2024: The Best Bits
Happy new year! Some plans for the Wisdom dojo in 2025 and some of the best bits from 2024 (plus a free annual review template)
Happy (early) New Year!
Thank YOU for joining the wisdom dojo and tuning in to the essays and podcasts in 2024!
I thought 2024 might be the year everything goes nuts, but we survived. Despite the weirdness that keeps getting weirder, people are starting to wake up that something deeply unusual is going on around us. It’s becoming harder and harder in the digital age to know now what is real and what is fake, what is valuable and what is bullshit. Therefore, there is a profound and pressing need to get back in touch with reality, which, if you believe Plato, is the job of true philosophy:
“What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy.”
To fulfil this educational challenge, we need wisdom, truth-seeking or sense-making ecosystems (whatever you want to call them) to combat the current rising tide of bullshit online. That’s how I see the wisdom dojo, as a citizen's attempt to offer some sense-making in the digital deluge and philosophically sophisticated, morally grounded thinkers beyond the temptations of gamification mechanics. The bullshit merchants in the digital age aren’t taking a break, and therefore, neither should the philosophers. We need true philosophy now more than ever.
Plans for 2025
Plato’s Republic Course
This will be the first course offered on the Wisdom Dojo (it will be freely available) on the greatest work of philosophy in the West, Plato’s Republic, particularly around universal ethics and moral relativism.
It will be a general introduction to Plato’s philosophy and The Republic but also drawing largely on the secondary work of DC Schindler in Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason, Vervaeke’s work in Awakening From The Meaning Crisis and some of the lectures of Michael Sugrue.
The plan is to post one lecture a month throughout the year and give people time to read through the ten books of the Republic with the lectures one at a time.
The first lecture will introduce Plato and the context of his writing, the Republic.
Waiting For The Offo Book
My play Waiting For The Offo debuted in 2023 to a sold-out run in the New Theatre in Templebar, and in 2025, I will be releasing a book version of the play script online on Amazon (you can get my collection of short stories there also The Man with a Mirror Face which was four years old this Christmas!).
The play is on the same topic of the ecosystem, the meaning crisis, but offers a dramatic and embodied take that struck a cord with the audience who saw the play in person - So keep an eye out on that on Amazon in 2025!.
New Essays and Podcasts
Essays will be oriented around the idea of this new literacy emerging and self-knowledge as a subject in the digital/AI age. I hope to review some big-picture theories of mind, brain and life, like active Inference, Big Five personality theory, relevance realisation and their possible integrations with traditional ethics and philosophy.
The podcast guest list is all the way down to the floor at this point, but I plan on prioritising conversations with those I see as contributing to this emerging field and bringing together interesting thinkers for conversations that might not happen otherwise. So lots more discussions on meaning, freedom and the technological moment in which we find ourselves.
The best bits from the Dojo in 2024
Youtube
The top podcast on YouTube this year was (surprise, surprise) my chat with the one and only Iain McGilchrist:
The top Youtube podcast that was posted in 2024 was with Sam Tideman essentially arguing that AGI was a non-starter and pure hype:
We even got to confirm some of our speculations about the fundamental difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence with John Vervaeke in a follow up episode:
Spotify
Interestingly on Spotify, the top conversation (watched 475% more than any other!) was my chat with DC Schindler on the nature of Truth, which I think was a super underrated podcast:
The movement towards truth as Alethia (“unconcealment”) is emerging in so many interesting places at the moment. It certainly seems to spell doom for the ghost of 20th century logical positivism that seems to be still haunt the the new Atheist types.
Substack
Here on Substack, the top two conversations were respectively my recent chat with
author and author of Dynamics in Action and Context Changes Everything, Alicia Juarrero:
I didn’t get to write as many essays as I would have liked to this year simply because my brain was completely melted by recent Phd chapters.
However, I did manage to edit and bring together this semi-literature review on the Meaning in Life literature which many people contacted me about and said it was a useful introduction:
Finally, I’ve just finished my 2024 annual review, a practice which is definitely worth doing, and here is the template I use modified from Modern Wisdom if you are interested:
See you next year!
Mahon.