Translations and Textual Transmission
Posted on 22 April 2012
Peter introduces philosophy in late antiquity, when Aristotelianism and Platonism made a comeback, and pagan philosophy developed alongside Judaism and Christianity.
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Posted on 27 May 2012
Peter looks at the history of Aristotelianism up the time of the Roman Empire and the beginning of commentaries on Aristotle's works.
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Posted on 21 October 2012
Sir Richard Sorabji, founder of the Ancient Commentators Project, joins Peter to discuss the history of ancient commentary on Aristotle.
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Posted on 3 March 2013
Boethius ushers in the medieval age with expert works on Aristotle, subtle treatises on theology, and the Consolation of Philosophy, written while he awaited execution.
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Posted on 31 March 2013
Greek philosophy and science make their way into the Islamic world via Syriac and Arabic translations and interpretations.
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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 17 November 2013
A special 150th double interview episode on the transmission of philosophy from Arabic into Latin.
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Posted on 13 July 2014
Robert Wisnovsky joins Peter to discuss the enormous body of unstudied philosophical commentaries in the later Eastern Islamic world.
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Posted on 20 July 2014
Philosophy in Safavid Iran, and a look back at earlier philosophy among Shiites.
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Posted on 9 November 2014
Alcuin leads a resurgence of interest in philosophy and the liberal arts at the court of Charlemagne.
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Posted on 7 December 2014
Stephen Gersh (who was Peter's doctoral advisor!) joins him to discuss the sources and influence of Platonism in the Middle Ages.
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Posted on 14 December 2014
Little-known authors prepare the way for scholasticism with glosses on logic, metaphysical debate, and a poem about a cat.
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Posted on 3 May 2015
Greek and Arabic sources are rendered into Latin in a translation movement that will revolutionize medieval philosophy.
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Posted on 14 May 2016
Rival philosophical schools proliferate and subdivide in our second major historical period, the “age of the sūtra.”
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Posted on 28 May 2017
An introduction to philosophical developments in Buddhism and Jainism up to the time of Dignāga in the sixth century AD.
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Posted on 2 July 2017
An interview with Monica Green reveals parallels between medicine and philosophy in the middle ages.
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Posted on 4 February 2018
Did Indian ideas play a role in shaping ancient Greek philosophy?
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Posted on 18 February 2018
The impact of ancient Indian thought upon the Muslim scholar al-Bīrūnī and upon European thinkers like Hume, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.
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Posted on 20 May 2018
We begin to look at the third tradition of medieval philosophy, in which the heritage of classical antiquity is preserved and debated by the Byzantines.
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Posted on 3 June 2018
Eastern Christian philosophy outside of Constantinople, focusing on translation and exegesis in the languages of Syriac and Armenian.
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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 2 September 2018
Walda Heywat’s reaction to the thought of his teacher Zera Yacob, and the dispute over the authenticity of these two Ethiopian philosophers.
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Posted on 30 September 2018
The spread of Islamic scholarship in subsaharan Africa, focusing on intellectuals of the Songhay empire around the Niger River in the 15th-17th centuries.
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Posted on 28 October 2018
Peter speaks to Souleymane Bachir Diagne about Islamic scholars in West Africa.
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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 16 December 2018
Katerina Ierodiakonou discusses Byzantine commentators on Aristotle, including Michael of Ephesus.
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Posted on 27 January 2019
Without handwritten copies produced by Byzantine scribes, we would know almost nothing about ancient philosophy. How and why were they made?
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Posted on 10 February 2019
Oliver Primavesi tells us how Greek manuscripts are used to establish the text of authors like Aristotle.
Prof Primavesi runs the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy together with Christof Rapp and Peter Adamson.
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Posted on 24 February 2019
The Neoplatonist Proclus gets mixed reviews from Christians, as Nicholas of Methone refutes him but the Georgian philosopher Ioane Petritsi helps to revive his thought.
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Posted on 10 March 2019
Intellectual exchange between Christians and Muslims, and the later flowering of Syriac literature including the philosopher Bar Hebraeus.
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Posted on 24 March 2019
Historian Judith Herrin joins us to talk about competition and mutual influence between Islam and Byzantium.
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Posted on 7 April 2019
Mathematics and the sciences in Byzantium, focusing on scholars of the Palaiologan period like Blemmydes and Metochites.
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Posted on 5 May 2019
Thomas Aquinas finds avid readers among Byzantines at the twilight of empire, and is used by both sides of the Hesychast controversy.
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Posted on 2 June 2019
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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Posted on 16 June 2019
The series on Byzantium concludes as guest Michele Trizio discusses the mutual influence of Byzantium and Latin Christendom.
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Posted on 30 June 2019
A first look at the themes and figures of philosophy in the Italian Renaissance.
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Posted on 14 July 2019
Bessarion and George Trapenzuntius, rival scholars from the Greek east who helped inspire the Italian Renaissance.
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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 8 September 2019
Lorenzo Valla launches a furious attack on scholastic philosophy, favoring the resources of classical Latin.
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Posted on 22 September 2019
Jill Kraye returns to the podcast to discuss the nature of humanism, its relation to scholasticism, and its legacy.
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Posted on 20 October 2019
The rediscovery of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Sextus Empiricus spreads challenging ideas about chance, atomism, and skepticism.
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Posted on 29 December 2019
The blossoming of Renaissance Platonism under the Medici, who supported the scholarship of Poliziano, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola.
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Posted on 12 January 2020
Marsilio Ficino’s revival of Platonism, with a focus on his proofs for the soul’s immortality in his magnum opus, the Platonic Theology.
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Posted on 9 February 2020
An interview with Denis Robichaud on how, and why, Plato was read in the Italian Renaissance.
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Posted on 23 February 2020
Jewish philosophers in Renaissance Italy, focusing on Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love, the Averroism of Elijah del Medigo, and Italian Kabbalah.
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Posted on 13 September 2020
The blurry line dividing humanism and scholastic university culture in the Italian Renaissance.
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Posted on 27 September 2020
Aristotle’s works are edited, printed, and translated, leading to new assessments of his thought among both humanists and scholastics.
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Posted on 11 October 2020
An interview with David Lines on the Renaissance reception of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
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Posted on 22 November 2020
An interview with Dag Nikolaus Hasse on the Renaissance reception of Averroes, Avicenna, and other authors who wrote in Arabic.
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Posted on 6 December 2020
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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Posted on 20 December 2020
Connections between philosophy and advances in medicine, including the anatomy of Vesalius.
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Posted on 9 May 2021
The impact of the printing press on the history of philosophy, and its role in helping to trigger the Reformation.
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Posted on 23 May 2021
Rudolph Agricola, Juan Luis Vives and other humanist scholars spread the study of classical antiquity across Europe and mock the technicalities of scholastic philosophy.
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Posted on 4 July 2021
The “learned piety” of Desiderius Erasmus, the greatest figure of northern humanism.
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Posted on 12 March 2022
John Sellars returns to the podcast to discuss Lipsius' work on Seneca and the early modern Neo-Stoic movement.
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Posted on 18 December 2022
A chat with Ann Blair about the "Theater of Nature" by Jean Bodin, and other encyclopedic works of natural philosophy. (Pictured: Prof Blair holding the annotated copy of Bodin's Theatrum she describes in the episode.)
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Posted on 25 December 2022
The first leader of independent Tanzania grounds his socialist ideas in traditional African values.
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Posted on 1 January 2023
Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, and Guillaume du Vair grapple with history and the events of their own day.
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Posted on 21 December 2010
In this episode, Peter Adamson of King's College London introduces the podcast as a whole, and the thought of the early Greek philosophers called the Presocratics. He also discusses the first Presocratic philosopher, Thales of Miletus.
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