Tolerance & The Open Society with Jeremy Shearmer

In this episode, John speaks with Dr. Jeremy Shearmur about Karl Popper's popular paradox of toleration. They highlight the importance of distinguishing criticisms of a person from criticisms of an idea, and how this can be difficult since our identities can contain so many ideas. They emphasized the importance of bringing humility and the recognition of our own fallibility to any critical discussion. They discussed the importance of respecting "background knowledge"--the existing knowledge of experts in any field--while simultaneously acknowledging its fallibility. And finally, they discussed pluralism--not only the plurality of ideas, customs, and beliefs, but also the plurality of paradigms that hold those ideas, customs, and beliefs, including how the heuristics and epistemic approaches they each take--and how pluralism fits into the greater frame of critical rationalism.Dr. Jeremy Shearmur is a Reader in Political Theory in the Faculty of Arts at The Australian National University. Professor Shearmur was educated at the London School of Economics (University of London), where he also worked for eight years as assistant to Professor Sir Karl Popper. Professor Shearmur's Ph.D. thesis on F. A. Hayek was a joint winner of the British Political Studies Association's Sir Ernest Barker prize in political theory. Prior to taking his position in Australia, Professor Shearmur taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and political theory at the University of Manchester. He also served as Director of Studies of the Center for Policy Studies and worked as a research associate professor for the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. Professor Shearmur has published The Political Thought of Karl Popper (1966) and Hayek and After (1996) and was joint editor of H. B. Acton's The Morals of Markets and Related Essays (1993). He has also published numerous papers in philosophy and political thought.