History of Philosophy without any gaps | Hacker News Reader

History of Philosophy without any gaps

historyofphilosophy.net

72 pointsDougBTX49 comments

I listened to the whole Indian Philosophy part [0] of this podcast - all ~20 hours of it, and I can vouch for its quality. It took me some months.

It delves deep into philosophical theories but doesn't use any jargon, so there is no entry barrier and prerequisites. But the content itself is deep and will test your analytical thinking. The content is no fluff or trivialities - be sure of that.

I look forward to listening the episodes on Greek Philosophy, and I encourage you to listen to the Indian Philosophy episodes, as I can guaranty, if nothing else, that it will expand your mind.

Podcast transcripts are available as books from Oxford University Press, too, sans the interviews (interviews are very high quality). I bought the Indian philosophy one [1].

[0]: https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/series/classical-indian-...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Indian-Philosophy-history-p...

I listened from the start to the most recent main series, all of the Indian series, and am a quarter of the way through the African philosophy section. I concur and recommend the rest :)

I’ll add a caveat: listening to a podcast is a very passive form of learning. Most people won’t remember the majority of the content. But that’s ok, the enjoyment comes from how intellectually stimulating the podcast is as your wrestle with the new ideas.

Listen to enjoy, not to learn. If learning happens, enjoy it.

For something more playful, I'd happily reccomend the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast. We tend to focus on arguments and theories that either entered the mainstream long-term or were prescient in retrospect, but many philosophers (some you've heard of, some you haven't!) held the /wildest/ of world-views. The host is great, love his voice and enthusiasm, and while I did fall off eventually, I'd love to pick it back up. There's a lot of media I wish I had more time for.

https://shwep.net/podcast/

https://www.philosophizethis.org/ is another podcast going through all/most philosophers - both old and new ones.

I'm getting a 404 on the linked page[0], there appears to be a typo in the URL, maybe it was corrected on the server after being posted on HN. When I remove the 'p' at the end[1], it works.

@dang, could you please look into this?

[0]: https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/all-episodesp

[1]: https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/all-episodes

Related - Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is probably what this name is a reference to, and that book does have gaps, but it’s also one of the best things I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it.

Russell was opinionated and very, very funny, while still offering sometimes profound insight. You’ll inhale the book if you are interested in this topic.

Is there any such podcast about history as well? That covers what happened so far since the beginning of time or whatever we know of.

How much time have you got?

Try Philosophize This!

Not a podcast, but Durant's "The Story of Civilization" is available as audiobooks on Audible. It's something like 500 hours, but hey, a lot of stuff has happened.

It’s also over fifty years old and history as a science has developed a lot since then.

The books can be considered primary sources by now, as examples of history writing in the 1920s to the 1960s. I wouldn’t bother reading them to learn about the past anymore though.

I really liked some episodes of Fall of Civilizations [0] and History of India by Kit Patrick [1].

[0]: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com

[1]: https://historyofindiapodcast.libsyn.com

You could stitch together multiple. Mike Duncan's History of Rome is as thorough.

Stitching them together might be an interesting project in itself. As you get closer to the present day, and there's more material, they inevitably get more and more tightly focused. I'm imagining some kind of timeline/world map hybrid thing. Click a location, slide the timeline around, see podcast episodes that cover that time and place.

Tides of History S4 will get you as far as the Bronze Age. It's very up-to-date and very detailed. Best thing about (apart from the immediacy) is that it doesn't focus on one country or region.

It took over two years though - 122 episodes, most between 40 minutes and 1 hour.

S5, 48 episodes in so far, takes us into the iron age.

This always struck me as an odd title. Should I be concerned about gaps?

Of course you should? Most history of philosophy classes only cover the superstars and ignore the other 99%.

What have you found amongst the 99% of history of philosophy that isn’t ordinarily taught that was particularly of interest to you?

Learning the pre-Socratics well made Plato and Aristotle make a lot mote sense for example, but medeival times are also filled with people who are either forgotten or misrepresented. Closer to now we have people who had enormuos impact but are rarely talked about let alone credited like maybe Bergson and Mach, for example. Pyrrhonist and other skeptics usually aren't taken very seriously either which I think leads to a lot of arrogance.

Edit: I was talking about temporal gaps in the Western canon here but if we're going to go with spatial/cultural gaps then I have to say Indian (especially Buddhist) and Chinese philosophy have had an enormous impact on me and it's really a crime that people like Nāgārjuna aren't covered in standard courses.

> it's really a crime that people like Nāgārjuna aren't covered in standard courses.

I think I'd find a "standard course" (e.g. 1 term) on Nagarjuna deeply unsatisfying. He's often presented as the inventor of Buddhist logic, but I don't think prajnaparamita makes a lot of sense as a philosophical system. Nagarjuna was a meditator's meditator, and his system of "logic" was supposed to rid the mind of conceptual thought.

Also, one course wouldn't really cut it; people spend lifetimes studying prajnaparamita, and barely scratch the surface.

People spend lifetimes studying Kant. They still need to be mentioned in introductory courses for people to study them further.

Thanks. I'm not sure how much of that sounds like "gaps" the normal History of Philosophy curriculum would ignore, but I get the point. (certainly, it's a mistake that so much gets spun off into "Asian Philosophy" types of classes, so I agree strongly on that point)

I wouldn't want to claim I really studied all that stuff but the only thing that didn't immediately ring a bell was Mach. I see that he's got a couple of minor mentions in Copleston's history and none in Russell, so a podcast about his work seems like a really good idea.

The title of the podcast sure is a clunker, though.

You should definitely check out Mach if you want to understand Einstein better (but also the previous Newtonian debates in philosophy of physics.)

There were others who Russell missed but I just can't remember off the top of my head right now. In the end, you can't cover everyone in one course but it does seem like some people are completely ignored sometimes. Like maybe Occam will get a line (often misrepresentative) but the majority of time will go to Aquinas, but if you look at the SEP articles on Aristotelian topics (the scholastic debates) for example then you get a different picture of what the context for these things was. It's fine if people don't know, but the problem I have is that people think they know because of how the gaps are kind of paved over if you will. It's nice to tell a story but it would also be good to admit and clarify that the story isn't literally true.

It's been a really long time but I remember History of Philosophy courses at my university being rather specific to a given historical context, down to the whim and expertise of the professor teaching the course that quarter, with the goals of the course listed in the course description. Which is perhaps not engendering in undergrads the global view you'd hope for, but it's maybe a little more realistic and honest. Possibly they weren't all like that (like I said, it's been a long time) but I imagine the global view was meant to be explored during the intro courses - and as I said, probably not including much outside of Western philosophy, which is a problem. But there's really only so much you can cram into a semester.

I'm stretching here but I remember History of Philosophy being a 300 or 400 level course, unlikely to draw any grad students, but a bit further along.

I certainly will check out the podcast, which sounds interesting.

There's an entire large campus (with sub schools) of 20th century { logical philosphers | mathematicians } that reject the Axiom of Choice and infinities (simplified) and thus reject many of the modern analytic proofs that "prove the existence of {something}" by first assuming non existence and looking for a contradiction.

The relevance, if any, to a HN audience is this school doesn't settle for "a basis for some space MUST exist" they'll only accept "this is HOW you construct a basis for this space".

ie. in a sense Constructivists are Algorithimists.

Nothing is real unless there's an IKEA assembley diagram for it.

Earlier this year, this podcast had some episodes on Michel de Montaigne who I found to be quite interesting.

So? Philosophy has a lot of redundancy because of semantics and people talking past each other.

Maybe you can argue against the canon and strike down the false gods. If you were to say that philosophy has become tame and mediocre because of namedropping, I wouldn't say you're wrong.

> Philosophy has a lot of redundancy because of semantics and people talking past each other.

So are you saying that you're familiar with all of it and qualified to make this claim or are you just guessing?

Do you really think one person can be familiar with all of it?

If you read enough of it, you'll see that language is a problem for philosophy, hence why there is the principle of charity.

they are referring to a 19th century philosophical concept, perhaps a dis, "the God of the gaps", meaning that as science explained more and more of how the universe worked, religions would "retreat" their explanations of what God's responsibilities were to "the gaps" in scientific understanding. It's not actually a valid challenge to theology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps#Origins_of_the...

I think you're reading too much into it.

and I think you are not reading enough into it. Name me another philosophical reference to gaps whether in the main or in the breach, especially one with a wikipedia page, something nobody else here has supplied?

They stated their intention in the FAQ. It is common for a person to write a history of philosophy and skip a lot.

https://historyofphilosophy.net/faq

the one thing philosophy should study more of is psych. Freud studied philosophy, and so did they, they have absolutely heard of "God is in the gaps", so their affective declaration where they got the name does not influence my or Freud's opinion about their unconscious motivation. If somebody has heard of something and declares they came up with a similar idea on their own, you have no sus? Want to trade my big penny for your little dime?

Philosophers tend not to be as petty as the scientists and science influencers that you've probably seen, like Richard Dawkins. Over the millennia, many philosophers have been religious; Kant was clearly religious yet his philosophy is still very influential.

The meaning of this is discussed in the FAQ:

https://historyofphilosophy.net/faq

Absolutely, there are (w)hole branches of philosophy that deal with the void, nothingness and what is between things. Nothing is without its absence, is it not?

I heard your words in Peter Adamson's (the host's) voice. Nice.

So, who is talking in your head? You, me or Peter Adamson?

gaps means "the lesser-known figures"

One guest jokes with him that most of history is gaps without any philosophy.

This looks promising. What would be disappointing is after listening to a few episodes is slowly revealed that the authors/creators actually do reveal some sort of bias, negative or positive. Any bias would be annoying, from the somewhat trendy denigration of Western philosophy as the mainstream contender for the target audience (I realize I’m making some, I think reasonable, assumptions about the audience), to a Trojan horse of selling Christian philosophy.

Oh such a great resource. Thank you for posting.

I'm getting a 404 error for this link!

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38088974

You can also see a link in the 404 page towards the end of the page.

The link has a typo (episodesp instead of episodes).

https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/all-episodes

Thanks! Fixed now.

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