Peter Adamson
speaker
1,322 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2d ago
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Weddings and baptisms would not be holy events celebrated in churches, but dark and secret affairs best kept out of view.
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This is all good fun for the modern-day reader, and Bale is clearly having fun too, discussing obscenities at great length by way of apologizing for mentioning them in the first place.
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As for his claim to be a sober historian, this is rather undermined by his use of an anecdote about another cynic, Diogenes.
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Supposedly he too had sex in public, and when challenged to explain what in the world he was doing, said, I'm planting a man.
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having worked this entertaining one liner into his defense of mentioning obscenities on the grounds of historical accuracy, Bell then admits that it's probably not true anyway.
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By now we're used to this sort of game playing, which goes back through the history of humanism.
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Erasmus, the patron saint of humanist irony, gets high marks in the dictionary, because he was so firmly on the side of erudition and tolerance, which are perhaps the two things that Bale values most highly.
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And that brings us to the serious side of his discussion of obscenity.
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Bell thinks one should be open to discuss any topic and consider fairly any idea.
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If one does that, one will find that even the most outrageous philosophical and religious proposals are terribly difficult to refute.
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This makes it hard to know what to think, which seems to be the chief effect intended by the dictionary.
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Hipparchia the Cynic is only one of several ancient philosophical figures who appear as a representative for skepticism.
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Bell's article on the pre Socratic Xenophanes emphasizes that for this early thinker, all things were incomprehensible, before going on to assimilate his teachings to those of Spinoza, who was at this time at least as scandalous as having sex in public.
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Also pressed into the service of a modern philosophical debate is Zeno of Elea, whom we covered about fifteen years and exactly four hundred and ninety episodes ago.
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But I'm guessing you'll remember him nonetheless.
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He was the follower of Parmenides, who used a series of paradoxes to show that motion is impossible.
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The point of this was to show that being is one and unchanging.
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Bail suggests a different possible consequence though.
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As long as a dispute is going on about whether we know or do not know the nature of substance and of matter, this will be an indication that we do not understand anything.
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Writing in the wake of Cartesian physics, Bale takes Zeno's paradoxes to undermine the very idea of extension, which would leave the rest of the new philosophical system in tatters.
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Showing 801–820 of 1,322 · page 41 of 67
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