The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.1

What Can We Know? From Socrates to Hume

This episode traces what you can actually know, from Socrates questioning Athenians in the marketplace to David Hume's 1748 argument that nothing guarantees the future will resemble the past. You follow Descartes through his wax thought experiment in the 1641 Meditations, where the episode corrects the common reading of "I think, therefore I am" as a proof of existence, arguing it is really a claim about the order of certainty. It tracks Descartes's deceiving demon forward into Nick Bostrom's 2003 simulation argument. It then turns the same test on the book's own method, admitting its account of the past rests on an assumption it cannot prove.