Literature
Posted on 23 January 2011
In the first of several episodes on Socrates, Peter discusses his portrayals in "The Clouds" of Aristophanes and in the works of the historian Xenophon.
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Posted on 15 May 2011
Plato criticized both the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod, and the tragic and comic poets. Yet he invented myths of his own. So what was his attitude towards literature and myth? Peter tackles this question in a final episode on Plato.
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Posted on 9 October 2011
A penultimate episode on Aristotle considers his discussion of persuasive speech in the Rhetoric and his account of ancient tragedy in the Poetics.
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Posted on 10 June 2012
Peter looks at the interaction between rhetoric and philosophy in the Roman Empire, discussing authors like Quintilian, Lucian and Themistius.
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Posted on 30 June 2013
Miskawayh, al-‘Āmirī, al-Tawḥīdī, the Brethren of Purity and Ismā'īlī missionaries bring together philosophy with Persian culture, literature and Islam.
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Posted on 8 March 2015
As early medieval science blossoms, Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille personify Nature in their philosophical prose-poems.
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Posted on 22 May 2016
Sex, reason, and religion in Jean de Meun’s completion of an allegory of courtly love, the Roman de la Rose.
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Posted on 1 January 2017
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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Posted on 31 December 2017
Philosophical themes in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and “Troilus and Criseyde,” as well as Langland’s “Piers Plowman.”
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Posted on 14 January 2018
Medieval attitudes towards homosexuality, sex and chastity, and the status of women. Authors discussed include Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, and Chaucer.
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Posted on 21 January 2018
An interview about the status of nonhuman animals in ancient Indian philosophy and literature.
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Posted on 28 January 2018
Peter is joined by Isabel Davis to discuss marriage, sex and chastity in Chaucer, focusing on the Wife of Bath's speech.
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Posted on 18 March 2018
The host of the History of India podcast joins us for the final episode on India.
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Posted on 25 March 2018
The Renaissance ideals of humanism and universal science flourish already in the medieval period, in the works of Petrarch and Ramon Llull.
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Posted on 10 June 2018
Demands for ma’at (justice or truth) and a confrontation with the soul, in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and Dispute Between a Man and his Ba.
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Posted on 24 June 2018
Egyptologist Richard Parkinson joins us to talk about the context and meaning of the Eloquent Peasant and other literary works of ancient Egypt.
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Posted on 8 July 2018
Translations of religious and philosophical texts into Ge’ez, a national epic called the Kebra Nagast, and other developments in the story of philosophy in Ethiopia.
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Posted on 29 July 2018
Photius, “the inventor of the book review,” and other Byzantine scholars who preserved ancient learning.
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Posted on 4 November 2018
Psellos and other experts in rhetoric explore how this art of persuasion relates to philosophy.
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Posted on 25 November 2018
A conversation with Sam Imbo on approaching oral traditions as philosophy and the Ugandan thinker and poet Okot p'Bitek.
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Posted on 14 April 2019
An interview with Kai Kresse (pictured here with Ustadh Mahmoud Mau) who discusses his efforts to do "anthropology of philosophy" on the Swahili Coast.
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Posted on 26 May 2019
An introduction to Africana philosophical thought as it emerged from the modern experience of slavery and colonization by Europeans.
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Posted on 7 July 2019
Eighteenth century black authors touch on philosophical themes in autobiographical narratives, poetry, and other literary genres.
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Posted on 21 July 2019
Phillis Wheatley astonishes colonial Americans with her exquisite and precocious poetry and reflects on the liberating power of the imagination.
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Posted on 28 July 2019
Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni combine eloquence with philosophy, taking as their model the refined language and republican ideals found in Cicero.
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Posted on 15 September 2019
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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Posted on 1 December 2019
Cassandra Fedele, Isotta Nogarola, and Laura Cereta seek fame and glory through eloquence and learning.
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Posted on 1 March 2020
Frederick Douglass' journey from slave to leading figure of 19th century American thought.
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Posted on 12 April 2020
He is called a “father of black nationalism,” but Martin Delany also promoted integration in American society. Can the apparent tension be resolved?
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Posted on 26 April 2020
The moral crusades of Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper, activists against racial and gender oppression.
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Posted on 4 October 2020
Abolitionists Luiz Gama and Joaquim Nabuco, and the great novelist Machado de Assis, react to the injustices of slaveholding in Brazil.
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Posted on 10 January 2021
Co-host Chike joins Peter to look back at series two and ahead to series three.
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Posted on 30 May 2021
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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Posted on 13 June 2021
The aesthetics of Alain Locke and its basis in his theory of value judgments.
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Posted on 5 September 2021
Zora Neale Hurston’s interest in Africana folklore feeds into her great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
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Posted on 3 October 2021
Du Bois moves to the left, and revisits and refines older positions during the latter half of his very long life.
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Posted on 31 October 2021
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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Posted on 14 November 2021
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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Posted on 28 November 2021
Negritude thinkers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire embrace surrealism and reflect on the relationships between poetry, knowledge, and identity.
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Posted on 26 December 2021
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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Posted on 20 February 2022
Famous for his incendiary novel Native Son, Richard Wright responds in his multifaceted writings to sociology, communism, colonialism, and existentialism.
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Posted on 6 March 2022
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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Posted on 20 March 2022
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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Posted on 22 May 2022
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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Posted on 5 June 2022
A Renaissance queen supports philosophical humanism and produces literary works on spirituality, love, and the soul.
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Posted on 19 June 2022
In his outrageous novel about the giants Pantagruel and Gargantua, Rabelais engages with scholasticism, humanism, medicine, the reformation, and the querelle des femmes.
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Posted on 17 July 2022
Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Julius Caesar Scaliger fuse Aristotelianism with humanism to address problems in logic and literary aesthetics.
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Posted on 4 September 2022
Fanon’s incendiary final work explores the violent process of decolonization.
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Posted on 2 October 2022
The author of the famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, explores questions of violence, sexuality, and more during her too brief life.
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Posted on 27 November 2022
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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Posted on 19 February 2023
Abdias do Nascimento, a leader in Brazilian theater and politics, and his theory of Quilombismo.
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Posted on 26 February 2023
Marie le Jars de Gourney, the “adoptive daughter” of Montaigne, lays claim to his legacy and argues for the equality of the sexes.
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Posted on 27 December 2010
In this episode, Peter talks about the Greek gods in Homer and Hesiod, and the criticism of the poets by the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes.
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