

History of Philosophy Audio Archive
William Engels
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.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jan 31, 2025 • 40min
Hemlock #9 - An Unhinged Rant About What Our Government Likes to Call "Detention Centers"
Update/Correction: I misstated the executive order number (it's 9066 not 9006) and stated that Korematsu v. United States still technically had legal precedence - in fact it lost legal precedence in 2018 with Trump v. Hawaii. Links below.Photos:https://www.desertsun.com/picture-gallery/news/2020/01/28/photos-take-look-inside-adelanto-ice-detention-center/4602066002/Stephen Miller Stovepiping False Immigration Statistics in 2018https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/white-house-rejects-report-that-doesnt-match-trumps-factsFDR Executive Order 9066 Leading to Japanese Internment:https://www.britannica.com/topic/Executive-Order-9066Korematsu v. United Stateshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_StatesSexual Violence Statistics:https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible-rape-cases-in-the-usa-since-1990/?__sso_cookie_checker=failed

Jan 28, 2025 • 8h 1min
#151 - The British Romantic Poets: Adam Potkay on How Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Burns Worshiped Nature, Sought Transcendence, Defied Authority, and created Modern Love
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“Worlds on worlds are rolling ever from creation to decay - Like the bubbles on a river: Sparkling, bursting, borne away.”
Percy Shelley, Hellas, 1822
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellas_(poem)
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(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:00:35) - What is Romanticism?
(00:33:33) - Folk Culture, the Ballad Tradition, and Robert Burns
(01:11:53) - Wordsworth and Coleridge: Ballads of Nature and the Supernatural
(01:45:19) - Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800: Rustic Life and the Questionable Pleasures of Nature
(02:22:31) - The Descriptive-Meditative Poem and the Divine in Nature
(02:56:32) - Wordsworth and the Invention of Childhood
(03:32:36) - Blake and Infantine Innocence
(04:04:31) - Blake and Satanic Energy
(04:40:58) - The Byronic Hero
(05:17:17) - Byron and Shelley: Darkness and Light
(05:51:15) - Gothic Horrors: Coleridge's “Christabel” and Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein”
(06:23:21) - Keats's (Mock-) Gothic Romances
(06:58:35) - Keats's Great Odes
(07:30:39) - Byron's Comic Epic: Don Juan
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Adam Potkay is a professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a recipient of a 2009 Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence. In August 2009, he was designated William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities. In 1996, Professor Potkay and his wife and fellow College of William and Mary professor Monica Brzezinski Potkay were jointly honored with the College of William and Mary’s Alumni Fellowship Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Professor Potkay has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University and at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He received his B.A. from Cornell University (1982), an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University (1986), and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University (1990).
A distinguished scholar of eighteenth-century literature and culture, Professor Potkay has published works that include The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Cornell University Press, 2000) and The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Cornell University Press, 1994). He is the coeditor (with Sandra Burr) of a collection of autobiographies and sermons by some of the earliest black writers in English, Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (St. Martin’s Press, 1995). He has published scholarly articles and more popular essays in a wide variety of journals, from 18th-Century Studies and Studies in Early Modern Philosophy to Philosophy Now and Raritan Quarterly.
Professor Potkay was recently named a co-winner of the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association for his book The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The Story of Joy outlines an intellectual and literary history of joy, especially the treatments of joy in literature, philosophy, and religion, with an emphasis on British and German works from the Reformation through the Romantic period.

Jan 21, 2025 • 58min
#150 - The Government of the Future: Noam Chomsky on Libertarianism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Political Implications of Marxism, Individualism v Collectivism, and Prospects for Democracy and Survival
“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.”
Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?, 2017.
Recorded at the New York YM Poetry Center, Broadcast YWHA, February 1970
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Text Link
https://chomsky.info/government-in-the-future/

Jan 17, 2025 • 1h 16min
#149 - My Interview with Professor Michael Albertus on his New Book “Land Power”: Indigenous Rights, Climate Change, Land Theft and Restitution, the Great Reshuffle, and the Chinese Sparrow Massacre
Buy Michael's Book on Amazon (Untracked Link):
https://www.amazon.com/Land-Power-Doesnt-Determines-Societies/dp/1541604814/
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212924049-land-power
Author's Website:
https://www.michaelalbertus.com/
Come join my Patreon!
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Guest Bio:
Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, will be published by Basic Books in January 2025. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with.
Albertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of nearly 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics.
He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.
The defining features of Albertus' work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.
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Jan 13, 2025 • 4h 58min
#148 - The Grail Quest: Joseph Campbell on the Arthurian Legends, the Adventure of Gawain, Parsifal's Quest for the Holy Grail, the Three Ages of the Church, and the Elementary Ideas of Mythology
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“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.”
-Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 1949
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00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:16 - The Origins of Western Mythology
00:52:42- The Mythology of Love
01:40:07 - The Arthurian Tradition
02:33:025 - The Grail Legend
03:45:46 - The Forest Adventure of Parsifal
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These talks, entitled "The Western Quest" were delivered in November 1978 at Washington University by Joseph Campbell in front of a live audience.
In the complete works of Joseph Campbell, they are delineated in the catalogue as the Lecture II, 6.1-6.5.

Dec 20, 2024 • 36min
#147 - Dzogchen: James Low on Tibetan Buddhism, the Uncontaminated Mind, Developing Clarity and Insight, Overcoming Ego, and Riding the Wave that Never Breaks
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James Low's YouTube Page:
https://www.youtube.com/@jameslow
Video Source:
https://youtu.be/gf51n8V8vII

Dec 19, 2024 • 8h 24min
#146 - Moby Dick: Bert Dreyfus on the White Whale, the Origins of American Literature, Ahab's Madness, and Existentialist Themes in the 19th Century
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This is an eight lecture series, delivered in 2010 at UC Berkeley by the philosophy professor and overall great human being Hubert "Bert" Dreyfus as part of a Great Books course.
Enjoy.

Dec 13, 2024 • 9min
Letter to the Shareholders 2025
Reach out and share your thoughts!
williamengels@substack.com
Congratulations on a great 2024 - a couple of channel-exclusive messages and announcements as we take the podcast into 2025. Cheers to a great year.
References:
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose.

Dec 11, 2024 • 1h 15min
#145 - Wittgenstein: Norman Malcom on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language, Analytic Philosophy, the Vienna Circle, Bertrand Russell, and Language Games
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“Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
Original Video:
https://youtu.be/371LobXpUlo

Dec 10, 2024 • 5h 26min
#144 - The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche: Rick Roderick on Postmodernism, the Eternal Recurrence, Ressentiment, Master & Slave Morality, the Übermensch, and the Last Man
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"The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits - as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the collective evolution of mankind: this philosopher will make use of the religions for his work of education and breeding, just as he will make use of existing political and economic conditions….the will to self-mastery is always increasing - religion presents them with sufficient instigations and temptations to take the road to higher spirituality, to test the feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude.-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
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(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:00:41) - Nietzsche as Myth and Mythmaker
(00:44:34) - Nietzsche on Truth and Lies
(01:23:54) - Master of Suspicion, the Immoralist
(02:04:23) - The Death of God
(02:46:06) - The Eternal Return (Time is a Flat Circle)
(03:25:04) - The Will to Power
(04:08:08) - Nietzsche as Artist
(04:49:20) - Nietzsche's Bastard Children


