Are There Any Truly Original Ideas? | Jacob Emery | TEDxLehighRiver

There are no original ideas. But that doesn’t mean that unoriginal ideas are bad. In fact, give up entirely the notion that you must be original at all. You can’t be. The idea of originality is a cultural myth that needlessly discourages innovation, stifles communication, and perpetuates an intellectual isolationist lie. We can never come up with any truly original ideas because every idea is related to ideas in the past, present, and future. Jacob Emery is the warehouse operations manager at Emery Distributors, Inc., and a graduate student at West Chester University, working toward a master’s degree of philosophy with a concentration in applied ethics. Jacob earned a graduate assistantship in the philosophy department from 2015-2017, and won the Claghorn Award for Progress and Promise in Philosophy in the spring of 2017. He earned a BA in philosophy from Muhlenberg College in 2013.

Jacob’s thesis will critique Western philosophy’s dismissals of less-commonly-taught metaphysics and
epistemologies with a focus on American Indian philosophies. The guiding theme behind Jacob’s academic study is the Principle of Relatedness, which
Vine Deloria, Jr. describes as a methodological tool for obtaining knowledge wherein “we observe the natural world by looking for relationships between various things in it.”

During his free time, Mr. Emery enjoys spending time with family, cooking, playing video games, reading, and geocaching. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx