One Year of Today in Philosophy of History

The View from Oregon — 320: Friday 20 December 2024

Now that we are rapidly converging on the end of the year, and find ourselves in the shortest and darkest days from which we can slowly emerge again into the light, I am approaching a full year of my Today in Philosophy of History episodes (I call them “episodes” because I release them both as audio and video uploaded to almost ten different platforms, then I share the links on another dozen social media platforms). I got a little jump start on the year by posting a couple of episodes in the last week of 2023, starting on 27 December 2023 with “Getting Started in Philosophy of History,” and my first profile being on Christian Jürgensen Thomsen on 29 December 2023. Since beginning this project I’ve produced 132 episodes, most of them focused on a particular historian or philosopher, and I may complete a couple more episodes before the end of the year. This project consumed my year in a way that I didn’t really expect. As soon as I had finished one episode I would be thinking about the next episode.

Three years prior to beginning this I had started a philosophy of history space on Quora and had been posting there. This gave me a lot of material with which to start 2024. I have an MSWord file that is 900 pages of collected material that I posted to my Quora space. Some of this material I was able to convert into spoken word episodes pretty easily, but most required significant re-writing. And I discovered that presenting the material in spoken word form required me to focus in a way that my written posts had not. A lot of my written posts were a short introduction followed by lengthy quotes from the author in question. But writing a profile that could be read aloud I had to create some kind of narrative for each episode.

Since I often produced several episodes each week (an average of 2.54 episodes per week), I was always working on one or several episodes, most of which were around 20 minutes along, with a lot at a half hour in length, and a few longer episodes that went up to an hour long. At the end of the year, I had my first guest, Mohadeseh Jazaei. She had contacted me after listening to my episode on Reinhart Koselleck. She has been applying Koselleck’s conceptual history to Iranian history, so we corresponded about this and she agreed to be interviewed. I hadn’t ever done anything like an interview previously, so that was as new to me as producing spoken word episodes was new to me at the beginning of this year.

I still have plenty of material for the coming year. I have a list of at least 33 people I would have liked to have profiled, so I may cover them in the coming year. Since I organized the year according to the birthdays of philosophers and historians, it often happened that there were two or three birthdays on a day and I had to choose among them. I was busy enough getting out one episode in a day, so I didn’t have the strength (except on a rare occasions) to get two episodes out in a day. The use of birthdays is a semi-arbitrary way to organize material, but it did fill up the year for me, for better or worse. As it happens, Ranke’s birthday comes in December (I just recorded this episode), so while Ranke ought rightly to have come early in any exposition of historical thought, he came at the end of the year. I was mentioning him in episodes throughout the year, so it would have made much more sense to have Ranke early in the year and refer back to him as a foundational figure. When I recorded my Ranke episode I mentioned at least thirteen philosophers of history that I had covered earlier in the year, which shows how his thought is widely related to so many other consequential figures.

Ranke should have come at the beginning of the year thematically, but his birthday is in December.

I don’t plan to systematically re-visit all the philosophers I discussed in the first year, though I may return to some of them if I think I have something more worthwhile to say, but I also hope to branch out to related ideas that I have been working on for some time. In fact, I had planned to start branching out in 2024, but as it turned out I was so busy with the figures I did cover, I didn’t have the time to develop the other material in a form that was ready to present. Projects that I am working on, some of which I may produce in the coming year, include:

1. A series of talks on philosophy of science, not a systematic survey, but an idiosyncratic account of what interests me in philosophy of science.
2. A series of talks on the idea of the good life as it has manifested itself as an ideal in different historical milieux, i.e., the good life taken in historical perspective. One of the reasons this interests me is that I have talked very little to date about the relations between philosophy of history and ethics, and this would give me an opportunity to fill this gap.
3. A series of Thought Experiments on Civilization, in which I’ll take up a number of semi-random topics in relation to civilization, kind of like an introduction to thinking about civilization — not a systematic survey, just a tentative probing of the idea of civilization0.
4. A series of Case Studies in civilization, in which I plan to discuss particular civilizations with an eye to the generalizations that can be made from considering a particular instance of civilization. This will be a bit more systematic than the thought experiments about civilization.

Some of these are based on old blog posts, and series of old blog posts, some are based on past conference presentations, and some are manuscripts I’ve been pottering away at for some time. Further in the future, fate willing, I also hope to talk about the ethics of space exploration and the philosophy of astrobiology. I have elaborate outlines written out for both of these projects, but they represent major efforts and I don’t have everything clear in my own mind as of yet. Some of these projects I can make relevant to philosophy of history, as with the good life taken in historical perspective, but some are less so. But I’ll probably make available whatever I produce on the platforms I’ve established, several of which are explicitly tied to “Today in Philosophy of History,” in hopes that the small audience I have accumulated will be interested in these projects as well. After a year on Youtube I have 972 subscribers and on Spotify I have 102 subscribers. If I were to start at zero again it would take me another year to build to a similar number of subscribers, so I would rather build on what I have so far.

Although I have been dissatisfied with every episode I have created (because every episode could have been better), on the whole I am satisfied with what I’ve said. That may sound paradoxical, and I’m not sure than I can explain this feeling. I made a lot of mistakes, frequently misspoke, recorded all episodes in one take with only a couple of exceptions, and never edited anything. I accepted a lot of compromises to keep producing episodes at the rate I did. So my output in 2024 was filled with errors, but I am nevertheless happy with the totality of it. The busyness created by this project felt like it ate up my time, but I have something to show for the year.

People often say, “The internet is forever,” as a kind of threat, since one may come to regret something that one has posted in a moment of youthful indiscretion. I am heartened by the possibility that the videos and podcasts I’ve recorded in the past may be archived and their format updated as formats change over the coming years, so that they remain available. It bothers me a lot that, when I die, it’s likely that all my notebooks will end up in a dumpster, notwithstanding the fact that I have poured my life into them for decades, and they hold all my best ideas. Now I have put at least some of my thought into these recordings and made them available on enough platforms that they may get swept up in a dragnet of archiving and be preserved over the longue durée. At least that’s something saved from oblivion.