Taking Up Your Inheritance: A Philosophical Conversation Between Student and Teacher

In this conversation, Jay Morris speaks with Dr James Bryson about the modern crisis of meaning and the difficulty of remaining spiritually oriented in a world shaped by reductionist accounts of mind, body, and nature. They reflect on the psychological and cultural repercussions of a scientific picture that brackets teleology and final causes, leaving many modern people disembodied, disenchanted, and uncertain about purpose. While acknowledging the genuine success of modern science, Dr Bryson argues that its limits must be faced honestly, especially where questions of meaning, value, and the human heart are concerned.

The discussion then turns to education and the experience of intellectual disinheritance. Dr Bryson reflects on his own formation through a liberal arts education and the humbling discovery of the vast conversation that constitutes the Western tradition. Reading Plato, Dante, and Hegel not as isolated figures but as interlocutors across time, he emphasizes that tradition is a lineage we already inhabit, whether consciously or not. To read historically, he suggests,  is not to retreat into the past, but to become aware of the forces shaping our thinking and to take responsibility for them.

The conversation culminates in a meditation on teaching, love, and the philosophical life. Dr Bryson argues that education at its best does not impose conclusions, but kindles desire, granting students permission to pursue the questions that genuinely move them. Drawing on Plato’s understanding of eros, he describes philosophy as an act of midwifery, helping ideas come to birth rather than dictating outcomes. In an age marked by spiritual malaise and intellectual fragmentation, the conversation offers a hopeful vision of education as the recovery of orientation, enchantment, and the shared pursuit of wisdom.

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Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Plato

   

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

   

• Blaise Pascal

• Dante

• Plotinus

• Homer

• Virgil

• Alfred North Whitehead

• Arthur O. Lovejoy

• Aristotle

• Johann Gottlieb Fichte

• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

• Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy

• An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner

• Dante’s Paradiso

• The Ring of Truth by Roger Scruton

• The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis