If you have been harboring an inexplicable desire to hear me speaking in German for almost two hours, here is a wide-ranging interview I just did for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences:
Posted on 28 May 2023
Richard Hooker defends the religious and political settlement of Elizabethan England using rational arguments and appeals to the natural law.
Posted on 21 May 2023
Toni Cade Bambara, the Combahee River Collective, and Awa Thiam critique white feminist and black nationalist failures to recognize the unique struggle of the black woman.
Posted on 14 May 2023
The evolution of ideas about kingship and the role of the “three estates” in 15th and 16th century England, with a focus on John Fortescue and Thomas Starkey.
Posted on 7 May 2023
What is the message of the famous, but elusive, work Utopia, and how can it be squared with the life of its author?
Posted on 30 April 2023
Pan-Africanist and Marxist historian Walter Rodney rethinks Black Power, engages with Rastafari, and opposes racial division in his home country of Guyana.
Posted on 23 April 2023
Humanism comes to England and Scotland, leading scholars like Thomas Eylot and Andrew Melville to rethink philosophical education.
Image: Queen Elizabeth's translation of Boethius
Posted on 16 April 2023
Famous for his killing at the hands of the Apartheid government in South Africa, Steve Biko was also a deep thinker, who introduced the notion of Black Consciousness.
Posted on 9 April 2023
A leading expert on the history of the Reformation joins us to explain the very different stories of England and Scotland in the 16th century.
Posted on 2 April 2023
The political and musical revolution of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, the social critique of his cousin, the playwright Wole Soyinka, and the extraordinary career of Fela's mother Funmilayo.
Posted on 26 March 2023
John Knox polemicizes against idolaters and female rulers, while the humanist George Buchanan argues more calmly for equally radical political conclusions.
If you have been harboring an inexplicable desire to hear me speaking in German for almost two hours, here is a wide-ranging interview I just did for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences:
I'm very happy to say that I have now gotten my author copies of my book on Abu Bakr al-Razi which I wrote for the "Great Medieval Thinkers" series at Oxford University Press (the same series where my book on al-Kindi appeared). To give you an idea how long I was working on this, I started it a couple of years before launching the podcast! So it's great to see it finally in finished form.
Ok, that title pretty much explains it, but here is the link to me doing just that: discussing Avicenna's views on God and the soul, on the "Partially Examined Life"!
As promised, here is a tentative episode list for the upcoming series of episodes (63 in total) on "Philosophy in the Reformation" which is shorthand for philosophy in the northern Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, and Catholic/Counter Reformation. Basically, the goal is to cover philosophy around Europe (excluding Italy, which we already did, though we will return there a bit to cover figures like Cajetan) between roughly 1400 and 1600. As you'll see from the list my plan is to organize the material geographically.
I have just recorded the first two episodes of the upcoming series on Philosophy in the Reformation: an introduction and a look at the impact of the printing press. (These will be published on April 25 and May 9.) A full list of projected episodes is coming soon!
It turns out that without noticing it, I have released 500 episodes of the History of Philosophy podcast! We're only up to 367 in the main series but if you include the Indian and Africana series, then the 500th episode was actually number 366 on Renaissance magic. I think Ficino would be pleased.
And thanks to my Uncle Fred for pointing this out.
In this new blog post HoPWaG co-author Jonardon Ganeri asks "What is Philosophy?"
Many thanks to Rafael Abuchedid who has translated one of my articles,"One of a Kind: Plotinus and Porphyry on Unique Instantiation," into Spanish. It's here free online, in two parts:
As you'll have noticed we are just about up to the year 1900 in the Africana Philosophy series, which means we'll soon be launching into the third, and by far most extensive, section of that series. It will make for a whole book's worth of episodes, beginning on Jan 24 with episode 68. Here is our tentative list of episodes, which will surely change a bit as we go along; suggestions welcome! Please note that interviews are not included in the list.
Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King's College London, takes listeners through the history of philosophy, "without any gaps." The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.
The latest episodes are listed on the left, or you can view the list of all episodes published so far. If you want to keep up to date with the latest podcasts, you can subscribe to the latest episodes RSS feed or to email notification (via Google Feedburner) that there is a new podcast.
Series of podcast episodes (MP3 files) are grouped together as RSS feeds (requiring an RSS reader such as Feedly or a podcatcher), zip files (requring a zip tool such as 7-zip to unzip the downloaded file) and bit torrent files (requiring a bit torrent client such as µTorrent to open the downloaded file.)
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