300a. The Relevance of Ancient Philosophy Today

Cool! One thing I love about doing the podcast is being able to reach people in places like Argentina, where I have never even been, to say nothing of getting to teach there or give talks or whatever. So glad you like the series!

Well, I think that's a bit unfair. If I'm remembering that part right, she didn't really even criticize Trump in her own voice as such, just pointed out that there has been quite a lot of discussion of Trump in the media and so on that has invoked Plato - which is just a statement of fact and is clearly relevant to a discussion of Plato's contemporary relevance, which after all was the topic of the interview. Indeed it would, I think, have been rather strange to have a discussion about this topic in 2018 (or actually 2017, when we recorded it) without even mentioning this most striking example of the way ancient philosophy has played a role in contemporary discourse.

Of course there is a further question whether people are justified to use, say, Plato's analysis of the tyrannical mindset to understand Trump as a person or political leader, or to analyze Brexit through the lens of Plato's critique of democracy. I think if someone made a cogent argument along these lines then it would also be a powerful way of demonstrating the continued relevance of ancient philosophy. I understand why you might want to keep things "apolitical" to avoid hurting people's feelings or just because a podcast like this is usually a refuge from politics. I more or less feel that way too and mostly avoid mentioning contemporary politics in the podcast. But we should I think be open to the idea of bringing the ancient texts to bear on our current situation.

Well,  this was supposed to be about how figures from ancient philosophy have actually featured in non-historical work, and to be honest contemporary philosophers, at least on the analytic side, have not ventured far beyond the two biggest names - so in that sense I think the interview conveys a pretty accurate picture. But of course I agree with you that other ancient thinkers should get more attention!

Good point, I think the coverage here was more a matter of whom I happened to have handy when I was putting the episode together (for instance I was in London so took the opportunity to interview Prof Kalderon). But actually I would say that Stoicism is very impactful on the broader public but not so much in contemporary philosophy, which is what I was going for here. I can imagine doing another episode like this at some point but we'd have to get through a lot of early modern philosophy first.