Aesthetics and the Arts (Music, Painting, etc)
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In his masterpiece the Republic, Plato describes the ideal city and draws a parallel between this city and the just soul, with the three classes of the city mirroring the three parts of the soul. Peter discusses this parallel and the historical context that may have influenced Plato's political thought.
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Peter looks at the interaction between rhetoric and philosophy in the Roman Empire, discussing authors like Quintilian, Lucian and Themistius.
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Anne Sheppard discusses ancient aesthetics, touching on poetry, visual art and music in thinkers from Plato to Proclus.
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Peter turns DJ, with some actual music interspersed with discussion about theories of music in works by al-Kindī, the Brethren of Purity, and al-Fārābī.
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Does medieval art tell us anything about medieval theories of aesthetics? Peter finds out from Andreas Speer.
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Italy’s greatest poet Dante Alighieri was also a philosopher, as we learn from his Convivio and of course the Divine Comedy.
This episode is dedicated to John Kleiner, the inspirational teacher with whom I had my first experience reading Dante.
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Bharata’s Nāṭya-Śāstra and later works from Kashmir explore the idea of rasa, an emotional response to drama, music, and poetry.
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Jean Gerson’s role in the political disputes of his day, the spread of lay devotion and affective mysticism, and the debate over the Romance of the Rose initiated by Christine de Pizan.
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Is it idolatry to venerate an icon of a saint, or of Christ? The dispute leads the Byzantines to ponder the relation between an image and its object.
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John of Damascus helps to shape the Byzantine understanding of humankind and the veneration of images, despite living in Islamic territory.
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Peter's twin brother Glenn Adamson discusses the philosophical implications of craft.
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Psellos and other experts in rhetoric explore how this art of persuasion relates to philosophy.
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An interview with Nkiru Nzegwu on matriarchy, sexuality, and gender fluidity in Africa (with a quick chat at the end about her work on African art).
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When the Byzantine empire ended in 1453, philosophy in Greek did not end with it. In this episode we bring the story up to the 20th century.
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Phillis Wheatley astonishes colonial Americans with her exquisite and precocious poetry and reflects on the liberating power of the imagination.
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Ignatius Sancho and Benjamin Banneker make their mark on the history of Africana thought through letters that reflect on the power of sentiment.
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Ficino describes a “Platonic” love purified of sexuality, prompting a debate carried on by Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Tullia d’Aragona.
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The humanist study of Pythagoras, Archimedes and other ancient mathematicians goes hand in hand with the use of mathematics in painting and architecture.
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For our finale of the Italian Renaissance series we're joined by Ingrid Rowland, to speak about art, philosophy, and persecution in Renaissance Rome.
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The artistic flowering of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance raises important questions about identity and the purpose of art.
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The aesthetics of Alain Locke and its basis in his theory of value judgments.
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Leonard Harris explains how Locke's value theory was the basis for his aesthetics and theories of democracy and race.
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From the latter half of the nineteenth century to the 1970s, African Americans only rarely obtain jobs as philosophy professors but bring distinctive perspectives to the profession.
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Zora Neale Hurston’s interest in Africana folklore feeds into her great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
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The career of the multi-talented activist and performer Paul Robeson, and the place of the Negro spiritual in the Harlem Renaissance.
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Our first look at the emergence of the Negritude movement in Paris in the 1930s, with a focus on the early leadership of the Nardal sisters and Leon Damas.
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Leopold Senghor compares different ways of knowing while developing his theory of Negritude and combining the roles of poet and politician.
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Negritude thinkers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire embrace surrealism and reflect on the relationships between poetry, knowledge, and identity.
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The Trinidadian historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James applies Marxist analysis to the Haitian Revolution, American cinema, and Shakespeare.
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Ralph Ellison provides a new metaphor for the experience of racism in his Invisible Man and tackles topics of art and identity in his essays.
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In The Fire Next Time and other writings, the essayist and novelist James Baldwin seeks to dispel the illusions surrounding racial and sexual difference.
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We begin to look at philosophy in Renaissance France, beginning with humanists like Budé and the use of classical philosophy by poets du Bellay and Ronsard.
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Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Julius Caesar Scaliger fuse Aristotelianism with humanism to address problems in logic and literary aesthetics.
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African American literature of the late 1960s reflects the Black Power movement, in the works of such authors as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Larry Neal, and Sonia Sanchez.
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Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic return to claim the pyramids, and Octavia Butler uses science fiction to confront the brutal past of slavery.
Thanks to Stephan Terre for the creation of the futuristic intro music!
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How the Rastafari movement grew from trends within Africana philosophy, and then passed into global popular culture in the music of Bob Marley and other reggae artists.
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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.
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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
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Toni Cade Bambara, the Combahee River Collective, the Brixton Black Women's Group, and Awa Thiam critique white feminist and black nationalist failures to recognize the unique struggle of the black woman.
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Stuart Hall pioneers “cultural studies,” offering tools for analysis of films, television, fiction and music that were put to use by followers like Paul Gilroy and Hazel Carby.
Thanks to Glenn Adamson for his feedback on this episode!
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Sylvia Wynter offers a bold and provocative assessment of the role of the humanities in understanding humankind.
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Writers like George G.M. James, John Henrik Clarke, Cheikh Anta Diop, Yosef ben-Jochannan, and Chancellor Williams prepare the way for the Afrocentricity of Molefi Asante and capture the imaginations of hip hop artists and intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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An introduction to the thought of Cornel West, focusing on his early essay “Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience.”
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Cornel West joins us to look back on the development of his thought and the many authors who have inspired him.
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Fray Luis de Leon, Antonio Nebrija, Beatriz Galindo and other scholars bring the Renaissance to Spain.
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To celebrate reaching 450 episodes, Peter looks at the philosophical resonance of two famous artworks from the turn of the 16th century: Dürer’s Self-Portrait and Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel.
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In this interview, we learn how Kongzi become the pivotal sage of early Chinese history, and what new discoveries teach us about the Confucian tradition.
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This is one in a series of podcasts on "German Philosophy and the World," recorded for the September 2024 Congress of the German Society of Philosophy (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie).
This episode features Kristin Gjesdal, who is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, and looks at themes from Hegel and Nietzsche in the works of Henrik Ibsen and several women thinkers of 19th century Scandinavia.
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An interview about the "resonant cosmos" in early Confucianism, and the role played by music in linking sages to the universe.
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An introduction to the Mozi, the founding text of an anti-elitist school of thought that tests social and political practices by the measure of “benefit.”
