Hello, welcome to the OPV,
African and South Asian Fox News broadcast series This Joiner's Till Everything Is Roundabout's by the Subthemes African Nation.
Gorski's Anybody's Imagination of our Public Policy Genoese.
This week was November 2020.
Working together, we as students begin to acquire our traditions and to study in your American philosophical institutions
while investigating our own assumptions and the way our traditions present these recipes and beyond.
We intend to participate in meteoritic the tax and spend representation, respect and resources required to transform our minds.
The. And actually. Welcome to Oxford Public Philosophy's podcast series in continuation of the discussion girls have hosted this year,
Oxford Public Philosophy is a student life journalist based thought critically questioning what
philosophy is and how we are doing it in form and content for the second turn of the journal.
The focus has been on African philosophy, South Asian philosophy and critical pedagogy.
As part of our ethos of public philosophy, we hosted a series of discussion groups engaging with these fields of thought.
We're now hosting the series of podcast interviews, conversations critically reflecting on our engagement with African and South Asian philosophies.
My name is Ruth and today I'll be talking to Professor Peter Adamson and Professor Teekay Jeffries about the History Philosophy podcast,
which has been enormously influential in guiding terms of our journal.
Professor Adamson is the host of the podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of major philosophers, as well as the lesser known figures of the tradition.
Professor Cheekier Jeffers co-wrote the series for this podcast.
The series of episodes examines philosophy originating from Africa and the African Diaspora.
So thank you for being here, sir.
I thought we could get started with the history of this dreadful history podcast and maybe talk about how you came up
with the idea and how you got started and how you decided what episodes you're going to make and things like that.
Well, I guess that one would be for me, since I was involved before G.K was high cheek, by the way, or Guzzi.
Well, it started in two thousand and ten, so it's been running for more than ten years now.
And it really started because I was listening to a lot of podcasts myself,
including some with some philosophy podcasts like philosophy bites, for example.
And I also was listening to a lot of podcasts that were just about history.
So I was particularly influenced by one called The History of Rome, which is hosted by someone named Mike Duncan,
who's gone on to do another really brilliant podcast about the history of political revolutions.
And it sort of struck me that it would be really cool if someone did a podcast that dealt with philosophy in the style of a history podcast.
I sort of started at the beginning and moved forward inch by inch without leaving anything out.
And then I thought, well, even though what I really want is that someone else would make this podcast so I could listen to it.
Probably no one will. And I'm a specialist in ancient and mediaeval philosophy, which is the first thing that would have to be covered.
So maybe I should do it. And I actually hesitated for quite a long time.
I don't know if I've ever told this to Chieko, but I mean,
I spend almost a full year wondering if I should do it because I thought oh this will be a lot of work.
But then eventually I just thought the idea was too good not to use.
And so I started at the wrong place actually because I started with the price Craddock's, which seemed like the obvious thing to do.
And then subsequently when we developed the idea of the Africana philosophy series and maybe I can say a little bit about how that came into being,
we realised that we needed to go back actually quite a bit earlier than the earliest philosophers who wrote in Greek and cover Egyptian philosophy,
ancient Egyptian philosophy. And as kind of context for that, we also covered Babylonian philosophy.
So at this point, the podcast covers everything from ancient Egypt up to about the Renaissance.
And it also goes later than that because in the African series, we've now gotten up through like the 19th century,
we're now in the early 20th century, we're going to keep going and covered the rest of the 20th century.
And then with Janardan Gennari, who was another co-author, we covered classical Indian philosophy.
So there's quite a lot of it already. There's already more than five hundred episodes total.
And maybe you can say something about how we got into the Africanness areas.
Yeah, I was just about to ask about where you started with your research and how you
developed and in what ways that surprised you in the ways that episodes go.
With respect to the kind of serious. I think that the prehistory, so to speak, of the kind of cities would be the fact that.
I managed to be a listener of the podcast from the beginning, so I do remember.
I think it was probably Brian Lighter's website or blog, probably, that it had been announced,
and so so I'm pretty sure that only the first episode or maybe just a few episodes were available when I first started listening to the podcast.
And so I was a fan.
And the the one thing that that I had a complaint about was the idea of it being called the history of philosophy without any gaps.
When the first episode, as it was then in existence, you know, indicated that there would be continent sized gaps.
And so I was for that reason, very excited when.
Peter on the podcast blog was showing more openness to.
To expanding the series and. One story that I am very fond of is the fact that that you can actually.
See a specific conversation on the blog in which I am.
Encouraging the idea of. Expanding the cities and into and speaking of people that he could collaborate with,
I mentioned genetic engineering as someone to collaborate with in order to cover Indian philosophy.
And I also mentioned I think I mentioned more than one person, but one of the people I mentioned in terms of East Asian philosophy was Karen Lee,
with whom Peter will be covering Chinese philosophy in episodes to come.
That will be coming out after our Africanness series wraps up.
So apparently I was quite prophetic.
The one thing that I had no prophecy of in the context of making those remarks on the blog is that I would become a collaborator, too.
And and that that did not happen. Right at that point, I don't think.
I would have to, you know, scour the comments and so on to to get the the flow of events.
Down better, but. I do know that at some point.
While I think it was in response to Peter having mentioned, you know, oh, and possibly other stuff like Africa.
Right. I would have at some point said, you know, and by the way, as this is my area of speciality,
if you would like to discuss what would be involved in trying to cover that, then, you know, I would be happy to discuss that.
And and Peter's showed interest. So as I recall, we had a Skype conversation feel like that was the Skype era and we're in the zone, but time flies.
You know, we had a Skype conversation and it was great conversation.
And, you know, I remember that by the end of it, Peter seemed positively excited about covering Afrikaner philosophy.
Next after the series with co-written with Jonathan airing on Indian philosophy.
So that's the the the origins and.
I think that how the cooperative works with different co-authors probably differs from person to person, and that's something that Peter can speak to.
I mean. Certainly in my case, the first step was planning out, you know, what we would do, and I also was very used to the way that.
The series would kind of operate in three parts and so, you know.
There's, you know, the part of the podcast that came out is classical philosophy now on the website labelled,
I think more clearly is classical Greek philosophy. But, you know.
That was in three parts, it had reached the Craddock's and it had. Socrates and Plato and then had Aristotle, and so similarly,
I ended up with this three parts structure that we've used with the first part is focussed on precolonial African philosophy.
The second part is focussed on. The.
Development of. Philosophy in the era of slavery and colonialism, and the third part is focussed on the 20th century.
The first part, it's worth noting, is entitled Locating and Debating the Colonial African Philosophy,
because in addition to looking to colonial times, it is also about professional African philosophy and how professional African philosophy as a.
Subdiscipline sort of emerged as a debate around the status of precolonial.
Traditional. African philosophy.
Yeah, so anyway, that's a little bit about how it came to be and and the way forward, I mean, the other thing is beyond the beyond me planning it out.
As we've mentioned in an interview that's available on the podcast,
it's it's actually split pretty equally between us in terms of who does the first draught of an episode.
So, you know. Many and at times, depending on how things are going, it can even like maybe sometimes go sixty percent, something like that.
It's actually Peter who with some suggestions for me, has really done the the the basis for that episode as far as the first draught that I would,
that I would then revise and subtract anything I want and then, you know, the other half of the time it's me doing the first draught.
So. Yeah. Thank you, Lisa.
Maybe you can tell us a bit about working on the Indian philosophy episodes that you just married.
That was very different, actually, because I, first of all, had a somewhat better idea of what it would be involved in looking at Indian philosophy.
So as the story has just told kind of suggests, I went into African philosophy,
although actually we wound up calling it Africana philosophy because it includes philosophy in the diaspora.
I went into that with zero knowledge, really. I mean, like not even any idea of what you'd cover, what it would be about.
Right. And so for me, there's been a very strong learning curve where actually I think this may be useful for the listener,
because what's happened is that Cejka is sort of teaching me what's involved in the whole topic.
And then especially in the episodes where I write The First Draught, you're kind of getting the voice of someone who's learning about it.
As they're writing and reading, so I think that that's actually kind of nice,
the mixture of like an amateur and an expert that you get with those episodes.
And that's true to some extent with Indian philosophy, except that at least with Indian philosophy, that was, of course,
that was taught at King's College, London, where I used to teach and I had even examined it together with Janardan.
And so I knew a little bit about it. Like I wasn't surprised that we were talking about Buddhism in the Bhagavad Gita.
And I even knew that there were these so-called six Orthodox schools, innovative tradition.
So when I saw his list of what we were covering, I wasn't that surprised, I guess.
Whereas when I when she sent me the list of the Africana episodes, I was like,
my first reaction was, holy cow, I can't believe how much of this there is.
Like, this is going to take us a long time. And and also just like, oh, yeah.
Like we could have an episode about whatever gender and traditional African culture that.
What a cool idea. Right. So really, in that case, the that's been a pure learning experience for me.
But I have to say that I knew very little about classical Indian philosophy as well before I started.
So I knew about it like in the broadest of outlines, but I had never worked on any of it.
Read the secondary literature or read the primary literature in translation and so on.
One other big difference there is that with the exception of some episodes, which I wrote the first draught on,
Janardan agreed to do this series with me and then sort of didn't contact me for almost a full year.
And I began to wonder whether he had gotten cold feet.
And just as I was about to get back in touch with him and say, hey, Janardan, are we still really doing this?
He sent me the whole thing is like a single document.
So he sent me something like forty five episodes as one one chunk, which I was very surprised by.
And so I said when I was working on the Indian series, it was more like Jonathan's job was already done and I was adding stuff.
So where I thought, oh, we could have it, we could have an episode here, or maybe we need to split this into two episodes or something.
I would kind of contact him for advice and ask him about things like what can I read?
And and that would also obviously I ran all of the scripts past him.
We also had to talk about things like who to interview in the series,
because the podcast we haven't mentioned this, but the podcast is a mix between scripted episodes that I record.
Even when she writes them, I recorded them. So they're scripted episodes.
And there's episodes where we have an expert interview guest which are more like this, what we're doing now.
And so anyway, Janeane was involved the whole time, but he was much it was much more like he handed it over to me and then I took it from there.
And I think both approaches have worked.
I mean, I really like the fact that with Cejka and and I, when we're working through it, we're kind of playing off each other.
And since I'm learning from his scripts as we go along, it helps me write the next thing I have to write, you know?
But generally speaking, I. I certainly have enjoyed working with both of them, of course, and learnt a lot by doing both.
I will and I mean, the other thing is just how amazing it's been to get this kind of crash course on these two.
Amazing. Bodies of philosophical literature and get to do that together with the world's leading experts, I mean, it's amazing.
So I think I've probably gotten more out of it than any listener could hope to get out of it.
But I hope the listener gets a lot out of it, too. And one of the things that strikes me about doing this history philosophy contest,
and it's something that came up in the discussion groups as well when we were doing,
you know, we had a sounding board for a discussion group on philosophy and do something you
really talked about and then was for the South Asian philosophy discussion groups.
We had one come speak to us about philosophy of language and talk about Sanskrit and appropriate and like grandma as philosophy.
And I mean, I was wondering what it has been like to do this sort of, you know,
especially like the Indian philosophy episodes that are sort of like classical Indian philosophy and then the precolonial kind of philosophy,
you know, to do it in English and to sometimes have to translate concepts or, you know,
give an idea of what a word means that can't necessarily be or easily translated into English.
Well, one reason I didn't originally plan to try to cover Indian philosophy or Chinese philosophy, for that matter,
is that I thought it was sort of inappropriate for someone to do that who can't read the original primary texts.
So like for Western European philosophy, plus Islamic philosophy, which I always plan to include, I can read Greek, Arabic and Latin.
So that takes you all the way up to the rise of vernacular literature in early modernity.
And I can read French and German too.
So I can basically I can read almost all of Western European philosophy plus Islamic philosophy, except for like Kierkegaard.
So so that in fact, I thought that was one reason why it made sense for me to do it, because at least I can, like, check that.
I mean, it's not like I'm reading everything that I ever read for the podcast in the original language.
I would take a long time, but I can at least check the original when I want to.
And also I can speak with some authority about what the words mean.
And so that's why when I decided it was a good idea to tackle these other traditions, I've always tried to get co-authors.
However, African philosophy presents some unusual challenges there because, of course, a lot of desperate African philosophy is in French or English.
So that's no problem. I mean, she from Canada so as French is quite good.
But then we have the problem of African languages, which I think would be fair to say we don't speak all of those and in fact, nobody does.
So maybe you can say something about that and how complex an issue that is, because that's really interesting, I think.
Yeah, well, the. The interesting thing.
Well, you know, as your question sort of suggested.
You might compare the question of your ability to read Sanskrit and how that relates to covering classical Indian,
possibly with something like the question of can you read ancient Egyptian?
Right. And we did a series of episodes on ancient Egypt, you know, and here is where.
Mention that not only. Did we do the podcast without me actually being able to read ancient Egyptian,
but I have in fact published an article that a lot of people seem to like, the tale of the African peasants.
And I also cannot read ancient Egyptian philosophy.
And that actually was, you know, separate and apart from them before even doing the podcast.
That was something that I had to think about.
Like, well, so I do this and, you know.
I don't know why it's sort of reminding me of what Peter's saying about the podcast.
I mean, I ended up sort of saying that, you know, I think I do need to do this instead of wait for others to.
And, you know, I felt like, well, you know, I could I could wait until.
You know, I get the time to really put into learning to read ancient Egyptian before trying to do any scholarship on it, but, you know,
if I'm really trying to stimulate this as an area of research, I might as well get going,
so to speak, you know, and and in addition to that, I certainly.
There are a number of things that I mean, I you know, I learnt a lot about how the ancient Egyptian language and reading it works and then, you know.
I read every translation I could get my hands on and, you know, made a careful comparison of where they differ and things of that nature.
So I did things to sort of somewhat compensate for my for my lack of ability to be in the original.
But, yeah, that story, I thought is relevant to to and just an interesting thing for students and researchers to think about,
you know, when are you allowed to intervene? So, you know, in terms of covering these kinds of topics.
In any case. Once you move beyond.
Ancient Egyptian also is because we covered, you know, philosophy coming out of Ethiopia and we had a piece of philosophy in sub-Saharan.
Islamic philosophy in sub-Saharan Africa, which, of course,
actually did include text in Arabic so that we can replace that language, I know to have facility with the original.
In that case, however, it is also the case that some of that is in African languages has and Fulani being the biggest examples.
And so, you know, for example, smile, who we covered.
Wrote her poetry in Arabic and Pazz and won.
Right. So then, you know, moving beyond that, then you you get to the part,
the part of the podcast where we were breaking it up thematically because we were.
Interested in talking about philosophy in oral traditions and at that point of the podcast,
there's not a you know, there's not a real chronology to to be able to to have in place.
And, you know, even if there was a chronology, then you have the question of, like,
how you're going to bounce around the lake, the various places of the continent, I mean, and so.
I mean, at that point, actually, you and you end up.
You know, things end up being actually somewhat easy in terms of the the question of your ability to read in languages, you know, because, you know,
what we're drawing on then is the research that has been produced in a professional African philosophy first,
first and foremost, which is generally in English and French.
Right. And the ways that, you know, professional African philosophers have tried to, you know, capture concepts, ideas, themes in oral traditions.
And then another thing which I which I have commended Peter for before is that.
He did a lot of the first draughts in that section of the podcast and.
He had a tendency to. Really dig in not nearly to the literature by professional philosophers, but he spent a lot of time with.
Literature and anthropology, so again, most of that was actually in English,
so it didn't present to many reading difficulties that way, but really enriched the podcast in terms of bringing out these themes.
And, you know, yeah, I mean, one could you know, one could.
Do, you know, a whole. Longer series, sort of.
Covering all of the themes that. One could when one could find in anthropological texts, you know,
the way that you can think of that part of the series is that every theme that we're covering has been.
By professional philosophers themselves, treated as an area of serious interest and again,
I think that it is therefore enriched by the way, that Peter really moved beyond the literature by professional philosophers,
also to a lot of the literature by anthropologists,
something that there is that I was actually a little bit disconcerted while working on that at the fact that even though,
as I just said, we were reading anthropological and philosophical literature about these cultures in English or French, usually mostly in English,
actually, they would often say, oh, there's this saying in the Akan people or the Liuba people, and here's the saying in transliteration.
And it's some African language that obviously we can't read.
And even if we could read one of them, there's like 12 others that are being quoted writing the stuff that we're reading.
So, no, nobody knows all these languages. I don't think so.
They they will maybe give you the transliteration, maybe not. And then they'll say, and here's what it means.
And then they'll take a whole bunch of philosophical messages out of that.
And you have no way of second guessing their translation.
And a lot actually turns on the way they're translating it.
Right. So, for example,
in one that just in my head at the moment is that there's like a big discussion about how African traditional peoples have thought about time,
because this philosopher named John MBT argued that African tradition doesn't have
a conception of the future or at least doesn't have a conception of the long,
long future like the future way ahead. And he was interested in that because he thought it meant that traditional African
peoples couldn't understand Christian theology and the idea of the last judgement.
And so people criticised this and they say, well, here's here's a saying from I think this might be an icon saying this.
And the saying goes something like time. Flight time is like a bird.
It flies away before you can catch it or something to that effect. And then you wonder, well, OK, what's the word for time there?
Right. So to what extent does that actually correspond to our abstract notion of time or even find sayings in
some of the same literature where they're translating African words with English words like eternity.
And so you really wonder what's going on there?
Sometimes the scholars comment on this, like they'll say, oh, well, the word I'm translating as time here literally means seasons.
And then you think, oh, that's kind of difference, right?
And so so there are problems like that all the time, but I think it's inevitable, really.
I mean, even if someone became a career expert just on oral traditions in Africa, they would still have the same problem,
because you have to take account of the immense diversity of Africa as a continent and all these different cultures, all these different languages.
And so you're never going to be beyond the situation of having to take people's word for it as they report on languages that they have learnt.
Because you can learn all of them yourself. It's not possible. I'm can.
Yeah, yeah, I am I'm interested to add something, because I think that what Peter just said is true, but then it's interesting to think, well,
so but if you wanted to if you really wanted to try to be the best expert you could be and learn the least amount of languages that you had to learn,
you know, then then what? What might you do? And so I think that one thing that you would really want to do is learn Acom.
So, you know, that's referring to.
A language or a life or family of languages, depending on how you think of things, that is it's mostly in what is today Ghana,
although also one of the most spoken languages in Cote d'Ivoire, Foully is also in a common language.
So it's it's a language in that area of West Africa and for reasons that are probably.
You know. Historically explainable, but not necessarily obvious, I mean, that is an area that has that is a language that is a you know,
an ethnicity, you know, even say that has produced some of the most important African philosophers.
Right. So.
As I'm sort of already suggesting, right, like like like so Peter has to be right, because the fact is there's such a plethora of African languages.
But but then you have the interesting question of what will what does the tradition, as it has already developed, sort of give to you?
Right. One thing is an overrepresentation of kind philosophers.
And so by learning a con, you would be able to, for example.
Engage with the work of Kwame Chechi, which is very important, and, you know,
he is the best example of someone who's treating Proverbs as a key kind of philosophical text or.
But interestingly, in in my very first publication.
Professional reputation of my very first professional publication was on a book called.
Telebrands Reason introducing Afro Caribbean Philosophy by Padget Henry and it
is an engagement with his treatment of traditional African philosophy and.
The point I'm making at certain points is that he is.
Treating traditional African philosophy is as much less of a contentious thing than it is,
and one example that I end up using is the ways that he chooses to translate.
The terms of Korra and sons, something, if I'm remembering those terms, right, hopefully, I mean,
you know, like twenty four is what I'm talking about in terms of what I said a long time ago.
But, you know, he chooses to waste of translating those terms.
They are parts of the person, arguably.
Right. And, you know, and so I then made the point that, well, you actually have disagreements between different philosophies,
all of whom are written about how to translate those terms.
And so so that, you know, on the one hand illustrates the point that Peter was making about how,
you know, translation issues, you know, really do come up.
But also illustrates my point that learning a con would be a great idea if you want to, like, engage a lot of what's out there.
And then the other thing is that you you would, of course, want to.
Learn about new language, the Bantu language families, a huge language family, you know,
that is that reaches down to the bottom of the continents because languages like Zulu are Bantu and then also to the east of the continent.
And so Swahili, which is one of the most spoken African languages, is a Bantu language.
And that would help you for lots of reasons.
The very first I mean, the book that helped to shape professional African philosophy is The Discipline is a book called Bantu Philosophy,
where, you know, the language that's being drawn on a lot is.
Beluga, I mean, I'm sorry, but Lubert, because that would be the people, Chiluba, I think would be the name of the language,
but the people of Central Africa, which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, that's being drawn there.
Peter mentioned John MBT in his book African Religions and Philosophy.
When? When. Is making the point that about time he uses the terms and the money which so he returns
and he also does think a lot about how he does some comparative stuff with language,
I believe, as I recall in the way he writes and is also Alexis Kagami.
So I actually have thought about how one Bantu language that that I would like
to learn if I end up having time enough to do all I want to do is Kinyarwanda,
the language. It's about language. It is, as you can maybe guess, the most spoken language in Rwanda.
And and Kagame was Rwandan.
And his book, A Philosophy Born to Rwanda, is the lecture, the Rwandan Bantu Philosophy of Being, which is written as a dialogue.
Is very fascinating for its attention to the grammar and the structure of the language and what can we learn from the grammar,
the structure of language, he actually treats the structure of the language as sort of like a text that the philosopher can investigate
and and points that he's making because they're grammatical often do apply to many Bantu languages.
But then you've also just got the specifics of how he's translating particular Kinyarwanda terms.
So those are some of the languages that could be useful to learn.
If you're trying to put yourself in a good place to read African, possibly.
Maybe you're reading as well, Yoruba for sure as well.
That would be one of the ones that I'd feel bad for having not said so.
Thank you, Peter, because amongst other things, you know, the oral tradition of the of the IFA divination tradition in the Arab context is.
You can find collections that that have the the verses that the babalawo,
which are the traditional priests of this tradition, you know, they recite verses and a lot of those are written down.
And so to engage with those in the original learning Uraba would be an excellent idea.
And I would also say, if I can philosophers are the ones who are most disproportionately represented,
then your philosophers would come somewhere not far I mean, not close to them, but not that far behind.
And so you have a number of Uraba philosophers who have.
You know, who have written and you can have someone like Barry Helwan, who's a white American philosopher,
but he spent time in Nigeria, you know, has worked with traditional Yoruba elders and I think maybe the babalawo themselves as well.
And so so some of his work on African philosophy is directly engaging with Yoruba ideas.
So, yeah, that's a great way to learn. Ancient Egyptian is Arabic, a couple of on two languages, Arcon, Yoruba, French.
And you're pretty much good to go. Yeah. You have a good start. You'd be like in one of the best positions and well, sort of a two part question,
but I was wondering what the reception of the podcast has been like and on the part of academics,
on the part of students, but also maybe more general public engagement and then sort of like building upon that, you know, reception.
But also, like in your development of the episodes, you know, what are the sort of advantages to having as a podcast structure,
but also what are the shortcomings of a podcast that you don't like so much in doing public philosophy?
Well, we already heard from a good example of maybe the best thing about it,
which is that I get feedback from listeners so as to get that he started as a listener
and his feedback led to at least doubling the ambition of the whole project.
So that was very helpful, not helpful in terms of like getting this all done before I becomes more culturally diverse and interesting.
And that happens at a smaller scale as well. So, I mean, things have happened like, you know,
I mentioned some mediaeval king and I say and I say that that's so and so the fourth instead of so-and-so,
the sixth because I just read it wrong, the VI, the IV.
And like, within one day someone someone writes a comment on the website because they actually know about mediaeval history.
And they say, I think when you said the sex, you met the fourth. Right.
So they're actually the podcast. The scripts become books, something we haven't mentioned yet.
And so in a way where there's a kind of already a copy editing or proofreading going on by the audience as as we put out the podcast,
which is really useful, although, of course, they can only catch errors that you can hear.
And so everything from like really small mistakes to big mistakes, which I make sometimes to to reconceptualize of the whole project.
This is all very useful and comes in all the time. Like every day we get comments on the website.
Something that I've started doing maybe about five years ago is that whenever
I'm coming up to a new season like the Italian Renaissance or the Reformation,
which is what I'm doing right now, just started the philosophy in the Reformation series in the original sort of Western European philosophy feed.
I actually publish online both on Facebook and on the podcast website a list of the things I'm planning to cover.
And I always get lots of feedback on that.
The feedback never takes the form of ohe or something you might want to leave out.
The feedback is always, oh, you forgot this, this, this and this. And so that tends to lead to an expanding of the list.
Sometimes listeners do say, could you please go faster because like, we'd really like you to get to him.
But I have to admit that the feedback that influences us more is probably the feedback about, oh, shouldn't you cover X because it's without any gaps.
Right? That's the slogan. And so I'm always very interested to hear about things I could cover.
Even if they don't get their own episode, they might get worked into another episode, for example.
And we have gotten feedback like this on Africanness series as well.
I'm not sure. Can you think of an example? She gave something we added because we are on the episode on Brazil was influenced by a listener who
who wrote in the comments section of a previous episode and directly influenced the episode on.
On 19th century Brazil and abolition, yeah, that's a great example, which I do, yeah, I do think I hope.
But I do think that on the Web page for that upset that we do think thank that listener because, you know,
that's a really good example of very directly implicitly we had talked about how, you know, we definitely want to have some coverage of.
You know, though I already knew the problem is obvious, the Nacimiento, the Brazilian thinker who I want us to cover for the 20th century.
I wasn't sure what we would do in terms of part two.
So, you know, 20th century is part three. So we knew that there would be some Brazilian.
There wasn't sure how Brazil would figure into part two.
And we got some helpful hints from a listener that directly influenced the episode there.
Yeah. And that was, of course, a chance to be reminded that I don't read Portuguese.
So I had the exact language from again. But I should also say, because you asked about feedback from academics.
That has actually been a really great part of the whole experience, to be honest, when I first started the podcast,
one of the things that made me tentative about it was that I have seen and this
is relevant to your whole your whole podcast series about public philosophy.
A lot of professional philosophers have at best, an ambivalent attitude towards public philosophy.
So they sort of think it's dumbing down.
They think it's, you know, maybe giving a false impression of philosophy by packaging it in a form that everyone can easily understand.
So, you know, for example, yesterday I wrote a podcast about Erasmus.
So I wrote the script. It's about three and a half thousand words long.
So I'm trying to explain Erasmus in twenty five minutes.
And so you can see that there's going to be a little bit of simplification and corner cutting going on there.
So I was worried that people would kind of think I was wasting my time, but then I decided that I didn't maybe care so much about that.
But in any case, I was wrong. So I don't know about you, but the feedback I get from colleagues has been uniformly positive.
And I think it helps that we interview these experts.
Right. So so we're integrating the voices of other scholars into the show that also has given us the opportunity to involve a lot of women
scholars so that we make a real effort to try to have as close as we can get to like 50 50 gender balance in with the guests.
And in addition, like when I was just saying that,
I published the list of episodes that we're projecting to do before it even gets to that with something like the Reformation,
because I don't have Cejka because I like writing it with me.
So an expert on the philosophy and the Reformation, I'm trying to do it by myself.
So what I do is I do enough research to come up with an episode and then I send it to a bunch
of experts and they gave me feedback and I modified the list and then I published that.
And then the listeners give me more feedback. So actually, by the time we start writing episodes for each season,
there's usually that that the list of topics has in a way gone through a pretty vigorous vetting or rigorous vetting procedure.
And I've just always been amazed at how generous other people in the field are coming on to do interviews,
but also more quietly behind the scenes, giving us feedback on scripts, giving us feedback on episodes less.
So people are really great about it. I think they really want to.
You know. Give the advantage of their expertise to a project like this that's been really inspiring, actually.
Yeah, that sounds like full peer review, but yeah, I mean and also, like,
you know, it has been to the amount of work that goes into the podcast because,
you know, I mean, we've used that we've used certain podcast episodes as resources for discussion groups and they've been enormously useful.
And I think it's been really good as well for our students to be directed to such a comprehensive and, you know,
as comprehensive as you can get at a place where they can explore all these different philosophies and actually relates to that.
So my last question that I've done is sort of how you visualise this project, because it seems to me that, you know,
it provides an enormous archive, really, of both historical philosophers, but also contemporary conversations and philosophy.
I think it's almost a direct response to our contemporary concerns about diversification and decarbonising the curriculum.
And then it also has this added thing of like citation politics, right, with 50 50 gender balance or citing philosophers of colour.
And I was wondering in terms of like visualising this project, whether you see it as something as intellectual history project,
because both of your philosophies or whether it is a project really sort of and atmosphere, whether it's more interdisciplinary or aggressive.
The one thing I say to first just sort of link back to your previous question is
that I think invaluable is a word that I've heard from a number of colleagues,
you know, other professional philosophers to describe the podcast.
So, you know, that just goes to what Peter was saying about the positive feedback.
And I actually think that. You know, while.
While a professional phosphor is likely to be the kind of person who's going to have a certain looking down upon public force-feed type of.
If someone is going to have that reaction, it's likely to be a professional philosopher.
However, at the same time, so many professional philosophers who actually spend time engaging with the vodcast.
They're also sort of in some ways, well-placed to know how much work goes into it, right.
Because they have a sense of the kind of research it would take to be able to say
the amount of things that we're saying and touch on things that we're touching on.
I mean, there are times that in the Africana podcast that we are covering things and there isn't a vast, vast literature to go to because, you know,
we're covering it because it seems sort of obviously important thinking about the history of have kind of thought,
not because a lot of people have written on it. And so there's this pioneering that happens at that point.
And also there is the question of especially for the things where there are where there is a lot of secondary literature,
how you're, you know, being informed by that. And.
So I think that people do respect that and.
I've certainly heard of people using the podcast in.
In cruxes. I think I guest lectured in classes based on the class having used the podcast, not I think I have I've definitely done that even locally.
So I've been able to show up in a classroom, you know, live because they've been listening to certain episodes of the podcast.
And so it's, you know, I think a powerful intervention in all of these ways in relation to sort of which you were specifically asking just their.
I almost don't know if there's that much I can add to what you said, because it is sort of all of those things, right?
It is an intellectual history. It is specifically focussed on philosophy, but necessarily interdisciplinary in terms of all this from where it is,
you know, a contemporary intervention in terms of how it relates to the goal of diversifying philosophy.
It's sort of all those things. And and, you know, it's some of that is a happy accident.
Right. So there's ways in which it's really because I think it plays a vital role in the in the current, you know, move to diversify.
And of course, as we've talked about, it didn't necessarily set out to do that.
I mean, you know, it was it always was going to do some diversifying, given that it's, you know, by an expert in philosophy in the Islamic world.
But upset about that. But, you know, it it took on that character to such a greater degree and somewhat organically, you might say.
And so, you know, I think that the podcast is becoming what it is.
I guess one advantage of that, too,
is that I think it has the power to reach and kind of quietly convince people who are not against the idea of diversifying,
possibly, but maybe they just haven't thought about it,
or they don't particularly care if you imagine a podcast that was devoted solely to non Western philosophy,
let's say, or that was somehow labelled as being about diversifying philosophy.
And there are podcasts like that. So there's a really good podcast called the unmuted podcast run by MHRA,
which explicitly makes it its mission to speak to philosophers of colour and other philosophers
who maybe aren't always the people who are thought of as like paradigm example of a philosopher,
which would be more someone like me. Right. White English speaking guy with a beard.
Right. And that's not that's not how we present what we're doing, even in the Africanness areas.
So the way that the way we present what we're doing is, well, we're just going to tell you about all the philosophy that there is one bit at a time.
And the the sort of logic of that is to show you that if you're interested in the history of philosophy in a capacious and broad minded and.
Like, fully embracing way, then you would just have to learn about a lot of African philosophy,
a lot of diasporic African philosophy, a lot of Indian philosophy, a lot of Chinese philosophy.
And I mean, I think the in some ways the the most powerful diversifying move is to almost like
put the burden on the sceptic to sort of like show them all this stuff and and say,
well, what why would you not want to know about this? Like, you know, what could what could be your objection possibly be?
And I think that's actually a very powerful and it's all the more powerful for being so understated.
So and I think what she said about the fact that the the diversification of the podcast project is something that kind of happened along
the way is part of that because the original mission was just to be as complete as possible within the limits of my own competence.
And then eventually I decided to be as complete as possible beyond the limits of my own confidence.
And this is the results. Well, thank you so much for being here today and for answering my questions on the podcast,
I'm sure it's really interesting to hear more about the work that happens in the background because we see the finished product and,
you know, I can speak for myself. It's been absolutely wonderful to have people to listen to.
So thank you. Thank you for making room for the possibility of strengthening or testing our terms and frameworks and building consideration.
Many thanks to the entire BPP a the torch and also the broadcast teams.
Forward to agree with you. I hope you you next possibly the next episode hexavest.