Peter Adamson, "Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 3" (Oxford UP, 2019)
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Who is Peter Adamson and what motivated his focus on Islamic philosophy?
Welcome to New Books in Middle East Studies, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm Asad, one of the co-hosts of the channel, and your host for our conversation today. Our guest today is Peter Adamson, and we'll be talking about his book, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, which is actually volume three of his much longer series on precisely the topic of history of philosophy without any gaps. Peter Adamson is an American academic who was professor of late ancient and Arabic philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He has written articles, monographs, and edited books mostly on philosophy in the Islamic world and ancient philosophy. He is the host of the weekly podcast, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, which now has more than twenty-five million downloads and led to the publication of a book series, this book series.
Addis Adamson received his bachelor's degree from Williams College with Summa Kam Laure in nineteen ninety four and his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in two thousand. He worked at King's College London from two thousand, becoming professor of ancient and medieval philosophy there in two thousand and nine. In two thousand twelve he became a professor of Lent Ancient and Arabic philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. So without further ado, I now welcome Peter Adams into our podcast. Welcome Peter. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much for having me. So, Peter, you have this massive history of philosophy podcast covering a wide range of philosophical traditions across time and space.
It's truly incredible, both the depth and the breadth of what you've covered on it, from Greece to India to China, and of course the Islamic world, which is the subject of our conversation today. So I'm very curious, as I'm sure our listeners are as well, to know what led you to this point. Can we get a brief biographical sketch? Why why the history of philosophy and what's behind the words without any gaps.
Okay, well thank you very much for the kind words about the podcast, first of all. Uh so I'm from Boston or from near Boston and I went to Williams College, as you said, to get my BA. And at the time, and maybe still it had a very kind of historical focus for philosophy majors, which was my major. And so I really w when I went to grad school was thinking I know I wanna do philosophy, uh hopefully for a living. And to me philosophy was basically just history of philosophy. That's what I thought the subject really was about. And so for me the question was mostly what area in the history of philosophy do I want to work in? And there I really made my choice for a couple of reasons. One is that I had also been taking a lot of literature classes and in the literature classes I was especially interested in medieval literature.
So I thought, oh, medieval philosophy would make sense. And also I just thought I should be trying to get into an area of the history of philosophy where there was still a lot of research to do. I mean, I love Plato and Aristotle, for example, especially Plato at the time. But I thought, oh, you know, how am I ever gonna contribute anything to the scholarship on Plato? Whereas medieval philosophy, that seemed like an area where I could maybe contribute something, get some articles published. And while I was in grad school at Notre Dame, which I really um picked as a graduate program because it was this place where I could specialize in medieval Yeah. While I was there. I got into uh Arabic language philosophy basically for the same reason.
In other words, I didn't have a personal connection to Islam or anything like that. It was really much more of a tactical decision like, okay, well, if there's a lot of uh scope to do new research in Latin medieval philosophy, then probably even more so there will be a lot of scope to do new research in Arabic philosophy. And of course that was true. I mean I was kind of guessing at the time actually, 'cause I didn't really know what I was doing, but it was a good guess.
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