History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

From comets to blood transfusions, embryology, and the debate over the pineal gland: Desca... more

Why Cartesianism appealed to women and became the inspiration for a pioneering feminist, P... more

Early Cartesians including Cordemoy and de La Forge develop but also challenge Descartes’ ... more

We finish our look at Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes by talking to Ariane Schneck abou... more

What do emotions reveal about the connection between mind and body? We turn to Descartes’ ... more

A royal scholar and philosopher sets aside the tribulations of her family to debate Descar... more

Descartes’ “provisional” morality and his views on free will and virtue.

Descartes’ Meditations caused controversy as soon as it appeared. In this episode we look ... more

We're joined in this episode by a leading expert on one of the most famous works of philos... more

The word “Cartesian” is synonymous with a radical contrast between mind and body. What led... more

How Descartes fashioned a “method” to repel even the strongest and most radical forms of d... more

For Descartes body is purely geometrical. So how does he understand features we can percei... more

How René Descartes’ understanding of his own intellectual project evolved across his lifet... more

A look at the political and religious ferment that made up the historical context of philo... more

In this interview we learn more about the Republic of Letters: its importance for the hist... more

How scholars around Europe created an international network of intellectual exchange. As e... more

What is Enlightenment, anyway?

We finish our look at philosophy in the Reformation era with an interview about Galileo's ... more

The philosophical issues at the heart of the notorious condemnation of Galileo and Coperni... more

Though most famous for his role in persecuting Galileo, Robert Bellarmine was a central fi... more

Carlo Ginzburg’s innovative historical study The Cheese and the Worms looks at the ideas o... more

Natural philosophy and medicine in the work of two unorthodox thinkers of the late sixteen... more

Why do critics consider Don Quixote the first “modern” novel, and what does it tell us abo... more

We're joined by Tom Pink, who tells us about Suárez on ethics, law, religion, and the stat... more

Suárez and other Iberian scholastics ask where political power comes from and under what c... more