Matthew Stewart on Slavery, Enlightenment, and America’s Refounding

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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Matthew Stewart is an independent philosopher and historian who has written extensively about the philosophical origins of the American republic, the history of philosophy, management theory, and the culture of inequality. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, among other publications. In recent years he has lived in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, and is currently based in London. He is the author of Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic and An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America.

Shermer and Stewart discuss:

• What does the phrase “The Law of Nature and Nature’s God” mean?
• What is heretical about the origins of the American Republic?
• Religion of the founders: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Jay, James Madison, Thomas Paine
• Ethan Allen and Thomas Young
• The Enlightenment influence on the Founding Fathers
• John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza
• Ancient Greek influences on the Founding Fathers
• Epicurus’s Dangerous Idea
• Lucretius’s “swerving” atoms
• Theism, Deism, Pantheism, Atheism
• Reason and empiricism
• Self-evident truths
• Morality and the origin of right and wrong
• Happiness and its pursuit
• The religion of freedom
• Enslaving other humans: what were these people thinking and feeling?
• Should they have known better?
• Racists or creatures of their time in which nearly everyone held such views?
• Monogenism vs. polygenism
• Abolitionism
• John Brown
• Frederick Douglass
• Theodore Parker
• Abraham Lincoln
• Civil War cause: slavery or states’ rights?
• Religious supporters of abolition: Quakers, William Wilberforce
• How did American slavery lead to civil war?
• Why did the war result in emancipation?

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