The word progress has become contested in many ways. It is invoked by its proponents as self-evident and dismissed by critics as a cover for inequality, environmental damage, or cultural loss. What both sides tend to share is an assumption that the …
When the best student an institution ever produced decides to leave — does that prove the institution worked, or that it failed?We live in a moment where institutional trust is called into question. The organizations built to accumulate and …
Can an institution be designed to transmit genuine knowledge across generations — or does every school eventually drift from the thing it was founded to preserve?Institutions built around a founding idea face a structural problem that no cha…
What does it cost to found an institution on the claim that genuine knowledge belongs only to the few? The word "philosopher" arrives today with the weight of a long tradition behind it — a field, a canon, a set of institutions that cla…
Plato vs. the Sophists: Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of CalliclesWho is Callicles, and why does he still matter?He appears only once in the whole of Western philosophy — in a single Platonic dialogue written around 380 BCE. In 1959, the…
Much of our political argument about who should make decisions for the rest of us rests on a prior assumption: can ordinary people be trusted to know enough about justice and the good to govern themselves well? The Sophists, as we traced in Episodes…
SummaryThis episode asks questions that the Sophists raised in fifth-century Athens and never fully resolved. When a school of thought is almost entirely known through the writings of its most powerful critic, how much of what we think we know is …
When leading AI companies such as Anthropic warn of "civilization" level risks from AI advances arriving within 1-2 years [1] , Professor Retz's framework invites us to ask: which historical narratives of progress implicitly shape these positions? T…
When one of the large AI companies announces that their new model will bring us "closer to AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence), what notion of progress, if any, are they invoking? When advocacy groups protest technological solutions to are…
Introducing Notions of Progress: A New PodcastWhat if many of our assumptions about technological progress rest on ideas formulated centuries ago—ideas we've inherited without examination? What if much of the current anxiety and uncertainty …
