Axial Age
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Search complete. 33 mentions across 18 episodes found for "Axial Age".
Sep 11, 2026
John R. MilesHOST
For sixty years, Marty was famous for discovering learned helplessness, the psychological condition where animals and humans after experiencing repeated unavoidable hardship simply give up and stop trying.
John R. MilesHOST
In his new book, Agency, he asks a much larger question: How did human civilization break out of learned helplessness in the first place? Marty looked at the Axial Age, that period between roughly one thousand BCE and five hundred BCE where across five distinct traditions, the Greeks, Hebrews, Chinese, Persians, and Indians, human progress, commerce, law, and philosophy accelerated.
John R. MilesHOST
Marty used AI to analyze ancient texts across Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit.
John R. MilesHOST
What his analysis suggested was striking.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
Something miraculous happens in all f- four of those civilizations over the next five hundred years.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
It's called the Axial Age.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
This is the age that the Buddha and the prophets and Confucius all come around, four different civilizations.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
And five hundred years later, they've suddenly got the words for agency.
Hayden PaulHOST
It's interesting.
Dave ButlerHOST
There may be a case for seeing—this is probably too big a conversation to have here, and I'm saying this off the cuff— Nephi's age has been called by philosophers of history the Axial Age, the sixth century BC.
Dave ButlerHOST
A sort of a new spirit comes over the Eastern Mediterranean.
Dave ButlerHOST
It's
Dave ButlerHOST
Maybe.
Dave ButlerHOST
But there may be an argument for sort of seeing Nephi as... as kind of like Isaac Newton, okay? Isaac Newton lived in another age of great transition, and you can see him either as like the first of the new scientists or the last of the old magi, right? And maybe Nephi is that kind of character too, where on the one hand, he is an ancient priest-king, right? And first Nephi is sort of the work of that ancient priest-king.
Dave ButlerHOST
And on the other hand, he also, he's a child of the Axial Age, and...
Dave ButlerHOST
Some of what has impacted Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic history, some of that has impacted also the Nephites, right? And so he also has a concern for, hey, recording things that actually happened as opposed to just recording things that archetypally always happen, capital H, right? So again, this is probably a bigger conversation than this, but there may be an argument for seeing Nephi as sort of a great transitional figure with a foot in both those worlds.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
The mystery is that something big happened across the globe between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
Now, it's called historically the Axial Age, and basically the portrait is if you look at the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Persians, the Indians, 1000 BCE, no progress, no technology, limited thinking, no medicine, very little progress in the arts and literature, no political freedom.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
500 BCE, in the 500-year stretch, there appears progress, technology.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
Villages become cities.
Eric ClaussenGUEST
Are Platonist pagans? I would say generally speaking, yes.
Eric ClaussenGUEST
But I even understand the arguments where somebody might say that, I don't know, Bronze Age religion is somehow different from what's going on in the sort of Axial Age.
Eric ClaussenGUEST
And I do understand that there is some differences there, but does that constitute that it's not paganism? I don't know.
Eric ClaussenGUEST
It's kind of a semantic debate, I think.
Matt RupertHOST
Is that really true? And if it's not true, if you can be genuinely, seriously, demandingly moral without any notion of God, then what does that mean for us and our understanding of the good life? We're going to answer this question from four different directions.
Matt RupertHOST
The historical record of the Axial Age, the empirical science on religion and moral behavior, Kant's rationalist ethics, and Hegel's critique of it.
Matt RupertHOST
And finally, a thinker I think most people haven't heard of, but who may have a really good answer for us all the same, Iris Murdoch.
Matt RupertHOST
Welcome back to American Socrates.
Matt RupertHOST
Does morality require belief in God? Or what is the same thing? Can we establish goodness without the divine? Is secular ethics ultimately a castle built in the air? I want to start by examining the history of the notion that morality requires God.
Matt RupertHOST
Because history has already tested this notion for us again and again.
Matt RupertHOST
Just a few episodes ago, I was talking about the Axial Age.
Matt RupertHOST
It's a remarkable window of time between about 800 and 200 BCE when humans on different continents all sort of independently constructed different ethical frameworks.
Joseph FoleySOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
It, it felt like that, that to some degree...
Joseph FoleySOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
I mean, I think, um, atheists or sort of humanists of a certain kind have a problem with the Tom Holland argument as well because they want to believe, or, or a certain type of, of that kind of person wants to believe that, that their morals or their kind of view of the world is obvious, that it's kind of, like, recovered from the Axial Age.
Joseph FoleySOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
It's what A.C. Grayling argues-
Matt WhiteleySOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
Mm-hmm
Sarah WilsonGUEST
And so we had philosophers that guided us in that time.
Sarah WilsonGUEST
Um, another, you know, incredibly powerful liminal time was the Axial Age.
Sarah WilsonGUEST
And out of the Axial Age emerged Judaism, Buddhism, uh, the market system, you know, interestingly enough, all of these other isms that guided us into the next, I guess, epoch of, of humanity, um, of the human experience.
Sarah WilsonGUEST
Um, and so part of this threshold moment is embedding ourselves in wisdoms, you know, garnering wisdoms, um, following people who are offering and proffering wisdoms, you know, doing the wrangle.
Sarah WilsonGUEST
And we haven't done it for a long time.
speaker_2NARRATOR
This is a cusp moment for humanity.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Wilson offers a little hope by saying that after the Bronze Age collapse, there came what's known as the Axial Age.
speaker_2NARRATOR
That's the period around five hundred BC when there was a great intellectual and spiritual flowering across the planet.
speaker_2NARRATOR
New religions like Buddhism arose, great philosophers like Socrates appeared on the world stage.
Christopher BacheGUEST
It was my response to Ian Stevenson.
Christopher BacheGUEST
And I was still under the influence of what I would call the up-and-out cosmologies of the Axial Age, the religions that came into existence 5,000, 6,000 years ago.
Christopher BacheGUEST
Axial age religions, they all were part of an up and out cosmology.
Christopher BacheGUEST
So the purpose is to achieve enlightenment or achieve salvation and then to leave this veil of tears and to have some type of off planet spiritual realization afterwards.
Christopher BacheGUEST
And the whole purpose was to empty planet Earth.
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