A Companion to Public Philosophy

26Philosophy Podcasting

PETER ADAMSON

Philosophy has long been transmitted using different media: oral speech, papyrus rolls, parchment and paper codices, strips of bark and bamboo, and, in modern times, radio and television programs. It is only in this century, though, that one of the most popular methods ever of disseminating philosophy has emerged: podcasts. This may sound like an exaggerated claim, but consider the following statistic, offered (appropriately enough, on Twitter) by Nigel Warburton, who with David Edmonds hosts the long‐running podcast Philosophy Bites. On 12 November 2020, he reported that the total number of downloads for this podcast was 41,607,530. Given that it would be an extraordinary success if a book on philosophy sold copies numbering in the tens of thousands, this suggests that podcasts are now more powerful than traditional media as a way of reaching a philosophically minded audience. More powerful, indeed, by several orders of magnitude.

The philosophically minded audience of this essay, which is no doubt far smaller, will already be thinking of objections. Philosophy Bites is an unusually successful podcast; that astounding number is an aggregated total for hundreds of episodes; and you can download a podcast without listening to it, just as you can buy a book without reading it. But if anything, the figure in fact understates the impact of podcasts because it is the number of downloads for just one series. There are other philosophy series ...