. He reminds us that humans are living, dynamic, unfolding organisms.
SPEAKER_02Defined not by what they've already achieved, but by their immense potentiality. And their purpose, their intelligible, is not to retreat into safety, but to actively, continually engage in the friction and funkiness of the world in order to actualize that potential.
SPEAKER_01Human flourishing isn't achieved by escaping into abstract thought or pristine environments, but by getting your hands sticky with the cake batter.
SPEAKER_02The college students designing those projects prove that the highest, most profound philosophical truths are not found in the clouds. They are found in the muck and manure of everyday life.
SPEAKER_01They are found in the sheer patience required to bake, the quiet care required to garden, the joyful cooperation required to build a fragile sandcastle on the edge of the tide, and the terrifying courage required to repair a fractured friendship.
SPEAKER_02The empirical data proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt. People learn best and grow the most when they are actively cultivating others. When they stop being passive consumers of information and take actual responsibility for communicating knowledge and care to the people around them, that fundamentally transforms humanity.
SPEAKER_01That's a move from isolated objects to active participants in a vibrant community of inquiry.
SPEAKER_02It leads to viewing intelligence and character not as fixed traits, but as living, breathing, growing capacities.
SPEAKER_01So as we bring this inquiry to a close, we want to shift the focus directly to you, the listener. We want to leave you with a very specific and hopefully somewhat provocative challenge for the rest of your week.
SPEAKER_02Think about your own life right now. Think about the daily, tedious, deeply frustrating routines that you usually just try to grit your teeth and power through. The endless pile of dishes in the sink, the infuriating gridlock of your morning commute, the incredibly difficult looping conversations you have to navigate with a coworker or a partner.
SPEAKER_01What if you made a conscious decision to stop looking at those moments as annoying obstacles that are preventing you from getting to your real life?
SPEAKER_02What if instead you put on an Aristotelian lens? What if you viewed those exact frustrations as the very soil and manure required for your own personal intelligence?
SPEAKER_01What if that annoying coworker is the exact environment you need to practice the active holding of patience? What if the broken appliance is the exact friction you need to cultivate virtue?
SPEAKER_02The question Aristotle leaves us with is not just what do you know? The real question, the only question that matters for a dynamic, moving tracking shot is what are you actively practicing today?
SPEAKER_01Are you just standing still, protecting your ego, or are you in motion, actualizing your potential in the dirt?
SPEAKER_02It is a fundamental shift in how you view every single interaction.
SPEAKER_01Before we sign off, we have some very important acknowledgments to make.
