Peter Adamson

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1,235 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Sep

Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · HoP 500a Marguerite Johnson on Sappho · 27 Sep 2026 podcast

So that's Sappho.

And I think I won't say what's happening on the next installment.

I'll let it be a surprise, but we are staying in antiquity.

For now, I'll thank Marguerite Johnson very much for coming on to talk about Sappho.

Okay, me too.

Thanks so much.

And please join me next time as we continue to make this something more like a history of philosophy without any gaps.

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · HoP 499 Beyond Belief: Bayle, Toleration, and Atheism · 13 Sep 2026 podcast

Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode Beyond Belief Bail Toleration and Atheism.

Thanks to reactions I've received from listeners over the years, I know that quite a few of you out there think that all philosophy worthy of the name has to be independent of religion or even anti-religious.

obviously I don't agree.

To my mind, religion has in fact provided the main historical and intellectual context for the development of philosophy in most times and places.

Studying the history of philosophy without mentioning religion would be like studying swimming without mentioning water.

But if it were true that serious philosophy can only be done by atheists, it would certainly have saved us a lot of time.

We're on the cusp of reaching 500 episodes, and not a single one of them has featured an avowed atheist.

Yes, there have been thinkers who had little or nothing to say about religion or the divine, but this was just because they had different interests or were cautiously staring clear of the topic.

They didn't come out and explicitly deny the existence of God.

Sometimes philosophers were accused of being atheists, but on closer inspection this usually meant that they had unorthodox conceptions of divinity, with the ancient Epicureans being a leading example.

From antiquity, only a few stray counterexamples have reached us, with the most convincing case being a sophist named Diagoras of Melos, whose writings are lost, but who was said in late antiquity to have been an out and out atheist.

Apart from that, where would a history of explicitly atheistic philosophy in Europe begin?

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