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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.246)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy in Late Antiquity and the Islamic World at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Professor of Ancient History and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London. And we're here to talk about his podcast and forthcoming book series, already some volumes out, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Dr. Adamson, wonderful to have you on today.
Peter Adamson (00:30.387)
Thanks for having me on.
PJ (00:32.44)
So Dr. Adamson, why, I mean, this is a huge project. It's very impressive. Why a history of philosophy without any gaps?
Peter Adamson (00:41.169)
Yeah, well, maybe the first thing to say about that is what does it even mean? So I guess people kind of know what history of philosophy means, but maybe it's not so clear what without any gaps would mean. And in fact, to be honest, it wasn't that clear to me what it meant when I started, or at least I thought it meant something that it wound up changing, and it wound up changing over time. So there was a bit of mission creep involved. So what I meant originally was without any historical gaps.
So the usual way of teaching philosophy in college, for example, would be you might do Plato and Aristotle, right? And then you might jump to, let's say, Aquinas, right? So that's like 2 ,000 years jump, right? And even if you only jump to, say, Augustine, that's still like 700 years, right? So.
What I had in mind actually was sort of on the model of a history podcast, because I also listened to a lot of history podcasts. And this, by the way, was in 2010 when I started. So I didn't know that podcasts were going to be such a big deal. In fact, I thought maybe they were on the way out. Maybe I shouldn't even do this, because will people still be listening to podcasts in 2013? That's literally what I was thinking, because it was a new technology, relatively speaking. But there were already some history podcasts that I was following.
And something I really liked about those is the way that you just kind of always get to hear what happens next. Right. And I thought, it'd be cool to do the history of philosophy like that. just start with the pre -Socratics and just go. Like when you finish Aristotle, the next thing you do is Aristotle students, right. Instead of jumping to Augustine. So that's what I meant originally without any gaps, without any historical gaps, but
Already at the beginning, was a couple of other things that were kind of implied by that anyway. One is that that would mean that you'd wind up covering a lot of minor figures or so -called minor figures. And in fact, if you kind of scroll through the list of my episodes, probably no one would scroll through the episodes and think, I've heard of all of these people. Because not even I had heard of all of them when I had started the project, right? So, you know.
Peter Adamson (03:02.077)
there are going to be episodes on like sort of fairly obscure, let's say 12th century scholastic philosophers or female mystics from the 14th century or parts of Islamic philosophy that you might never have heard of, right? And so part of what I'm doing is trying to make a case that integrating these non -famous people into a history of philosophy just makes you understand it differently.
and maybe makes you understand it better. So for example, even if what you're really interested in is these like real giants like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Aquinas, it's really helpful to know what was going on in the generations leading up to them, who were the non -famous people to whom they're reacting. Another thing that I like pointing out is that sometimes the really famous people didn't seem like the important people at the time necessarily. So for example, my favorite example here is Aquinas. So if you asked,
people in Paris in the year, I think it was right, the year 1300. So like 30 years or so after 25 years after he died. If you said to them, who was the most important philosopher, theologian of the last 40 years here? They might say Aquinas, but they might say Henry of Ghent. Right. And who is Henry of Ghent? Right. Well, I have an episode on him. You can find out.
PJ (04:23.03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, I might have heard of that name once. Yeah. I'm probably getting confused with someone else.
Peter Adamson (04:27.535)
Exactly. Well, he's one of the fairies one of the more famous philosophers from Gantt.
But okay, so that's part of what I'm doing is these kind of minor figures. And I always intended to cover philosophy in the Islamic world because as you said at the beginning, that's one of my main areas of specialty. But almost like from day one, people said, why are you calling this philosophy of history of philosophy without any gaps if you're not covering Chinese and Indian philosophy? And I said, yeah, someone should do that. I don't know anything about that, sorry.
So I'm not going to do that. but then eventually I wound up covering so many other things that I didn't know anything about that I thought, well, I might as well do Indian and Chinese philosophy too. And actually what I wound up doing was teaming up with coauthors. I did Indian philosophy with Gennard and Gennari. Then I did actually Africana philosophy with GK Jeffers, which is like 140 episodes is something like 70 episodes for India.
And now I'm doing Chinese philosophy with someone named Karen Lai. So my idea was that since I, you know, I just didn't have the requisite tools, among other things, the linguistic tools, like I don't know Chinese, I don't know Sanskrit. and really felt like I needed co -authors to do that. And so what I do now is I do a episode on European philosophy every other week. And in the other weeks I do at the moment, an episode on Chinese philosophy. they alternate.
And there's two different RSS feeds for that. And then, so that's the second thing that has kind of come to me over time. And then a third thing that has become more and more important to me as it's gone along, kind of falls under the heading of these minor figures or less famous figures, which is covering women philosophers. Because, you know, if you ask yourself like, okay, who are the famous women philosophers? Some names will come to mind, right? Like Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir.
Peter Adamson (06:31.369)
maybe, but none of them will be before the 18th century, probably. But actually, if you look hard enough, you can find lots of women philosophers before the 18th century. I just counted the other day and I think I've covered, I think there's something like 40 episodes where women philosophers are either the only figure or one of the main figures covered in the podcast. Actually, a lot of them are after the 18th century because they're from the Africana series. But of course, they're
PJ (06:36.098)
Yeah. Yep.
Peter Adamson (07:00.837)
neglected for another reason, which is that they're Afrikaner thinkers, right? So that's become another, there's sort of three things that I think are really important. One is covering minor figures, one is covering all cultures, and one is covering female philosophers. So that's the project.
PJ (07:21.919)
very ambitious project. Do you have like an estimated end date?
Peter Adamson (07:29.553)
Well, so I used to think, so actually when I started doing it, I numbered the first episode zero, zero, one, thinking I'll be optimistic and imagine that I might get to more than a hundred episodes, right?
And now, like all total, it's more, I think it's something like 700 episodes if you put all the series together. The original series is now up to episode 450. And I'm just about to finish Philosophy and the Reformation. So I'm about to to 1600. And actually, I think a lot of people have been kind of waiting for that to happen. So they've sort of been like, okay, Renaissance philosophy, very nice. But can you please get to Descartes and Hume and Kant, right?
PJ (08:16.62)
Alright.
Peter Adamson (08:18.273)
And that's about to happen. So I will be covering Descartes, for example, next year because I'll be doing 17th century French philosophy. And my plan for the next decade or so would be to finish Chinese philosophy, which will take another couple of years, finish philosophy and the Reformation and then do probably three big series on 17th and 18th century philosophy. So one on France and the low countries, one on Britain.
plus Ireland and early United States, and one on Germany and other parts of Central Europe. There's some problems here, like what about Southern Europe, for example. But the idea would be that those would be three big series that each become a book. And I think that would take me 10 years. So I don't know that there's much point thinking about what I might do beyond that. In terms of more immediate plans, I think the...
The other question would be what to do for non -Western philosophy after I do China. And I'm not really sure about that. I've thought about doing a series called Philosophy in the Americas, where I cover like Native American, Mesoamerican, and Latin American philosophy. I think that would be fun, and I'd like to do that. But I'm not really sure yet. China's kind of keeping me busy at the moment, so.
PJ (09:39.81)
Yeah, I think for most people just doing China would be like a lifelong project. there is a like, I'm very impressed by the ambition. Like it's really, it's really awesome. For you personally, and I think in terms of you're doing this podcast, you weren't even sure that, you know, podcasts were going to exist in three years, right? What is kind of the overriding purpose? Like when you say it is valuable,
to have a history of philosophy without any gaps. What does that provide to academia? because you do have this interesting thing, you have the podcast and now you have the books, which probably could be used as like textbooks, right? Or a more official or more formal resource. What's the value for academia and what's the value for the culture in general?
Peter Adamson (10:18.663)
Yeah.
Peter Adamson (10:31.143)
Yeah. So the first thing I would say about this, and this is what I always say about this, is that I would say one shouldn't be too quick to assume that there has to be an ulterior motive. So for example, one of the podcasts that inspired mine, like I said, I was listening to history podcasts and one of them is about the history of Rome. Really good podcast by Mike Duncan. And then he went off and did it probably an even better podcast called revolutions. And these are
incredibly detailed historical podcasts, right? And I don't think anyone would say to him, well, why, why are you doing a podcast about their history? I'm like, what's the point, right? Because so many people just think the history of Rome is interesting, intrinsically interesting. And so the first thing I would say is that I don't know that it needs to have a further payoff other than just I've given you a very complete detailed, but still.
kind of accessible portrayal of the entire history of philosophy. And then I almost say, what more do you want? Like, why does it also need to achieve something more than that? So that's the first thing I would say. But having said that, I do think that it has some further benefits. So for sure, there is kind of a tacit, maybe political agenda behind what I'm doing, which is to say that if you think philosophy,
PJ (11:34.709)
Yeah
Peter Adamson (11:58.395)
is just something that some famous white guys from Europe did, then you're definitely wrong. So first of all, as I said, you can't even understand what these famous white guys from Europe were doing without looking at a whole bunch of non -famous white guys from Europe. And there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. So first of that. Second of all, they weren't all guys. Some of them are women. And third of all, actually, philosophy is not a European phenomenon.
I mean, the word philosophy is originally Greek, but I defy anyone to dip into the series we did on Indian philosophy even briefly and say, well, this is not philosophy. I mean, they're talking about things like, you know, under what circumstances am I allowed to say that I know something? is all of reality dependent on a single cause? Or...
what is the correct structure for rational arguments or how do we organize our political institutions? And so they do all of the standard philosophical topics. With Africana philosophy, things are a little bit more complicated because there's a very interesting debate about what it would even mean to study philosophy in cultures that don't produce textual traditions the way India and China did. So we can get into that if you want.
But then a lot of Africana philosophy was about diasporic and modern day Afro, I mean, modern in the sense of like going back to the 18th century or so. So where there's plenty of texts and there's lots of philosophy to discuss. And the same is true for China, right? There's a lot of texts going all the way back to antiquity. So I don't think there's, I guess I used to think there was sort of an interesting debate to be had about whether, like in what sense there is non -Western philosophy, right?
But having done this for quite a while now, I just have kind of come to think that people who think that philosophy is only European just haven't spent any time looking into the question. It's not an intelligent thing or meaningful thing to say. It's just like, well, I don't know about it, so I guess it doesn't exist. I mean, that's not to say that there aren't interesting questions about where exactly the boundaries of philosophy are.
PJ (14:02.103)
Right, right.
Peter Adamson (14:19.891)
But there's plenty of material in these other cultures where if it's not philosophy, then you'd be hard pressed to say what it is. So the kind of quiet, and when I say it's quiet, what I mean is I'm not polemical about this. Like I don't say, if you're not taking Africano or Indian philosophy seriously, then you're racist. But I would never say anything like that in the podcast. My strategy is much more to try to make it interesting and sort of welcoming and say, look how cool this is. Wouldn't you like to hear more about this?
And then people, you know, can listen to those episodes or not, but it's not sort of in your face. It's more like just, well, if you want it to know about all the history of philosophy that there has been, here it is. Right. And so I think that that actually is a very valuable message to project because it undermines something that I think a lot of people still kind of think, which is that European civilization is special in part because it produced so much science and philosophy.
whereas the rest of the world didn't. So if you can show how the rest of the world did also produce a lot of science and philosophy, that's, think, a useful message to get across. Obviously, the same thing goes for what I was saying about women philosophers. And then I think in terms of the impact on academic philosophy, I think that anything you can do to show the limitations of the canon that's kind of come down to us, like the sort of stuff we usually teach,
to try to explain to people how partial that is and how culturally specific and how also in lot of ways how contingent it is on decisions that were made by 19th century historians. I think that's a really useful thing to get across to people to kind of make them stop and think, hang on a second. Like I'm teaching a course on metaphysics here. Maybe I should include something from India. Like why not? They do metaphysics, right?
PJ (16:11.85)
One, thank you. Great answer. I want to be clear, I wasn't looking for an ulterior motive. I was like, I'll get you on here and be like, all right, so you're one of those sneaky, you I don't know. That is helpful. And I think another part to that question, and if you don't want to dwell on this, that's fine. Maybe a little bit more from a metaphysical kind of standpoint. Maybe this is too metaphysical, but the...
Peter Adamson (16:17.672)
hehehehe
PJ (16:39.532)
Like for you, what is the value of history? Like so, and I mean, you did say it's just interesting and there is just that intrinsic. I I think of Hans Ruckmicker saying art doesn't need justification. We pretend like it does, but everyone's going to do it anyways because it's, it's awesome. Right. And so I understand if that's the answer, I'm okay with that. But do you have like for a history of philosophy, is there kind of an overriding value to it kind of beyond just it's interesting.
Peter Adamson (16:54.291)
Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Adamson (17:06.247)
Yeah, I mean, I think that you can maybe split that into two different questions. One is, is philosophy even interesting? Like what, like why do we do philosophy? And there, I almost would say it depends what kind of philosophy you're talking about. So for example, political philosophy obviously influences our political affairs. And most people think political affairs are important in some sense, right?
PJ (17:12.907)
Hahaha
Peter Adamson (17:33.187)
Or epistemology, so the study of knowledge, is useful because it gives you a chance to think about what is the status of your beliefs? When can you take yourself to know something? And actually, a lot of the debates we've been having over the last few years, like are COVID vaccines safe? How would we know that? Or what has been the impact of Brexit or anything like that? Or even the kind of meta questions like, how should you
form your beliefs in response to what self -proclaimed authorities tell you, right? These are questions about epistemology, right? And so if you want a really, really good answer to that question, you should ask an epistemologist, right? I mean, not about the vaccines, more like, don't mean, mean, epistemologists don't know more about vaccines than other people. I mean, if you want to know what is the right kind of standard to apply, like how should you form your beliefs?
PJ (18:15.904)
Yeah.
Peter Adamson (18:31.005)
That's a question in philosophy, right? So different parts of philosophy have different kind of payoffs in that sense. Within academic philosophy, there's always been a big question about how history of philosophy then relates to these areas of contemporary philosophy. So some contemporary philosophers would say that if you want to know what knowledge is, then you should just look at the state of the art debate about knowledge. And it doesn't really make sense to look at like what some
10th century Byzantine philosopher thought knowledge was, right? Because they won't have anything interesting to say. Maybe it was interesting back then, but we are way, way past that. And this is an attitude that comes from, or at least goes along with seeing a kind of parallel between philosophy and science. So just as in the physics department, you don't do history of physics. In the philosophy department, it's not so clear why you're doing history of philosophy, right? And there's a big debate about that.
how history of philosophy contributes to philosophy as a discipline. It is in fact the case that pretty much every philosophy department does history of philosophy. And actually something I always like to point out here is that if you ask kind of a normal person to say what they think philosophy is, they'll say, well, like Descartes and Kant and Plato, right? So in other words, they will give you an answer that has to do with history of philosophy.
So if anything, the people who really need to kind of justify what they're doing are the contemporary philosophers, not us. Right. So that's the first thing I would say about that. And then there's a lot of other things that people always say about this, which I agree with, but you you can find positions in history of philosophy that are interesting from a contemporary point of view, because they give you options within debates that are still going on that you are kind of forgotten, like moves that are being that aren't being made anymore, but maybe actually have something to say for them.
So I think that's definitely valid, but I think also it kind of comes down to what you think philosophy is so I don't really think philosophy is like producing a set of opinions about philosophical topics. I think that philosophy is more like understanding the whole debate around a given philosophical topic. what is it? So for example
Peter Adamson (20:56.147)
Can you show that God exists? Well, the answer to that question is basically the full history of attempts to prove the existence of God up till now, right? And not the ones that have just been done in the last five years, but all of them, know, cultures and times and places, right? And so I guess I just kind of think that history of philosophy is just philosophy so far. And so to understand philosophy as a discipline is to understand
the entire history of philosophy, including the philosophy that's going on now. And if you can understand that, then you're sort of a maximally well -informed philosopher.
PJ (21:33.943)
Thank you. Great answer. And it's interesting as you talk about this in terms of other traditions. It's really obvious that you cannot study just the Western tradition on its own either because there are things I mean, this is more for our audience sake and to further cut the conversation. I'm not saying this like, like you're you're you're an expert in like the Islamic world of like, philosophically.
And so when we talk about things like the Western tradition and you talk about someone like Augustine, for example, you you said it's easy to think about this as, the history of a bunch of white, like a couple of really important white guys, like give it like proclaiming the great truths. Right. And then you look and see it's easy to kind of brush over Augustine and his cultural and geographic location. Right. Like that he's African or
to look at someone like Aquinas and to miss the connection from Maimonides. I'm probably saying that wrong. the, I remembered it from 15 years ago. I'm so proud of myself. No. But so there is this interdependence too, even as you talk about the diaspora with Africana philosophy, that there's this, especially as we get more global, the traditions are interweaving. And so I think this cultural and geographic
Peter Adamson (22:38.953)
this year.
Pretty much plus, yeah.
PJ (23:02.478)
expansion is important in the history of philosophy. Can you talk a little bit more to that interdependence and some of the more important connections that you've seen?
Peter Adamson (23:12.541)
Yeah, that's a really great point. So the example you just gave that philosophers who lived in the Islamic world, who would include Maimonides, he was Jewish, but he was born in Islamic Spain and spent most of his career in Cairo. And he's a major influence on Thomas Aquinas. Actually, even bigger influences on Thomas Aquinas are two Muslim philosophers, Avicenna, who lived in Central Asia, so he's from Afghanistan, and Verouiz, who lived in Muslim Spain.
their works were translated into Latin and are very influential for Aquinas and other scholastic philosophers writing in Latin. And you can also think about, so like a less celebrated example would be Byzantine philosophy, which I really didn't know very much about. So I I do late ancient Greek philosophy, like as part of my career, but I hadn't really ever gone past something like the fifth, sixth century in Greek philosophy. But there was this whole tradition of Greek philosophy in Byzantium.
especially in Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. And they are interesting in all kinds of ways because if you think about where that is, right, Turkey, it's nestled between the Islamic world and Latin Christian Europe, right? And bear in mind, they thought they were the Roman Empire, right? They didn't call themselves the Byzantines. They called themselves the Romans. They were just the part of the Roman Empire that hadn't fell.
from their point of view. So actually from their point of view, they were the center of civilization. And then there were these sort of upstart Latin speaking Christians whose interpretation of Christianity was slightly wrong and who were kind of uncivilized, right? And didn't have anything like the majesty of Constantinople in terms of their civilization and culture. And then there were these very frightening people who come out of nowhere who are the Muslim armies, right? Who almost topple the empire, but don't quite.
So that's a great example because there you have philosophy being done in a culture that's sandwiched between two other cultures that are pressuring it all the time and you see how they respond. So they're interested in Islamic science. They eventually start even translating things like Aquinas into Greek, actually. So they're a very kind of networked kind of philosophy. Spain and Southern Europe in general is...
Peter Adamson (25:35.197)
context in which you have a lot going on across the cultural boundaries. Spain obviously was in Muslim hands for a long time. Spain and Italy and Sicily wind up being the places where philosophy gets translated from Arabic into Latin. So it's really a very permeable boundary. If you think about then India and China, so this is interesting because these are traditions that seem to develop independently. So there's no Greek influence on.
Chinese warring states period philosophy. like Confucius or Mozu or the famous early philosophers of China have nothing to do with Greek philosophy. Sometimes people think that there's some kind of connection between early Greek and early Indian philosophy, but if so, it's a very marginal phenomenon. So Indian philosophy is basically also independent. And so actually you kind of have written philosophy
starting in these three locations separately, the Greek speaking sphere, the Sanskrit using Indian sphere, and then China. But actually, it doesn't take that long for there to start being interchanged across these boundaries as well. Obvious examples, the Buddhism comes into China quite early, so towards the end of the Han period. So we're talking like second century CE, right? So at the time that...
Peter Adamson (27:03.109)
you still have Roman emperors. The Chinese are already absorbing Buddhism from India and is coming across Tibet, right? So that's a really good example of another permareval boundary. There's also intellectual exchange between India and the Islamic world from very early on. They actually translate not only from Greek, but they also translate works from Sanskrit, especially in the sciences. There's a figure that I've worked on a bit.
in the 11th century named Biruni, who was working for a kind of warlord named Mahmoud of Ghazna, whose armies penetrated into India. And he took some scholars as war captives, sorry, guests of the court. And these guests sat down with Biruni and they collaborated to produce some Arabic translations of philosophical works.
PJ (27:50.28)
Hahaha
Peter Adamson (27:59.635)
from Sanskrit, like the Yoga Sutra and the Bhagavad Gita, for example. And that's 11th century. So you can see that there's a case to be made that there are kind of independent philosophical traditions. Another example might be the oral traditions of Africa, to mention them again. You could also think about the Mesoamerican cultures. So insofar as Aztec, Incan, Mayan cultures or Native American cultures,
have their own philosophical traditions. They develop independently of anything that's happening in Europe or Asia, obviously, but eventually all these things start being brought into contact. In fact, the reason we know something about Mesoamerican philosophy is largely because the Spanish made records of it when they got there and started colonializing them, right? So I think telling a global history of philosophy is always going to be in part telling a story about
how these cultures interact, how philosophical texts and ideas move around and so on.
PJ (29:03.726)
When you talk about Africana and Mesoamerican philosophy, you're talking about that oral tradition. How do you study a predominantly oral tradition?
Peter Adamson (29:17.489)
Yeah, that's a great question. And actually, it's not only a phenomenon that happens in these places we consider to be kind of like outside the boundaries of written culture. Because if you think about it, the like, for example, the poems of Homer are oral works, right? And they were transmitted orally for many generations before being written down. And the same thing is true for the Vedas in India.
PJ (29:35.506)
Yeah, right.
Peter Adamson (29:45.069)
or I mean, if you read the Upanishads, the early Upanishads, you're reading oral texts that just happen to have been written down, okay? So actually the contrast people often have in mind is that there's oral culture, which is very hard to study for obvious reasons, because it doesn't stick around. And then there's written culture, which is like Aristotle sitting down and writing. That's not by any means such a strong dichotomy as people think. And actually even Aristotle,
A lot of people think that at least some of his works are records of lectures that he gave. So even Aristotle might be oral philosophy in some sense. Another example would be Socrates, right? Socrates didn't write anything, but he's still a very famous philosopher. And in fact, scholars of African oral traditions love to mention the example of Socrates because he's a famous philosopher who didn't write. So I would say that situations with Mesopotamia, not Mesopotamia, sorry, Mesoamerica,
PJ (30:16.204)
Right, right.
Peter Adamson (30:42.001)
Mesopotamia is also an interesting case, but let's think about Mesoamerica, which I don't know that much about since I haven't done podcasts on it yet, but I hope to. there actually, there is a very large corpus of texts because we have these reports that were written by the Spanish conquistadors when they got to the Americas and they wanted to convert these people and do worse things to them. And so in an effort to understand what they were dealing with, they wrote down these reports saying, okay, here's what they think.
PJ (30:44.374)
Yeah.
Peter Adamson (31:11.281)
about religion, here's their cultural practices, et cetera. And you can extract a lot of philosophy from those sources. So actually there you are dealing with written texts, even though you're not dealing with written texts that were necessarily written by the actors you're interested in. You also have like archeology that you can draw on, right? And you have inscriptions, right? So it's not, we're not necessarily dealing with a purely oral phenomenon there. I think the purest case I know,
of a philosophical tradition that's really only oral would be Africa. And so what we're talking here about here is indigenous groups of people living in Africa. Let's say the Yoruba or the Akan or the various Bantu peoples. And there are books written about their philosophical views. So this goes back to the work of a Belgian missionary named Placid Tempos, who very much in the spirit of what the Spanish conquistadors were doing.
He was dealing with, he was like in Africa doing missionary work and he said, these people have philosophical views. And then he wrote them down and his version of African philosophy looks suspiciously like some things that would have been going on in French philosophy of his own time, which, interesting.
PJ (32:29.486)
Yeah, right. That's gotta be a problem. I even hear talk about the Spanish version. I'm like, I'm sure that that's there's a lens there.
Peter Adamson (32:34.077)
Yeah.
Peter Adamson (32:37.863)
Yeah, of course, that's a huge problem is that it infects the, mean, you have to think about the reporter as well. Or, you know, the Spanish would have been very interested in like, what do these people think about God? Right. And they're just unproblematically assuming that they must have a version of the Christian God who they worship. Right. But actually this project of temples then gets picked up even by some African scholars like John MBT would be a good example. And they start putting forward claims about
the philosophical views that are tacitly present in these oral traditions. And so the oral traditions would be things that have been handed down through the generations, perhaps over many, many, many generations. So you might even think this goes back centuries, right? If not longer. And you have things like religious accounts of the creation of the universe. You have things like just stories that have a kind of ethical upshot. You have things like
proverbs, which are actually often mined for philosophical ideas. And this led people like Temples and MBT to put forward very complex claims and very dramatic claims sometimes about what the Africans believe philosophically. This was then criticized on a number of grounds, methodological grounds. One obvious problem with it is that there was a tendency to paint with too broad a brush and to like, you know,
hang out with one particular group of people in modern day Ghana, let's say, and then say, okay, this is what Africans think, right? Which is sort of be like going to a village in rural France and interviewing them, learning about their customs and sayings and so on, and then saying, this is what Europeans think, right? So that was obviously unsustainable, but people pulled back from that and then started writing about like the Akhan theory of the mind, right?
PJ (34:13.763)
You
Peter Adamson (34:32.657)
And that and there I think you're really getting to a project that sounds a little bit more feasible and plausible. So you collect a lot of anthropological ethnographic evidence by talking to Akan people. And then you sort of think about what the implications of it are or the tacit assumptions behind it, or even think about the words that they use, the vocabulary. So, for example, some of the work in this area
points out that there seem to be various Akhan words that somehow correlate to the soul or the mind, but there's more than one. And then they will tell you, well, this is the part that survives after you die, or this is the part that leads you through into the world of the ancestors. This is the part that's actually deciding what to do every day. So they seem to have different functions. And then you could think about how does that map on to?
theories of the mind we find in other cultures. This is how it works, or this is how it's supposed to work. Maybe one other idea I should mention here is that there was someone named Henry Odera Oruka who developed a method that he called sage philosophy, where his idea was instead of just collecting information about what entire peoples think, we should look for the real philosophers.
Because philosophy isn't just everybody, whatever they like people say in the market. That's not what it is in Europe either, right? Even in Athens, right? The philosophers weren't just all of the Athenians. They were Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. So what he wanted to do was go find the philosophers. So what he would do is he and his collaborators would go into rural African areas and sort of just turn up and say, who's the wisest person in the town, right?
man or woman, and then they would sit down and interview them and get their ideas. They had a kind of standard list of questions they would ask. It was like a philosophical questionnaire. And then he wrote books about this phenomenon that he called sage philosophy, where he said, okay, here are the wise people that I managed to find in Africa. Look, this is kind of an indigenous kind of philosophy. And this was also very controversial, whether this makes sense.
Peter Adamson (36:58.791)
at a methodological level. And I think it's all really fascinating, both in terms of like, the actual material you find, like that Akhan theory of mind, very interesting, but also at the level of sort of forcing us to think about what philosophy is, what it could be, can it, is it meaningful to talk about philosophy in the absence of text? If it could exist without text, how would you access it? All these things are really interesting kind of meta philosophical issues.
PJ (37:28.258)
That is fascinating. Yeah, we don't need to get into his methodology there. That immediately brings to mind some questions, that's a little, I think, two into the weeds. Fascinating idea, though. As you're talking about these different traditions, the very little that I've done in this area, one of the reoccurring questions, I'd love to hear your answer, is what do you see among the different traditions?
In the West, have a very specific kind of relationship between things like philosophy, art, and religion. Especially starting into the modern period, those things start to split and become their own things. Where you don't see that as much in other traditions, as I understand. Can you speak to what it means to do philosophy where it's not so separate in other traditions? What is the...
What do you see as the value of that? What do you see as, how does that make what you do different?
Peter Adamson (38:30.309)
Yeah, that's a great question. And actually, I think what people often miss or like lose sight of is how unusual that is, that we do think of philosophy as, for example, we think of it as purely secular and completely unattached to religion, which is like a really weird idea, historically speaking. So this is an idea that has only existed in European culture for a few hundred years. Other than, I mean,
PJ (38:49.43)
Yeah.
PJ (38:55.787)
you
Peter Adamson (38:57.825)
religion and philosophy are very closely knit in all other times and places as far as I know. And actually, it's not even always true of European philosophy since the Enlightenment, that religion gets pulled apart from philosophy so much, and yet a lot of people think this is somehow built into what philosophy is, that it's somehow non -religious. That's a real fundamental mistake, I think. At least if you're trying to understand the history of philosophy, it's a very bad way.
It's a bad place to start from because you won't understand anything other than the last like two and a half centuries of philosophy in Europe, right? Cause you've already like missed one of the most important things from the get go. It's an interesting thing also to think about why that happened. And that's a long story at the moment. since I've been covering the reformation on the podcast, I think it has a lot to do with that. So I think that what happened in the reformation is that everyone
tried to convince and or use violence to compel other people to accept their interpretation of Christianity. And we had the wars of religion and nobody wins, right? And so eventually everyone kind of grudgingly agrees to create a public space in which you can talk about things without assuming your religious views because the only alternative was
continuing to kill each other, right? And so very ironically, the whole idea of a kind of secular political space that's religion neutral is something that happened because of Luther and the whole Reformation is certainly not what he had in mind at all, but it is a kind of unintended consequence of it, I think. So that's why we get this very unusual situation in Europe. Another thing you mentioned there is
PJ (40:42.051)
No.
Peter Adamson (40:53.993)
art and that's really interesting. Actually the most recent episode I released with the podcast is about Michelangelo's Sistine's chapel paintings and Dürer's, Albrecht Dürer's self -portrait from 1500 talking about how they reflect what was going on in philosophy of the time. And in general, I think it's really interesting to think about how literature and art and also theater, other art forms, music.
how they interact with the history of philosophy. And I've tried to cover that as I went along. Like I did a lot of episodes on Shakespeare, for example. I have an episode on Indian theater. We're gonna try to cover Chinese music and Chinese religion and the China podcasts. And I think that it's actually very valuable to understand that philosophy is very much bound up with all of these other cultural forms and phenomena.
And in fact, I was actually just talking to someone last night, I was interviewing someone else last night, who works on the German reception of Indian philosophy in the Romantic period. His name is Owen Ware, he's in Toronto. And he wrote a book about what these romantics like Schlegel and Schelling and also female philosopher, von Günther Ode, about what they made of texts like the Bhagavad Gita.
And he was saying to me just last night that one of the things that they really liked about the Gita and other Indian works is that they were both literature and philosophy at the same time, which is what they were trying to do. Right. So someone like Goethe, for example, he was like, excellent. This is what I want. And you can see how that also would be reflected in someone like Nietzsche, right. In fact, mean, Nietzsche is also...
Peter Adamson (42:47.431)
that is an attempt to recreate a kind of text that used to exist, right? So a literature that is also philosophical. And I think you could argue that the peeling away of philosophy from these other parts of human activity has had both benefits and also disadvantages because
So the benefits are, it allows you to like really rigorously and precisely focus in on just the philosophical issue, right? But the disadvantage is that you've decoupled philosophy from this much more richer embedded range of things that exist in human life. And I'm kind of glad that there's both. I'm glad that there's philosophy that's secular and non -literary and so on. Like I like modern day analytic philosophy and I value it for that.
PJ (43:36.195)
Hmm.
Peter Adamson (43:45.641)
for its purity, its isolation, its rigor. But I think it's also really interesting to look at philosophy that's not like that.
PJ (43:55.978)
Part of the reason I asked and I, you know, I said art and that's a problematic term anyways in philosophy. but even just talking about cultural practices, you're talking about archeology and you're talking about oral traditions. I mean, you even mentioned in the context of philosophy, you mentioned Homer, right? And we would think of that as this kind of artistic thing, but then you look at Indian philosophy, Chinese music and these kinds of cultural practices might be a better way to define that sort of thing.
essential to what is going on. So thank you for taking the time to kind of ruminate through that, meditate on that. You've started to put out a book version of the podcast and I want to be respectful of your time here. So I'll ask a couple more questions and then let you go. But as we look at kind of why move more, if I can put it this way, towards a more formal
Kind of consolidation why what's the value of a book versus a podcast and what's the value of a podcast versus a book?
Peter Adamson (45:00.649)
Yeah, that's a good question. mean, maybe that's not something I thought about a lot when it was happening. So when I started, I didn't intend it to be books. I thought it was a podcast. And in fact, in general, the extent to which I didn't take what I was doing nearly seriously enough is astounding. I mean, I thought what I was doing is I would sit down for like maybe 45 minutes a week, just bang out a kind of rough script.
PJ (45:19.242)
Hahaha.
Peter Adamson (45:30.771)
just drawing from what I already knew about the topic. Like, OK, Parmenides, eh, I've taught Parmenides. I sort of type up a few thousand words on Parmenides, record it, put it in the internet, done. And also, thought that if I was lucky, a couple of thousand people might listen to it, total, ever. So.
And in fact, I think I even remember thinking, well, maybe my colleagues won't notice that I'm doing this. And that would be fine because they might think it's kind of silly, right? So I.
PJ (46:09.678)
this into context for our audience. think what I just saw is something like over 25 million listens.
Peter Adamson (46:15.913)
Yeah, that's old though. It's actually more like 45.
PJ (46:20.622)
So thank you. Thank you putting it into context. Yep. So about 45 million listens. Yep. Sorry. Continue.
Peter Adamson (46:20.999)
if you've put everything together. Yeah, right. So I underestimated at that level, I also underestimated the extent to which I'd eventually have to get into material I didn't know about already. And then the other thing is that I got, guess I got to like Hellenistic philosophy or so, so like Stoics, Epicureans. And then I thought, wait a minute, I have a book.
on my hard drive here, just waiting to be published, right? So all I had to do is take these scripts and kind of revise them. And it's a book about free Socratic's Plato and Aristotle. Why not do that? that actually, and so that means that when I was originally doing it, I was only writing it as notes to record from. So actually those needed a lot of work to turn them into a book. But once I thought, no, these are also books.
It actually affects the way I write it. So when I'm writing the scripts now, I add footnotes, I add all the references of what I'm drawing on and everything. because it's a lot easier to do it then than later. Right. and maybe it's also made it a bit more detailed, right. Because, you know, it has to stand up on the page. So it can't be kind of vague or whatever. so I think maybe you can tell the, certainly you can definitely tell the difference between the early podcasts and the ones I do now.
just in terms of the level of detail and research that's gone into it. But I think also the way it's written even is still, I still definitely have in mind I'm writing for someone who's listening, but I also have in mind I'm writing in a way that's supposed to be nice to read. So I'm trying to do those two things at once. But your question was really about like the different advantages of the two formats. So I think...
Obviously the biggest advantage of the podcast is just the huge potential audience. So you're never going to write a book that's going to be, I mean, at least I'm never going to write a book that's going to be bought 45 million times. Right. I wish. Right. So my book.
PJ (48:25.944)
Yeah, yeah.
Like your book and like Harry Potter and the Bible, know, like just like next to each other, right? Yeah.
Peter Adamson (48:33.37)
Exactly, like the three things, right? So yeah, Harry Potter might be pulling ahead of the Bible now. I'm not sure we had to check the publishing stats. So I'd be happy to be third place, quite frankly. So.
PJ (48:41.07)
That's insane. Yeah.
PJ (48:48.27)
You wouldn't be talking to me. You'd be like on your own private island somewhere. Yeah.
Peter Adamson (48:51.987)
Well, would still want to talk to you. Absolutely. From my private island though. I'd be like with a pina colada floating in my... Right? Exactly. So I think that, I mean, one thing about the book is that it's got all of the... It's got things like maps. It's got footnotes telling you where to find the... Like, what am I drawing on?
PJ (48:54.246)
I appreciate that. Yes, yes. yeah, on the beach, you're like incredible setup.
Peter Adamson (49:21.257)
it's telling you all the secondary literature. So I actually do put up further reading on the website. So I'm basically telling you there what I read. and to some extent what I would have read if I had had more time, but mostly it's things I've read. so it's like a, you get a bibliography, but you don't get, so if you actually look at the books, especially the ones that I've written more recently, there will be, I don't know, like it's, so each chapter is maybe between three and 4 ,000 words.
And there's usually going to be like 20 footnotes at least. So that shows you, can like follow up in the secondary literature to see where I got everything that I'm saying about all this stuff. Also, of course, for people who are hearing impaired, the books are good. And for that reason, with the help of someone who knows a lot about voice recognition software, he actually got in touch with me and told me this was possible. We actually put up transcripts.
of the interviews, because some of the podcasts I do are interviews like this. And some of them are me reading from a script, trying to sound like I'm not reading, but I'm still reading from a script. So the scripts become books and the podcast interviews become transcripts. So actually in theory, eventually the whole thing is readable. My mom's actually deaf. So it's important to me that people who have hearing issues
PJ (50:28.024)
You
Peter Adamson (50:44.263)
can get access to all this stuff. So that's important. But I think also, I mean, there's something about podcasts that is very, I mean, I wouldn't say it's in one ear and out the other, but as someone who listens to a lot of podcasts, I know that the information doesn't stick all that well, right? I mean, for example, the listener could now do the test on themselves, right? So,
If someone said to them, can you explain everything Peter said 20 minutes ago about African oral traditions? They'd be like, well, yeah. And they could probably give a summary, like several sentences, but they wouldn't be able to recapitulate the entire thing because our brains just don't work like that. Also people when they're, when they're listening to podcasts are usually doing something else at the same time. Right. Like I don't think most podcasts listeners just sit and listen to me. They're.
PJ (51:27.607)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter Adamson (51:43.581)
commuting, like they're driving, or they're on the train, or they're, I actually listen to podcast while I'm a lot, or washing the dishes. So you know, you're kind of maybe two thirds listening to it, right? That's all very, very different from a reading experience. So a reading experience is much more focused, and you're much more likely to retain what you're getting, I think. So I kind of.
And also some people just don't listen to podcasts, right? So I thought for all these reasons, it would be nice to have them in this books.
PJ (52:19.606)
on the flip side, and you've mentioned it's just the listenership, the huge audience who have the podcast, that there is something nice about the casual, like it is a little bit one ear out the other, but you're able to grow and to educate yourself while doing other things. so that's kind of, those are the trade -offs. Yeah.
Peter Adamson (52:37.607)
Yeah, absolutely. And I do that too. I do actually I do that by producing the podcast. Of course, I'm the one who's learning most doing it because I actually had to go off and read all this stuff and think about how to put it into a podcast. But I also listen to a lot of podcasts. And, you know, if you ask me to like explain the French Revolution, I could do a much better job than I would have been able to that I hadn't listened to Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast.
PJ (53:04.898)
Yeah, absolutely. So two more questions. I want to be respectful of your time here, but I'm sure you've gotten this question before and it probably annoys you. what are some of your favorite, what would you say are some of the best hidden gems when you've been going through these minor figures that kind of surprised you? Someone that you, or a couple people that you're like, I really enjoyed that. I really needed that, that fit, gave me an entire new view on things.
who are a couple people like that.
Peter Adamson (53:34.121)
Hmm. Okay, yeah, so I mean, I could almost, I'd almost have to do it for each tradition. But just to take a few people at random. So one of them is definitely Nagarjuna. So Nagarjuna is a Buddhist philosopher from around the second century CE. And he's, you could think of him as our kind of radical skeptic. He's the founder of a...
PJ (53:41.09)
Yeah.
Peter Adamson (54:01.395)
grand tradition of Buddhism called Madhyamaka philosophy. And he is trying to argue, so Madhyamaka means the middle way, if I'm remembering right. And the idea is that he's not rejecting the reality of everything. So he's not a nihilist or a total skeptic, nor is he someone who believes in what the Brahminical Vedic tradition believes, namely permanent substances like tables and also the self.
which persist over time. So as a Buddhist, of course, he doesn't believe in that. Buddhists think that everything is transient and is only made up of these sort of fleeting properties that come together. Okay, so as a Buddhist, he's rejecting that, but he's also rejecting nihilism. And so what he's trying to say is that the reality of everything is always dependent on everything else.
And so he has all of these very complicated arguments about how something like, for example, motion is not an independent reality, but is dependent on something else, namely the location of something at different times. But locations are real either, or at least they're not, they are real, but they're not independently real. That's his point. And so he tries to show that everything that is has its being.
by being related to something else. That's at least one way of thinking about what he's saying. And so you could, again, you would think of him as a kind of skeptic or as someone who's trying to stop skepticism from going too far. And he's just brilliant. And in addition, he has something that I really like about him is that he's very sensitive to accusations that his philosophy is sort of self undermining because people could say things like, well, it sounds like what you're saying is that you're
philosophy is only relatively true, right? So, and this is something that often gets thrown at skeptics, like, well, why aren't you skeptical about your skepticism? And then he had a whole, he has a whole treatise responding to that kind of objection. So that's really cool. So that would be an example. I'm trying to think of a nice example of something I've done recently that's interesting. I mean, I've covered a lot of female,
PJ (56:06.903)
Mm.
Peter Adamson (56:23.747)
figures from the medieval and early modern period who I thought were really fascinating. Maybe my favorite is someone named Marguerite Poiret who wrote around the turn of the 14th century and she was actually put to death because she refused to disown this book that she wrote which was a dialogue in which her soul is talking to personifications of other
concepts like reason, for example, and love. she's actually, again, she's kind of skeptical in a way because she's a mystic. So she's trying to like put church authority and morality and rationality into a kind of lower place to make room for this sort of annihilating encounter with God. Just an amazing book. And again, a very literary book, I would say.
PJ (57:18.488)
Hmph. Hmph.
Peter Adamson (57:22.513)
So that was really cool. I loved a lot of the stuff I did for Africana philosophy as well. So someone who kind of sticks out to me there would be, well, maybe I have to mention W .E .B. Du Bois because my co -author, Cheekette Jeffers, loves him so much. And I think he's amazing too. But something I really, like really enjoyed a lot working on there was Malcolm X.
who I know is not like a minor figure, but he's not someone who you would usually think of as a philosopher, but he's really interesting philosophically. Someone else who's sort of along the same lines in some ways is Franz Fanon, who's a philosopher from Martinique who was involved in the Algerian revolution. And both of them have these very confrontational kind of challenging views because they're arguing in favor of the use of violence.
PJ (57:49.539)
Hmm.
Peter Adamson (58:19.547)
in response to political oppression. So this is a very challenging thing to think through. Although I think Fanon is not, with Malcolm, he's really like arguing that violence is justified and is tactically an astute tool to use. Whereas Fanon is more like interested in the psychological situation that leads to violence. So he's really interesting. But I mean,
My favorite philosopher is usually the one I'm just writing about at the moment.
PJ (58:51.202)
Hahaha
It's a hazard of your trade.
Peter Adamson (58:56.797)
Yeah, exactly. I have to say I have really been enjoying doing Confucianism, which is what I've been doing with Karen for the China series. And someone like Mengzi, who's something called Mencius in English, that's what he was called in Latin by the Jesuits. He's a really interesting thinker and it's really fascinating to see how he develops the ideas that we find in Confucius. So he's probably my favorite.
Confucian thinker. And then everyone's favorite Chinese philosophical text is the Zhuangzi, which we haven't gotten to, but that's amazing. So this is this Taoist text. So there's the Daodejing, right, which people know about. The next big Taoist text is the Zhuangzi, which has all of these amazing stories about animals and craftspeople and so on. And that's really wonderful. A lot of fun to read. So yeah, but it's all fun. I love it.
pretty much everything. kind of, you know, I really enjoy working on things like, you know, 16th century scholasticism as well, like a very dry and so on. like I recently did an episode on someone named Louis de Molina and he has this technical idea about how God could know in advance what I'm going to do while not preventing me from being free to do it. And I found that really fascinating. So it's a lot less fun than the Shuangzi, but I still really enjoyed it.
I very broad taste apparently. That's an advantage for what I'm doing.
PJ (01:00:23.606)
like the yeah no well I mean that's part of the project I mean you would expect someone who's doing a history of philosophy without gaps to have broad taste that would that would make sense
Peter Adamson (01:00:36.221)
Yes, it's an important asset. If you're bored easily. Although in a way, short attention span is good. Because I have to resist the tendency or temptation to think, I should spend more time thinking about this. No, I should write the script and move on. Actually, my co -author, Chike, who I did the Africana series with, he's like, I think in some ways, probably a more, maybe he's just a better academic.
PJ (01:00:38.39)
Yes.
PJ (01:00:43.881)
Yeah
Peter Adamson (01:01:05.095)
because he would always get super into like whatever it was. And, you know, he basically wanted to write a paper about everything, like a research paper, you know, he's like, or even a book. And I kept saying, Chike, just need a podcast. Come on, Keep it simple.
PJ (01:01:13.614)
the
PJ (01:01:19.161)
Yeah.
PJ (01:01:24.952)
So one thank you for coming on the show and I would love to ask this last question before we kind of wrap up for our audience besides listening to the podcast or buying the book if Which I think is just a tremendous resource. I think you're doing something really amazing with this What would you recommend to our audience just as like a takeaway for this week something to kind of meditate on or something to do? After listening to this for this last hour
What's something they should do this week?
Peter Adamson (01:01:57.897)
that's an interesting question. So I think that there, that one thing I actually always worry about with my podcast is that it might get in the way of people actually going and reading the philosophy. And I think that that's something that people should do. And I, and I hope that it doesn't have that effect, but it actually makes people go back to the text to see, okay, well, like, what is this that he was talking about? Right. And that's not always easy.
PJ (01:02:09.752)
Hmm.
Peter Adamson (01:02:23.473)
I mean, maybe the texts aren't that easily available and they're not necessarily that easy to understand like Molina, like what I was just talking about, know, God's foreknowledge or something. You're not going to just pick up Molina even in an English translation if you can find one and start reading, like, this is kind of cool and interesting. No, you're going to be like, this is boring and difficult. But I think reading something like the Schwanze or actually Plato's dialogues, an old favorite, right?
PJ (01:02:41.443)
Ha ha!
Peter Adamson (01:02:50.909)
I mean, that's what got me into philosophy, was reading playlist dialogues. And these texts work. So these things that are more literary, maybe, the Bug of Ad Gita would be another great choice. So to pick a text, like if you've never read any philosophy before, to pick a text like that, that kind of works as a literary text, but also has real philosophical depth. And I think those would be actually three nice choices, so easy to find.
And also there's multiple translations of all of those. read something like Plato's Phaedo or Mino, maybe not the Republic as your first thing, because that's quite long and challenging. Read that, read the Bhagavad Gita, read the Shwangsa. These are great things to get into. And they're also texts that, on the one hand, you could spend the rest of your life thinking about them, which of course is not what I'm... I I have spent a lot of my life thinking about Plato, but...
A lot of these texts I'm only thinking about for a few weeks while I'm writing the script, right? But you can think about them forever. But on the other hand, they really also reward reading immediately. So some things you pick them up and you're like, I don't know what's going on here at all. But with Plato or the Gita, you would kind of have an idea about what was going on immediately, especially if it's a good translation. So I would recommend that.
PJ (01:04:17.038)
Great answer, Dr. Adamson. Such a joy to talk to you today. Thank you for coming on.
Peter Adamson (01:04:22.268)
Thank you. was a real pleasure to be on here. Thanks.