It doesn’t come across in writing, but his delivery was hilarious. He smoked, speaking deliberately, waving his hand around and punctuating points with his cigarette. I remember (perhaps falsely), that there was a painting of him as a Ganesh-like figure in the student coffee shop, with eight arms all posed at different angles with cigarettes in each hand. He loved talking “Philosophy” (with a capital “P” – versus the specialization that was starting to creep into the academy at that level) and professional wrestling.

In any case, I dedicated this post to him because he embodied what I think are many of the right values guiding us. Love of Philosophy v. Academic Masturbation, a sense of humor, acknowledgement of difference but not to distraction, ability to focus on the big questions, the desire to share with others and a healthy dose of real world common sense.

@Jon – I’ve spent a fair amount of time listening to all three of the podcasts you mentioned (not In Our Time – too much to sift through). Some thoughts:

Philosophy Bites – I like the ‘star’ power they are able to bring to bear and they are superb questioners – very well read and informed. The short format doesn’t allow for exploration of issues as much as I would like, but it does permit introduction to theories or ideas which are interesting (therefore ‘bites’). However, I have listened to a number of interviews with what I would term as dinosaurs of the OxBridge culture and heard the technical philosophy (Analytic, Anglo) v deliberately obscurantist (Continental, European) refrain, which I find tired and unproductive. There are a couple of regular contributors I like such as Quentin Skinner.

Little Atoms – Up and down on this one. Good interview subjects, but the guys aren’t great interviewers all the time. I find the audio quality to be really poor (I’m still on early episodes, maybe it gets better) and there are the occasional weird outbursts of music. Two ends of the spectrum: Good – John O’Farrell, Bad – Paul Evans.

Philosophy, The Classics – agree with your assessment completely. Great audio ‘cliff notes’. I’ve listened to them all and would recommend them as a starting point for anyone wanting to get into those specific texts. My only criticism would be that he doesn’t seem to take a breath or pause as he moves from section to section so you have to be alert to catch his transitions from say, exposition to criticisms.

Hasta,
–seth

@Jon – thank you too. I originally was just looking at podcasts that were aligned with ours on iTunes – to give people a comment who might have listened to the same. Mark has recommended Philosophy Bites to me before and I’ll need to check it out.

There just aren’t enough hours in the day…:)

* In Our Time – http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/ – 100s of archived episodes many of which are about philosophy – not sure if you can listen outside the UK though

Other Podcasts I would recommend…

* Philosophy Bites – http://www.philosophybites.com/ – Serious interviews with philosophers

* Little Atoms http://www.littleatoms.com/ – Ireverent but interesting interviews with philosophers, scientists, artists etc

* Philosophy: The Classics – http://www.philclassics.libsyn.com/ – Nigel Warburton (of Philosophy Bites) reading from his own book – He has a lightness of touch which make this very listenable for a beginner

I also listened to an itunes-u series on “Philosophy for Beginners” by Marianne Talbot which I found quite frustrating – she dwells on stuff which seems obvious and then skips past the things I want to question – she also seemed arrogant, dismissing audience points outright rather than discussing them – but maybe that’s because of time constraints

Thanks again – keep up the good work!

I haven’t really listened to any of the other philosophy podcasts but I did listen to two semesters worth of course lectures from Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley about Heidegger’s Being and Time. They are available for free online and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read Being and Time on their own (and has a lot of extra time). Unless Seth, as the resident Heideggerian, you have something bad to say about him…