Appetitive: The British Schoolboy's Guide to Classical Myths

Since I have been trying to walk for exercise (as well as having a fairly long walk to class every day), I have been listening to a lot of audiobooks and lectures.

My newest favorite set podcasts is from iTunes and is called Myths and History of Greece and Rome. According to the preface, the set of podcasts was composed by the father of two boys who were interested in the stories of Greece and Rome than they were learning in school. He, apparently, did a bunch of background reading and wrote a book.

The set of podcasts is aimed at school children, so much of the sex and violence has been stripped from the stories. However, the stories have the added bonus of being written in that wonderful British way and are peppered by humor, understatement, and little quips to provide background for school children. I find them quite amusing, and they also include a few stories here and there that I had not heard previously, e.g. the origin of Scylla.

Enjoy!

Reasoning: The Development of Writing

There was a great five-part (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) show on the the development of written language on In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. I found the first two episodes quite fascinating. Melvyn Bragg discusses everything from the technology of writing to the development of literature in the whole series. The first two episodes focus on writing's early evolution from an accounting system into an alphabetic system and then the development from clay to paper.

For some reason only the first two episodes downloaded into my iTunes from the In Our Time podcast, but the rest of them might be heard on the website. Enjoy!

Reasoning: More Philosophy Podcasts

I checked into Rogue Classicism today for the first time in a while and discovered some podcasts on the history of philosophy from History of Philosophy without Gaps. According to the blogpost on Rogue Classicism, there were 14 podcasts on the preSocratics, Hippocrates, and the sophists, and now is moving on toward Plato.

I listened to some of the podcast on Parmenides. It is very simple and slightly condescending, but the ideas are clear, which is helpful. I will continue to report as I listen to more.

Appetitive: Podcasts on Plato

Today (and yesterday) I have not quite had the dedication necessary to write up the next installment of "Dates in the Platonic Corpus" yet (see my blogpost), but I have been rereading Zuckert's section on the Laws in order to write it up. It will be coming soon.

In the meantime, I thought I would post some links to some more traditional podcasts on Ancient Philosophy (and especially Plato). I have listened to some of the lectures from the UC Berkeley Ancient Philosophy class. I listened to a few of these last summer and I found them fairly interesting. In general, I do not entirely agree with David Ebrey's views on Plato (and his voice is really annoying), but he points out some interesting moments in the dialogues that I did not notice and his lectures are fairly engaging.

There are also, as it turns out, a number of podcasts that I had not stumbled upon until now. I have not listened to any of these, so I cannot recommend any of them, but I certainly will listen to them and review when I have time.

• Philosophy 103 at CUNY. This is a class on Plato's Republic (or more accurately Politeia). There are both good and hostile reviews of this class, but I am not sure what side of the divide I fall on yet (having not listened to it).
• Lectures from University of Chicago. Two lectures on this list are about Plato: "On the parts and whole of Plato's Republic" by Anton Ford and Gabriel Richardson Lear's talk on Plato's philosophy of poetry. Both look great.
• Political Science 10 at UCLA. Reviewed on Anne is a Man.