Listening to P.E.L. Chronologically?

Listener Nathan J. writes: “I recently started listening to your podcast and came up with the idea of listening to them in the chronological order of when the source material was written. My theory being that doing this will be a way for me to see how philosophical thought has evolved over the years. Anyway would you happen to have such a list or will I have to do a bunch of research and make the list myself?”

My answer, which I thought might be of general interest: I’m afraid we’ve been pretty spotty historically at this point. Our dips into ancient Greece have all so far been in contrast to more modern figures, i.e. we did Aristotle specifically as an alternative to Mill and Kant in ethics, and Plato on knowledge to contrast with Hume. Our approach to aesthetics has been particularly ahistorical, reading two modern figures and just bringing up older stuff as a side issue whenever it’s seemed relevant. We hope eventually to have a good historical selection covering all the major topics (metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, politics, aesthetics, phil. of science) but really aren’t even close to that point yet.

That said, here’s a roughly chronological list (you can figure out which episodes these are by putting someone’s name in the “search” box to the right and down a bit on any of our blog pages):

[updated 7/13/11]:

Three Plato, Aristotle, Chuang Tzu, Nagarjuna, Machiavelli, Montaigne, then Descartes, Leibniz, two Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham/Mill (utilitarianism), Rousseau, two Kant, three Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, two James, Frege, Russell, two Wittgenstein, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Camus, Heisenberg (quantum physics), the phil of Mind episode (Turing et al), Arthur Danto, Nelson Goodman, Patricia Churchland.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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