How we think about time and the value we give to the three parts of time (past, present, and future) really matters. Our special guest reckons it’s part of what makes for the good life.
Meet our guests
Meghan Sullivan is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame. Meghan is not only interested in how we think about time, but how we live in time. She teaches a hugely popular and influential undergraduate course at Notre Dame called God and the Good Life which dwells on these types of questions. Since 2016, the course has been taken by thousands of students. They’re encouraged to uncover the deeper reasons for believing and doing what we do.
Links
This episode of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic’s new book Bully Pulpit by Michael J. Kruger.
Download a transcript of this episode here
Want more?
- Read Meghan Sullivan’s book on time, Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence.
- And then read Meghan’s most recent book, which she wrote with Paul Blasko, The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith and Meaning
- Learn more about Meghan’s course at Notre Dame, God and the Good Life.
- Watch the Marshmallow Test in the wild, with this clip from Igniter Media which opened this episode.
- Read more about Walter Mischel, the psychologist behind the Marshmallow test in this feature from the New Yorker.
- And then read how Mischel has re-thought the Marshmallow test since the first experiment back in 1972.
- Listen to the full talk about Professor Sean Carroll on the passage of time and the meaning of life, from The Long Now Foundation.
- John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (so nice they named his twice, as Meghan says), was one of the most important systematic metaphysicians of the early 20th century, and authored his famous article The Unreality of Time in 1908.
- Check out this series from Closer To Truth with some of the greatest thinkers of our time wrestling with the concept of time and God.
- ‘What Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five tells us now’ by Salmon Rushdie in The New Yorker.
- Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time by Marc Wittmann (who we quoted in this episode).
- More on Plato’s Protagoras.
- A message from John Dickson: If you haven’t read Augustine’s Confessions, then it’s time you did.
- A message from Producer Kaley’s three-year-old daughter: If you haven’t watched Frozen 2, what are you waiting for?
- How to be happy: Aristotle’s 11 guidelines for a good life.
- The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
- Learn more about William James and his The Will To Believe.
- Try out The Examen prayer for yourself.
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