History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

Peter's colleagues MM McCabe and Raphael Woolf join him for a special 50th episode interview, to discuss Aristotle's reactions to his teacher Plato

In the Rhetoric and Poetics, Aristotle explores persuasive speech and engages with ancient tragedy

Aristotle's Politics responds to Plato's Republic and sets out its own ideas about the ideal state, the types of political constitution, and the role of women and slaves

Drawing on the De Anima, On the Heavens, Physics and Metaphysics, Peter tackles Aristotle’s theory of mind and its relation to his theology.

Dominic Scott discusses Aristotle's method in his Nicomachean Ethics

What place does Aristotle leave for pleasure and friendship in his vision of the good life?

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on happiness and virtue

In his zoology, Aristotle divides and defines all kinds of animals, and so invents the science of biology

Aristotle's theory of soul: its functions and how it relates to the body

Richard Sorabji discusses time, eternity and mosquitos in Aristotle's Physics

Aristotle's Physics explains change, time and place with the help of his actuality/potentiality distinction

The four types of explanation: formal, material, efficient and final cause

Aristotle's critique of Platonic Forms and defense of his own metaphysics

Hugh Benson discusses Aristotle's ideas about arriving at knowledge

Knowledge according to Aristotle's Posterior Analytics

Aristotle's invention of logic in the Organon (especially Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics)

Aristotle's career, corpus and unparalleled influence

Plato's attack on the poets and his own use of myth in the Republic and other dialogues

Frisbee Sheffield discusses Plato's erotic dialogues, including the Symposium

Love, friendship and philosophy in the Symposium, Phaedrus and Lysis

A divine craftsman makes the cosmos from triangles in Plato's Timaeus

Philosophy of language and Heraclitean flux in Plato's Cratylus

Fiona Leigh discusses Plato's revised theory of Forms in the Sophist

The Third Man Argument and other criticisms of Forms in the Parmenides

The Divided Line, Form of the Good, and Cave in Plato's Republic

Plato's Republic defends and defines justice at the level of the ideal city and the person

Forms and the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo

MM McCabe discusses epistemology and virtue in Plato

Knowledge, relativism, and memory in the Theaetetus

The Meno and Plato's theory of recollection

Ethics against immoralism in a Socratic masterpiece.

Virtue and knowledge in Plato's Charmides and Euthydemus

The life, times and dialogues of Plato

Raphael Woolf discusses Socrates as presented by Plato

Socratic virtue, ignorance and irony in the Platonic dialogues Socrates' claim that no one does wrong willingly

Socrates according to the comic poet Aristophanes and the historian Xenophon

Rhetoric and relativism in Protagoras, Gorgias and other sophists

Hippocrates and the relation between early Greek medicine and philosophy

Malcolm Schofield on Heraclitus, Parmenides and other early Greek philosophers

Love, Strife and the four elements in Empedocles

Is everything mixed with everything? Anaxagoras on Mind and the cosmos

Ancient atomism as a response to Parmenides

Zeno's paradoxes and Melissus develop the Eleatic philosophy

The father of metaphysics, Parmenides of Elea

MM McCabe of King's discusses the fragments of Heraclitus

Everything changes in the riddling philosophy of Heraclitus

Pythagoras and mathematics in ancient philosophy

The gods in Homer and Hesiod, and the critique of Xenophanes

Two early Pre-Socratics claim that the world is made of air, and the infinite

In this first episode, Peter discusses the goals of the series and Thales, the first Greek philosopher.