Comments Page

Hi Peter -

I’ve been working my way through the series from the start since last year, and it really is astounding the care you have put into this podcast and website. Thank you so much for providing the world with this resource. 

I had an amateur interest in modern philosophy before your series and I read some Hume and analytic philosophy I liked.  With a scientific background I assumed I didn’t have much to learn from, especially, ancient and medieval metaphysics. Happy to say how wrong that impression was… even issues that in the moment I think feel too removed from my natural empiricist mindset, including very theological issues, I find myself considering in my free time now.  When I catch up in the podcast I’m sure I’ll loop back to reading my favorite thinkers.  Although I just finished Abelard and I do admit the “medieval modernism” I found refreshing nonetheless!

Anyway - the original inspiration for my message, I was about to start the Indian Philosophy series and noticed they seem to be disappearing from Apple Podcasts. The first 3 episodes are currently missing. I have no problem listening on your website but wanted to be sure you didn’t lose any potential new listeners due to this, if it isn’t just some weird error on my end. 

Hi Peter,

First, thanks for this great project and the effort you are putting in! I keep revisiting and listening to the old episodes while trying to keep up also on the new ones, getting bettter insight every time.

I was wondering if something recently changed in the recordings, as the recent episodes (starting from the Renaissance and Reformation in Britain) are harder to follow for me. It feels like the playback speed is faster or pauses are cut out. I am not a native speaker of English, so maybe it is me, but just wanted to ask.

Regards, Cor

What happened with Sankara? I was wondering about him recently, and just learned that my question asking about him is nearly a year old by now. Was it too late, didn't fit with the current plan, nothing philosophically interesting about him?

Do you or Karyn Lai know of any work that deals with the relation between Chinese philosophy and disability/neurodiversity? I'm listening to the lecture series that Lai gave a few months ago on Chinese philosophy for Leverhulme and there has been a few times where Disability/Neurodiversity would pose some interesting questions to the ideas and/or puts them into a different and interesting light/angle. Two examples come to mind:

First, with Confucius. Specifically I have in mind between Ritual and Autistic people masking. Masking is when an Autistic person covers up their Autistic traits in order to fit in the neurotypical world. I can't say I really understand the role that ritual plays into Confucius' thought yet, but I know at least that it is related somehow to cultivation. It seems like though that a lot of daily rituals would not help cultivate an Autistic person, when they have to repress their Autistic traits for the sake of ritual. It is a common experience that later on in life for some Autistic people that have had to mask their whole lives to experience burnout and can no longer do a lot of stuff they could do before (very low on energy, no longer able to mask for a while etc). So much for cultivation, the rituals haven't helped them flourished at all but instead acted against their flourishing or their ability to participate in society. Would this be a correct understanding of what ritual is and the purpose it is supposed to serve, and if so how could a Confucian respond to this negative outcome?

The second example is the swimming parable in the Zhuangzi. The swimmer, by not having a dao of their own, is able to follow the dao of the water, which confuses Confucius since he has his own dao and therefore is unable to understand what the swimmer is doing or how. I think bringing in disability can help put two Daoist themes, spontaneity and relativity, in an interesting angle. On the one hand, if the swimmer had broken legs, how the swimmer would follow the water's dao would be different (I can imagine there would be more focus on how they use their arms and/or how they would control/throw their body weight around in order to navigate and move around the water), precisely showing the relativity of the water's dao. On the other hand, if your body is prone to stiffing up in cold water, then it seems that there is no way to go with the flow of the water. The dao of the water would be hostile to you, in which case you can't naturally and spontaneously follow the water's dao. In which case, if we still want to swim, they would have to develop their own dao somehow that goes against the water's dao, since they certainly can't follow it.

Both of those examples may or may not be born from misunderstandings, I don't know enough yet. But at the very least, if Karyn Lai is right in the lecture series that early Chinese Philosophy has an attentiveness to orientation and self-cultivation, then disability and neurodiversity surely seem very relevant to those concerns. So I have to imagine there has been some work on this, especially since it isn't necessarily a modern concern (what I mean is, while in my first example Autism might be a modern concern, I know that there is a recurring theme in the Zhuangzi of the use of uselessness) so I can't imagine there not being lots of literature on this.

Hi ...

So I started on Google Podcasts but it's closing. I don't have an Apple phone. Where can I get your podcasts?

Clay Kallam

Among the chief achievements of Plato's epistemology we have the difference between episteme and doxa, the account of episteme as true and justified belief, the dependence of episteme on ontology and the importance of truth for political and ethical life. 

What does Aristotle add to these achievements? Can we regard the systematization of deductive reasoning as a continuation of Plato's program?  As to metaphysics: does this play the same role as the dimension of imperishable and unchanging forms in Plato? 

I am perplexed. It seems that in spite of his historiographic method that made him famous in the Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle does not do the same in epistemology and, for example, simply neglects Theaetetus and Republic

Comments and criticism are welcomed 

Davide

There must be a very good reason that while Israel does not appear in the roster of countries to choose from for my profile Palestine does and I would like to hear it. Please fix this. You may be of the ilk that thinks that cancelling Israel and simultaneously creating an alternate state IS part of the fix, in which case I think deserves an episode of its own. Tell the world.

Hiya Professor, years ago you made a blog post on what topics/philosophers to cover for the Renaissaince and many listeners chimed in on this site and mention various topics/philosophers/themes to cover

https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/renaissance-suggestions

Are you going to do a new blogpost for the same for 1600-1800 European Philosophy, as it listeners might chime in figures that should be covered that may not have been in your radar in the first place, for example Richard Hooker for British reformation (who you eventually did devote an episode to).

Since we're starting this series next year, it should give you plenty time to prepare for such material, since we're starting on France-Low countries next. I say this because a particular French Catholic philosopher caught my eye, his name is Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and his work 'Discours sur l'histoire universelle' which is similar to Augustine 'city of god'.

     Hi, Peter.

I would like to ask you what is the earliest philosophy, whether of an individual philosopher or a group of philosophers, that there are still records of, be it of primary source or of secondary source.

Hi Peter,

In his "De mirabilibus mundi", Albert the Great has cited a quote from Avicenna about some features of human soul, as Albert puts in his citation, apparently in Avicenna's "sixth book of Naturalia". More than this I don't know.

Maybe you have a hint where to look for, in order to find exactly the text in the original Arabic?

Thanks!
 

Hello Peter

 I am a loyal listener to the podcast HoPWaG.  I am interested in how the Freedoms we value may change over the course of our lives.  For example a 14 year old may be content merely to rebel against authority, a 30 year old may value the ability to work in harmony with existing authorities (to start a small business for example) and a 50 year old might want to BE the authority. For me personally a 14 year old libertarian seems to be living in harmony with their stage of life whereas a 50 year old libertarian is not. (Obviously this is a contentious claim. This is merely an opinion on my part and I am sure things are more complicated than that!) Please recommend books that might give me insight into how the Ancient Philosophers thought about how our personal age might affect how we think about freedom and about which sorts of freedoms and conception of freedom we should value. I would be interested in both primary and secondary source books and especially interested in any philosophers who have written works in the last 8 years or so that relate our current changing conceptions of which freedoms we should value to writers from the ancient world. I am primarily interested in European, Japanese and Indian ancient thinkers, but would also be interested in other traditions. Thanks...and thanks for your sheer endurance as you create HoPwaG!
Philip

Wonderful podcasts, but why there is no Judaism-related podcasts? Everything else you seem to be covering...

I hadn’t thought about this until I started listening to the second episode—has anyone gone over some of the basic Chinese pronunciations with you? I know you’re obviously reading pinyin, but the pronunciations are nothing like what we use in English. The big example is that the word Zhou is pronounced more like “Joe”. It took me a minute to know what dynasty you were talking about. 

I may have to skip out on these episodes as I know the pronunciations are only going to get more difficult if you haven’t heard the names pronounced before. (And I am just talking about Mandarin.)

My favorite podcast series but I just found out they're also available in book form! I'm a better reader than listener.  Just bought the whole set on Amazon, and looking forward to China.

It seems to me that at different ages of our lives we value different sorts of freedom. When we are 14 a libertarian sort of freedom seems appealing. A 14 year old usually has distinct and identifiable authority figures and freedom for the 14 year old frequently consists in rebelling against those authority figures (or at least in always keeping alive the possibility of rebelling against those authority figures). At 30 years old, by contrast, many people want the sort of freedom they can only achieve by being in harmony with authority  (they might want to start a small business or be a Prof for example). To be free to start a small business (at least one with a physical store) one needs and wants a stable society and one wants to be integrated into that society in the relevant ways. It seems to me that philosophers of the ancient world thought a lot (more than we do today) about the different stages of life. My question is: Are there ancient authors who thought specifically about what sorts of freedom we should value at the different stages of our lives?  Thanks!

I'm curious to know from the History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps' research into the history of philosophy if any new insight has been gained as to which of the known ancient systems of philosophy may be the oldest.

Dear Peter, 

As a long-time listener to your podcast, I have become accustomed to your many references to Buster Keaton, the 20th century comedian, or should I say 'Buster Keaton', the name of that same comedian, whom you frequently use to illustrate philosophical points. 

I was delighted to discover you are not alone in this pedagogical employment of the late great comic's name. 

Edward Kanterian, in "Frege: A Guide for the Perplexed" (Continuum, London and New Your, 2012) argues in a discussion of 'The function-theoretic account of Sense' (pp. 184-197) "against all evidence and reason, that there are certain concepts which yield thoughts for objects." He then plugs in "a name ('Buster Keaton'), thus obtaining the experession of a thought, a declarative sentence, ('Buster Keaton is a comedian')."

To go to the punchline, Kanterian concludes "It is difficult to say what thought exactly we obtain by this method for our examples 'Fifi is sitting' or 'Buster Keaton is a comedian.'"

All of which harkens back to an earlier discussion of "different modes of determining ('Bestimmungesweisen') on pp. 111 ff.  

We can only hope that by the end of the passage, Buster is not sitting on Fifi.

Yours truly,

Michael Stanley-Jones

Circular Research Foundation (Parabita, Italy)

This is a blessing. I graduated as a philosophy major about 15 years ago and found this almost a year ago in hopes that I could get a refresh. This is perfect and I hope you are very proud of this. You should be ; )

I just want to thank you for this brilliant website!  It's really useful.  I graduated with a BA in philosophy way back in 1978 and have maintained an interest ever since, but sometimes it's difficult to find good sources.  On material I am already familiar with, I use Stanford's Encyclopedia a lot, but that stuff is pretty dense and challenging in areas I'm not that familiar with.  This is indeed a good gap-filler.  I especially value the entries on Islamic and African philosophy, which are very much overlooked in standard syllabi.  So - thank you very much!

Elizabeth Morton, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

I'm so glad I found this website at the perfect time. I can't thank you enough, as all I thought was to obtain all the philosophy material in one accessible and free place with all sources for my research. I'm beginning my career as a journalist after completed my masters in the UK.  Wish me luck and cheers!

It didn't let me post this on the episode for some reason but in episode 34 - Mr. Know It All: Aristotle's Life And Works, you off-handedly disparage modern political debating styles here implying that they are inferior to Aristotle's model of dialectic argument. I would just like to point out that, as it seems to me, these two things serve completely different contexts and functions, different objectives and thus different strategies for approaching them.

The purpose of a dialectic is to find common group between two opposing positions. The advantage of this approach is that it's less confrontational and at the end both participants hopefully have a better understanding of the topic. The downside is it's slow and doesn't scale very well. You have to walk people through your arguments one at a time, at their own pace, addressing their objections as you go. I might describe this as a trade-off of precision over efficiency.

A debate by contrast is a competition to persuade a third party, often a large audience to make a decision. As such compromise in this situation is not necessarily desirable. Only one of you can win the election or court case or whatever it is. Admitting your opponent might have a valid argument does you no good at all and might even do your audience a disservice if they make a bad decision because you sold yourself short. Furthmore, you need to convince lots of people quickly. There's no time to patiently walk every single audience member through your reasoning. Therefore this situation demands efficiency, which means being a persuasive speaker is more important than having a logically unassailable argument. Honestly, for a leadership position, being persuasive is more important anyway. To dump a bit on Plato's analogy of the ship, having perfect navigation skill does you no good if you can't convince anyone to follow you in the first place. And even if the captain only has a general idea of where he's going, as long as he can figure out how to get there eventually that's gonna be good enough most of the time.

Therefore I think both strategies have a time and a place and the important thing is to recognize which situation your dealing with and apply the correct strategy to the situation. As you observed, if you apply the logic of a debate to a one-on-one discussion you'll just end up talking past each other (which I've absolutely seen people do and it is always obnoxious). But a presidential debate is not a casual fireside chat. Think what would happen if two candidates just had a dialectic argument on stage, which is what your comment, and the comments of plently of other people I've heard, imply that you think they should do. The vast majority of the audience is going to get completely lost because you're barely engaging them and they can't all have signed on to the endoxa you set in the first place. And if at the end both participants decide they've now reached a consensus on which policy they support, the whole thing will have been completely useless for trying to figure out which one of them you should vote for.

Sorry to jump down your throat over a offhand remark like this but you're far from the first person I've seem make this mistake and it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. This seemed like a good place to air my grievances. Just found your show the other week and am loving it so far. Looking forward to bingeing my way through it :)

This may be one of many gratitude comments, but it is mine nonetheless.

Discovering the podcast has been a real blessing! Even if at times some topics seemed a bit obscure or harder to follow, it gives me more reasons to listen to the relevant episodes again! The show has greatly helped me demystify medieval thought and understand Neoplatonism and granted me a greater appreciation of Abelard and Avicenna. Plus, the "without any gaps" approach, showcasing how different people across different cultures and epochs understand and approach certain issues really satisfies my "background in history" itch!

At the same time, it's been a great stepping stone in my journey to enhance my horizons and in understanding myself:

I'm finding (or rediscovering) that reflecting upon topics, be they wider societal issues, some episode topics or my own person, has a daunting (due to the sheer vastness that can lead one to feel like they don't know where to start, or that the abyss "gazes back") yet charming character; one that I, at times, consider turning into more substantive texts beyond mere diary entries. The Africana series also further punctuated that even seemingly simple insights can have surprising implications, and reinforced that barriers to reflection can be illusory. Now, if only I could properly get started!

Reflecting more in this manner has also helped me become more resilient, even if the work is not yet done, if such an endeavor can ever be "complete". 

It is also helping me fulfill the commandment of "know thyself" by inspiring me to commit to such reflections and continue asking myself questions; "Is this what I stand for? What do I stand for? What do I value?...", questions I realize I haven't asked myself enough in the past.

To conclude, thanks for the podcast, thanks for giving me more topics to sate my intellectual curiosity and keep company in the long nights of the cold season and the balmy evenings of the warm one!

Professor, thanks for your work in adding themes to the scripted episodes, I've noticed that these interviewed episodes are missing themes related to the interview, the only theme attached is 'interview' unlike 'Ethics' or 'Logic', etc..

I'll be posting the links to the episodes with the missing theme below. 

1. https://historyofphilosophy.net/mccabe-on-heraclitus

2. https://historyofphilosophy.net/malcolm-schofield-on-the-presocratics

3. https://historyofphilosophy.net/woolf-socrates

4. https://historyofphilosophy.net/aristotle-plato

5. https://historyofphilosophy.net/warren-epicurus

6. https://historyofphilosophy.net/stoics-sedley

7. https://historyofphilosophy.net/platonism-opsomer

8. https://historyofphilosophy.net/trapp-humfress

9. https://historyofphilosophy.net/ismailis-daftary

10 . https://historyofphilosophy.net/avicenna-gutas

11. https://historyofphilosophy.net/averroes-taylor

12. https://historyofphilosophy.net/jewish-neoplatonism-pessin

13. https://historyofphilosophy.net/maimonides-stroumsa

14. https://historyofphilosophy.net/gersonides-crescas-rudavsky

15.  https://historyofphilosophy.net/medieval-marenbon-kraye

16 -  https://historyofphilosophy.net/anselm-sweeney

17 - https://historyofphilosophy.net/emery-institutions

18 - https://historyofphilosophy.net/upanisads-black

19 - https://historyofphilosophy.net/aquinas-macdonald

Thankfully we have the Transcript feature so if you want to refresh your memory professor one could read the interview and attach the relevant themes, for movements of philosophy historical context may be needed for example the interview episodes on Stoicism that covered both Greco-Roman, and you might need to attach several and several themes on 1 episode.

Sorry for the hard work professor!

Hi Dr Adamson,

I just wanted to reach out to commend you for your invaluable work in education and for the influence that it has had on me personally. I don't get much chance to follow the podcast but I own all of the Without Any Gaps books, and they are an important reference for me in an educational animation series that I produce called Three Minute Philosophy. It's made for a very beginner audience and meant to be entertaining so it's simplified but at the very least I endeavour not to be wrong.

Sorry if this comes off as self promotion but your work has been an important guide so I wanted to let you know about one project you've inspired. And if you are at all interested, I'd gladly grant you a complimentary subscription. https://threeminutephilosophy.substack.com/

I see the first Africana volume is on OUP’s site as forthcoming. Great news! Is there any news on other upcoming volumes?

Thank you for the podcast. It’s wonderful on all fronts. 

I understand you are about to cover Cervantes. I was wondering whether you also intend to cover Camões and his epic of the history of the Portuguese people from antiquity to the discovery of the maritime route to India. 

I don’t know that anyone has ever looked at it in with philosophical lens, but it is the a lot of interesting things at once: an epic poem, a periplus, the defining piece of Portuguese literature, filled with saudade, profoundly Christian and yet also filled with pagan imagery and divine characters nudging the navigators right and left. Given how important the discovery of maritime routes to the far east, Africa and the America was to the renaissance, I thought this text might be an interesting milestone.

It would be fascinating to hear your perspective on it. 

Professor Adamson,

Thank you very much for putting together the Podcast - it is really an incredible project and achievement.  I wondered if you could provide any thoughts on the second half of Plato's Parmenides.  A friend and I really enjoyed the Parmenides episode in particular, and so we went on to read the dialogue.  In your view, does the gymnastic that Parmenides walks us through tell us something about the forms, or is it more of a non sequitor to the discussion leading up to it?  It seemed to us that it must in some way bear on the metaphysical/epistemological issues raised in Parmenides's critique of the theory of forms, and we had some ideas of our own, but we would love to hear yours if the dialogue is fresh enough in your mind.

Thanks,

Carson

Dear Professor Adamson,

I've been a long time listener, long enough that I considered sending you a "welcome to Munich" email when you moved there, since I was living there at the time. I never did, but all these years later I'm still enjoying the podcast. Somehow I only recently learned that we received degrees from The University of Notre Dame in the same year, although my degree was a mere Bachelor's.

I apologize there isn't more substance to this message, but I just finally wanted to send a thank you for the years of effort you have put into this podcast. It is much appreciated.

Greetings from Illinois,

Pete

The British Library has opened the exhibition Medieval Women: In Their Own Words. https://www.bl.uk/whats-on/medieval-women/ I visited yesterday and it's a fantastic show, and has artifacts belonging to many women mentioned in HoPWAG. Julian of Norwich Margery Kempe Marguerite Porete Christine de Pizan and of course Hildegard of Bingen and many other I can't remember.

Amazing to see real artifacts from these times associated with women I've heard about on the podcase.

Yesterday I went back to that episode you did for years ago last time Trump was elected--it made me feel a little better about things to come. Given all that's happened in the interim, I kind of expect things to be much worse this go round, and so I am hoping you will once again offer a few "words of wisdom" which I assure you are still welcomed by some of us over here. 

I live in a fairly Texas-like part of Southern California and philosophically feel very alone. I've listened to just about ALL episodes at least once. Thank you. I still feel as ignorant as Socrates, but it's a much more informed ignorance. 

Greetings, Peter. I am a Lutheran Pastor in the USA, and I love your podcast - even though I've only made it through the first 100+. Your history, your clear explanation, and your humor are great. Before Seminary I was more into Psychology and am learning more about how the early Church explored God. Also, I am now reading the Enneads - fascinating.

Now that you are branching into the Holy Trinity, do you know of this YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQLfgaUoQCw

Thanks much!

Tim

I was wondering if there are books or resources that emphasize the reasoning behind philosophical ideas over bios or historical context. For instance, in the case of the pre-Socratics, one picked water as the fundamental substance,  another air and a third the aperion. Ok but why go with one option over the other? Or why not earth or gold? What would have the philosophers themselves said in a debate? Is this information available only in the primary sources, when they still exist? Thanks

Great series by the way, a truly monumental effort.

I hear some claims knowledge is impossible, but some beliefs are closer to truth than others.  I hear others say knowledge is possible, but all knowledge is fallible.  To me, these sound like just 2 different framings of the same position, but whenever I point this out, even well informed people are adamant that i am wrong and don't understand, but I've never gotten an answer to what the difference between these are that doesn't just boil down to "one says knowledge is impossible, the other doesn't" (without elaborating on the univocal usage of knowledge both agree on).  

There are a lot of people here that are well informed.  Perhaps someone on here can enlighten me on the difference?   

Hello,

I originally found your podcast while looking for something that 1) Had no ads 2) had hundred of episodes 3) was boring enough to help me sleep.  What I discovered is that I am actually interested in philosophy.  In spite of earning a doctorate of philosophy (in chemistry), I had never really had any introduction to actual philosophy. Although I do fall asleep listening to your material, I pay attention for at least the first 15 min or so and enjoy the material and your soothing voice.  Additionally I recently had a baby and so am up all hours of the night, listening to the history of philosophy while doing the many tasks required to calm an infant has greatly improved my sleepless nights. My favorite topics and episodes are the ancient Greek schools, especially the skeptics, the philosophy of sight and how that changed over time, and all of the strange contortions people have done to justify their various religious beliefs has been very entertaining.  I had no idea it had taken so much work for people to come up with the idea of a trinity. I also had no idea how much people love to talk about Aristotle! My all time favorite episode though is the one with your brother about the philosophy of skill.  I shared that with a lot of my fellow chemists and am very interested in the concept of what makes something a skill and how that has changed over time. Do you have any accessible other reading that touches on those topics.  Anyway, I love the show and listen to it every night. Thank you.

In addition to the podcast series as a whole (I am on episode 203) enjoy the choices of music for the different periods.  Is there a list somewhere of where the extracts come from.  Currently I am listening to the Medieval section. 

Dear Professor 

I am mightily impressed by the extent and scope of your philosophical musings. 

It seems to me, however, that there is one large gap waiting to be filled. This is the topic of nonduality. Without a grasp of this topic the literature of mysticism and much of that of religion will be incomprehensible, and metaphysics will seem to be a muddled host of intractable problems. Perhaps it is a symptom of this gap that on a first attempt I could find no discussion of Nagarjuna, who seems to me a far more important and useful philosopher than almost any other.    

Besides being a general observation I have self-interested reason for this comment. I have a book forthcoming later this year that offers an accessible and comprehensive introduction to this topic and that describes the relationship between the formal metaphysics of the West and the Perennial; philosophy. If you would like to read it I would be happy to send an ARC. (It is not self-published). I do not think you will find it dull, or I wouldn't have mentioned it, but please just ignore this suggestion if you have no interest.  

Thank you for your blog. It is an amazing piece of work and I look forward to doing more browsing and listening.  

Regards
Peter

Hello, I'm just here on recommendation by a friend. And I find the blog quite fascinating. As a Muslim born and now turned agnostic, I'm curious what's your motivation behind the whole Islamic content related podcasts? Is your propose just describing or documenting the whole Islamic religion/history or are there some analyses criticism coming up? Cause I see you touching so many vast topic ..from ibn Sina to Rumi to Sufism to everything possible. It would just help me a bit when I I understand the purpose behind the lectures. :) Thanks in advance! :)

I'm puzzled that you've not included any talk on Francis Bacon before Descartes. Are you not proceeding in the Early Modern section by chronological order or is there a reason for the omission?

 just finished listening to your episode about Descarte and was wondering if reversing his famous statement i think therefore i am inti I am thehefore i think sound somehow less phloshpically correct but still a valid scientific thought. it it actually wrong f philosphally speaking  someting yoda might say anf might be gramatically wrong. 

Dear Mr. Adamson, I thank you wholeheartedly for your podcast!
Every time I want to make sure that there is wisdom and kindness in this world, I turn on your podcast and every time it gives me inspiration, good mood and food for thought.
Thank you again for everything you do!
Warmest regards,
Nina (Krasnoyarsk, Russia)

I am very surprised to hear stricltly nothing about slavery in the muslim world , enslavery of christians in particular , the fact that women and children were used as sex slaves and that men were usually castrated. Was there no philosophical debate in the islamic world about that, didn t you find it worth noticing or am i still too early in the main podcast ( about episode 220 , thus after philosophy in arabic language ) . My BELIEF ( for i can t find any confirmation / infirmation) is that the whole societies in the whole islamic world until the 18 th century used slaves, in almost any family , rich or modest.

Thank you for your podcast! It’s a huge undertaking, and you make the ideas accessible, and I appreciate it. It also means a lot that you take theology seriously and engage with it!

I also appreciate that you seem like you love giraffes. 

worried I will shuffle off this mortal coil before you get to Kant, and you yourself might not make it to Wittgenstein. In each episode, you thread the needle of lucidity without reduction. I know I am listening to an introduction to each school and philosopher, and I never feel that complex material has been simplified. I realize that I must be grateful for the generosity of your guest speakers but so far (I'm up to episode 98) I will admit that nearly all the guests, the renowned and the very renowned, do not quite share the commitment to concrete accessibility that is the HoPWG standard. But, of course, I appreciate their time. 

This is a model of what podcasting can be: the sparest possible production, personality without narcissism, commitment to disciplined education. Thank you for all the work you have done and continue to do. Actuarially, I have about another 25 years. Maybe Hume, if not Kant. 

One contemporary philosopher who sadly didn't live long enough to hear your discussion of Cartesian philosophy is Helen de Cruz. Would it be possible to fit in a tribute to her at this point? Alternatively, let us listeners know when you intend to discuss Margaret Cavendish. Helen produced a beautiful illuminated edition of Blazy Worlds - a book that deserves a programme to itself. I came across Cavendish when studying for my MRes. A rabbit hole which turned into an Aladdin's cave. 

If you do the programme, don't forget to include an audio intro of Helen's archlute playing.

Keep up the good work. Probably only another 20 years to go!

Hello, I'm fairly new in the area philosophy so I was wondering where to start. Maybe in the classical Greeks? I would aprecciate the suggestions for the best way to listen every episode. Also I was thinking a timeline with all the important points would help to relate the moment where philosophers took inspiration of other philosophers, also because it would help people like me to feel like we are not missing any gaps by going "year by year" into this beautiful history of philosophy. 

Peter, you mentioned several times, that in retrospect you’d begin the podcast somewhat differently than you actually did. Having bought the book versions and being somewhat bored I started to imagine how this might actually look like and I started to imagine such an alternative list.

Does the following list (without interviews) more or less reflect what you would do if you began anew?

Vol. 1 The origins of Western Philosophy from the Stone Age to Classical Greece

Introduction

1. Introduction to the podcast

2. Origins of philosophy / prehistoric philosophy (similar to HoAP episode 2)

Ancient Mesopotamia / Ancient Near East

3. Introduction to the Ancient Near East and Ancient Near Eastern Thought

4. The invention of writing and its impact on Philosophy

5. Ancient Mesopotamian Myths (Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, Descent of Inanna into the Underworld)

6. The Epic of Gilgamesh

7. Ancient Near Eastern ethics / wisdom literature

8. Mathematics and Sciences in the Ancient Near East

9. Man-God-relations, fate and astrology in Ancient Mesopotamian Philosophy

10. Ancient Near Eastern political thought

11.  Women and gender in Ancient Near Eastern thought

12. Influence and heritage of Ancient Near Eastern thought (via Ancient Greece and the Old Testament)

Ancient Egypt

13. Introduction to Ancient Egyptian thougt

14. Ancient Egyptian cosmology and theology

15. Ancient Egyptian ethics / wisdom literature

16. “Dispute Between a Man and his Ba”

17. The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and other Egyptian narrative works

18. Women and gender in Ancient Egypt

19. Akhenaten’s monotheism

20. Influence and historical reception of Ancient Egyptian thought

Ancient Iran (as far as I know, little original literature of Achaemenid Persia survives, but Ancient Persia closes the gap between the Ancient Near East and Ancient Greek)

21. Introduction to Ancient Iran (Origins of Iraninan Culture/Indo-Europeans, politicial structure of the Achaemenid empire, general culture, nature of evidence etc)

22. Early Zoroastrian thought

23. The role of Ancient Persia in the history of philosophy

Ancient Greece

24. Introduction to Ancient Greece

25. Hesiod

26. Homer

27. Sapho and Archaic Greek poetry

28. Introduction to the presocratics

29.– 41. Episodes 1 to 13 of the actual podcast

42. Introduction to Ancient Athens

43. The historians (Herodotes and Thucydides)

44. The sophists (actual episode 14)

45. etc:  the actual episodes 15 and following, just with an extra episode on Platos “laws” and the text on women in Ancient Greek Philosophy included in the book

Vol. 2 Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman World

Actual episodes including “the household and the state” included in the books

Vol 3. Philosophy in the Islamic World

154. Introduction to Philosophy in the Islamic World (similar to episode 120 of the actual podcast)

155. Philosophy in Pre-Islamic Persia from Alexanders conquest to the Islamic conquest (maybe two episodes, one on later Zoroastrianism and one on the reception of Greek Philosophy in Iran?)

156. The worldview of Pre-Islamic-Arabia (as far as it can be reconstructed based on Jahili poetry and Islamic tradition)

157. The historical context of the formative periodes (giving also a short historical summary of early Islamic history for listeners not familiar with it).

158. Acutal episodes 121 ff…

There is an alternative approach to Newtonian mechanics that is in a way more profound and also more powerful because it can be extended to relativity and quantum systems. It is called the variational or Lagrangian approach. This approach was proposed by Lagrange, Euler, Maupertius and the Bernoullis, and its origins can be traced back even further to Huygens, Leibniz and Fermat.

Although it can be defined in very concrete mathematical terms, it has been referred to in teleological and theological terms since its inception, with people using it to prove the existence of God and discuss purpose, economy, wisdom and optimization in nature. Examples include: 'Nature knows', 'nature has a purpose' and 'nature is wise or perfect'. I was wondering how old these ideas are and whether you have touched on them in your podcast?

First of all thank you so much! I took a five month philosophy course to prepare me for an entrance exam and I listened to every episode of your podcast and it really helped me so much! I didn’t know anything about philosophy before and it was good for both understanding the fundamentals and having a fuller understanding of philosophers. Having said that—this is not a critique, more of a request, I feel that sometimes the greats are remembered in a simplistic way and I want all of their story and insights. I want what was progressive or revolutionary in philosophy that they brought us but also their most toxic and terrible traits and conclusions, and I want transmitted things like the demented quality of Augustine’s ramblings in city of god, the dual reality of the progress of the enlightenment and also the cruelty and hypocrisy of its thinkers. I know you already try to do this but I think there’s just more story to be told. Maybe it’s a big ask for a project that is covering all of philosophy but we always have something to say. Anyway thank you so much for your work!