
History of Philosophy Audio Archive
Curated lectures, interviews, and talks with philosophers, social scientists, and historians together in one place. Each week, we explore brand new research in history, economics, psychology, political science, philosophy, indigenous studies, and human rights while presenting the work of canonical scholars in a way that is accessible to newcomers while retaining interest for students and specialists. If you are an author in nonfiction or a scholar in the humanities/social sciences and are interested in being interviewed for the show please email me at williamengels@substack.com or @Bluesky.
Latest episodes

Sep 13, 2024 • 1h 55min
#112 - Dreams and Genocide: Iraq: Roy Casagranda on Petroluem Conflicts, International Sanctions, and the War on Terror
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In this Professor Roy presentation we get to hear about how international sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, how Saddam Hussein was first backed, then baited, and then finally killed off by US foreign policy, and the true reasons we invaded Iraq in 2003 and kicked off what Chris Hedges called “the greatest strategic blunder in the nation's history” and what Noam Chomsky calls “the greatest crime of the 21st century”.
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Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8BGpohOupQ
Posted December 2018

Sep 11, 2024 • 2h 4min
#111 - Guest Interview with Environmental Philosopher Guillermo Zapata: Reading Indigenous Philosophers on Confronting the Sixth Mass Extinction, Building Community, and Overcoming Corporate Power
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In this conversation with environmental ethicist Guillermo Zapata we discuss the role of indigenous philosophy in shaping our approach to environmental problems, the most pressing threats emerging from climate change, and how we can resist the encroachment of corporate and political interests that are contrary to rational and urgent action of climate change and the Sixth Mass Extinction.
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Citations
Indigenous philosophy and Rousseau/Enlightenment: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything
French philosopher who conceived technology as an organism: Jacques Ellul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique
Dutch microplastics study: https://phys.org/news/2022-03-scientists-microplastics-blood.html
All rainwater is poison: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069
The Green Scare 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare
Sheldon Wolin concept “Inverted Totalitarianism” is developed in his book “Democracy Incorporated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Wolin#Fate_of_democracy
Guest Reading Recommendations:
Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465709-braiding-sweetgrass
Right Story, Wrong Story - Tyson Yunkaporta: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199122606-right-story-wrong-story
Sand Talk - Tyson Yunkaporta: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45449501-sand-talk
How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42771901-how-to-do-nothing
Indigenizing Philosophy through Land - Brian Burkhart: https://msupress.org/9781611863307/indigenizing-philosophy-through-the-land/

Sep 9, 2024 • 7h 29min
#110 - Why Did Someone Think This Was a Good Destination? Roy Casagranda on Modernity, Drug Dealer Empires, Neocolonialism, and the Cold War (4/4 Part Series)
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Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.
-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:51 Part 1: The Grand Wealth Redistribution Scheme
01:57:01 Part 2: From Poland to Reagan
03:54:18 Part 3: The Promotion of Unfettered Greed
05:38:33 Part 4: Radiation and Madness
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Original YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/@TheAustinSchool
Original YouTube Video (Part 1) -https://youtu.be/8Dnp7lOObjU?si=ju8L-KH9Vzu7Bcwg

Sep 7, 2024 • 59min
#109 - Love and the Search for God: Thomas Merton on Rilke, Monastic versus Lay Living, and Finding God
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Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.
-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948
The Rainer Maria Rilke text that Merton references is Letter Seven from "Letters to a Young Poet"
https://genius.com/Rainer-maria-rilke-letter-seven-annotated
Later Merton cites Rilke's "Book of Hours"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Hours
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Original Reference (Titled “Rilke and his search for God”) - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/page/AVnovices
Publication Date - February 2nd, 1966
Thomas Merton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton

Sep 6, 2024 • 48min
#108 - The Philosophy of Simone Weil: Sister Ann Astell on Loving Attention, Interfaith Dialogue, Vatican 2, and Christian Mysticism
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When we are the victims of illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty…. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
-Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947
Presented by Sr. Ann Astell at the University of Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.
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Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X3vuOiFYKc
Publication Date - August 25th, 2014
Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture - https://www.youtube.com/@ndethics
Simone Weil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil

Sep 6, 2024 • 52min
#107 - A Medicine More Fit for Humanity: Iain McGilchrist on Anti-Materialism, the Divided Brain, and How Art and Literature Can Improve Medicine
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According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
-Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
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The Master and His Emissary - https://a.co/d/2gDbuCW
The Matter with Things - https://a.co/d/2jJVXZg
Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REB7GOxX5Mk
Dr. McGilchrist's YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/@DrIainMcGilchrist

Sep 2, 2024 • 2h 14min
#106 (LABOR DAY SPECIAL) - Why I Am Still A Communist: Slavoj Zizek on Stalin's Terror, the Consequences of Neoliberalism, and the Refugee Crisis
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Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.
-Slavoj Zizek, 2005 citing Frederic Jameson.
Happy Labor Day, you disgusting proles (I love you)
-Will
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Original YouTube Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgPqk8-HPGQ&t=1380s
Pervert's Guide to Cinema:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuI4SFw4g0
Frederic Jameson:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson
Slavoj Zizek:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEe

Sep 2, 2024 • 2h 37min
#105 - The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza: J. Thomas Cook on Pantheism, the Geometric Method, and Life as a Jewish Heretic
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A Portuguese Jew living in Holland, Spinoza was excommunicated because of the unorthodox view he took of God. Spinoza wrote in the rationalist style of a geometric proof to develop his idea of God as the infinite, indwelling cause of all things, a unified causal system that is virtually synonymous with nature.
In this system, there is no free will, for all things are necessary and inevitable, and all objects, including humans, are part of God's active self-expression. Our minds can participate in the eternity of God by focusing on natural laws and the way all things follow from God or nature. Human fulfillment is possible, he believed, only by rejecting our finite, flawed selves and identifying with the eternal within us. Spinoza believed that by doing so we can love God with an immediate devotion without asking anything in return.
Script authored by Spinoza scholar J. Thomas Cook.
Enjoy.
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https://philpeople.org/profiles/j-thomas-cook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
https://archive.org/details/thegiantsofphilosophy

Sep 1, 2024 • 2h 44min
#104 - The Philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard: George Connell on Infinite Resignation, the Knight of Faith, and the Path to the Spiritual Life
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The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.
-Soren Kierkegaard, 1848
For Kierkegaard, truth is a subjective reality which we must live, not simply something to consider and discuss. His self-consciousness and self-examination highlight the practical demands of existence, and he opposes the speculative thinking of philosophical idealists (especially Hegel). Kierkegaard urges the reader to commit to make choices about how to live. In Either/or, he concentrates on sensual indulgence versus duty, the avant garde versus tradition. Fear & trembling dramatically distinguishes between ethical and religious existence, based on the biblical story of Abraham. We must choose to be a "knight of infinite resignation" (giving up hope for this life). Kierkegaard says much of life's meaning depends not on external conditions, but on our internal choices about relating to them.
-George Connell, author of the script.
Enjoy.
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https://www.researchgate.net/profile/George-Connell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaar
https://archive.org/details/thegiantsofphilosophy

Aug 30, 2024 • 2h 34min
#103 - The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Kenneth L. Schmitz on Scholasticism, the Proof of God's Existence, and the Beatific Vision
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Thomas Aquinas is the smartest man who ever lived - with the sole exception of Jesus Christ.
-Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College
St. Thomas Aquinas is known for producing history’s most complete system of Christian philosophy. In the late thirteenth century, this quiet, reflective Dominican scholar combined the work of Aristotle with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan thought to reconcile reason and faith. He believed we can know that God exists but not what God is like. Thomas concluded that mortal happiness is uncertain but immortal happiness is the ultimate end of life; beatitude is to pass beyond death to "see the face of God." His thought continues to exert a powerful influence on Catholic philosophy today.
-Kenneth L. Schmitz, author of this recording's script. (1922-2017)
Enjoy.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_L._Schmitz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kreeft
https://archive.org/details/thegiantsofphilosophy
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