

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

Sep 29, 2024 • 44min
#115 - Why Everyone Should Read Dante: Professor Bill Cook
The soul, which is created quick to love, responds to everything that pleases, just as soon as beauty wakens it to act.
-Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 18
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Original Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxpl-cIPJg&t=191s

Sep 29, 2024 • 25min
Hemlock #6 - Interregnum and the Angel of History
"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."
-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1929.
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Sep 28, 2024 • 5h 51min
#114 - Isaiah Berlin's Lectures on Romanticism: Beethoven, Kant, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Blake [REUPLOAD #2]
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Credit for the copy below as well as the source videos goes to the great YouTube channel Philosophy Overdose. The lectures were first delivered in 1965.
Isaiah Berlin gives a series of 6 lectures on Romanticism and some of its sources. For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity’s view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: “The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men’s outlook in modern times.”
In these brilliant lectures Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define Romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how its lasting legacy permeates our own outlook. Combining the freshness and immediacy of the spoken word with Berlin’s inimitable eloquence and wit, the lectures range over a cast of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. Berlin argues that the ideas and attitudes held by these and other figures helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, individual self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art. This is the record of an intellectual bravura performance–of one of the century’s most influential philosophers dissecting and assessing a movement that changed the course of history. These Mellon lectures were delivered in Washington in 1965.
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Philosophy Overdose:
https://www.youtube.com/@Philosophy_Overdose
YouTube Source Material:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhP9EhPApKE_9uxkmfSIt2JJK6oKbXmd-&si=6livdDSyZL9-vzhk

Sep 25, 2024 • 1h 2min
Hemlock #5 - Greek Tragedy and the Net of Aeschylus
This is a personal post, I hope you enjoy.
"Our joy today is equal to the pain that made it"
-Aeschylus, Agamemnon.
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Sep 22, 2024 • 3h 3min
#113 - Inverted Totalitarianism and the Corporate State: Chris Hedges Interviews Princeton Professor Sheldon Wolin
In this engaging conversation, Chris Hedges interviews Sheldon Wolin, a distinguished Princeton political scientist known for his insights on democracy. They dive into the concept of inverted totalitarianism, which depicts a democracy seemingly governed by corporate interests rather than the people. Wolin distinguishes between classical and modern forms of totalitarianism, critiques the impact of capitalism on democratic foundations, and discusses challenges to civic engagement. The conversation urges for grassroots movements to combat corporate influence and re-establish genuine democratic principles.

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