We are living in a Golden Age for public philosophy, philosophy presented to a general audience rather than a specialised academic one. The Internet has opened everything up, and philosophers have responded well. From free online courses http to magazines, blogs, podcasts, animations, and videos, there is a rich variety of philosophical thought available to anyone who knows how to use Google. Since it launched in 2012, Aeon has been at the vanguard, and has published writing by leading figures in the field such as Martha Nussbaum, Philip Pettit, Galen Strawson, and Roger Scruton; but also, and perhaps even more importantly, has provided a platform for younger thinkers who have chosen to write for a general readership, including Nakul Krishna, Suki Finn, Rebecca Reilly Cooper, Clare Chambers, Skye Cleary, Keith Frankish, Paul Sagar, Philip Goff, Carrie Jenkins, Maria Kasmirli, and many others. It has been wonderful to be able to commission outstanding writers like these in my role there as Consultant Senior Editor, and to see several of them go on to secure book contracts with major publisher.
If you think I’m exaggerating by describing this as a Golden Age, consider just how much philosophy is now available thanks to the Internet. Philosophers were among the earliest adopters of the new technology that emerged in the late 1990s – the outstanding Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , for example, a reliable and growing resource for anyone wanting to learn more about the subject, was launched in 1995; the philosopher Denis Dutton, founded the web portal Arts and Letters Daily in 1998, later selling it to The Chronicle of Higher Education . Today many philosophers have their own websites, as you’d expect, but they’re far from uniform - Jonathan Glover’s quirky site is one of my favourites – it’s a rabbit hole that’s easy to fall into. But online philosophy is so much more than just a series of individuals’ websites. There are numerous blogs – try Aeon author Eric Schwitzgebel’s The Splintered Mind where you can see him working out his ideas in public, Brian Leiter’s well-known Leiter Reports which he modestly describes as ‘The world’s most popular philosophy blog for more than a dozen years’, and Justin Weinberg’s philosophy news blog Daily Nous . There are also sites which regularly feature links to free online philosophical content, such as Open Culture , 3 Quarks Daily , Maria Popova’s Brainpickings and The Browser. There are also less-easily-categorised sites with interesting philosophical content: the philosopher Jonathan Bennett has devoted amazing energy to setting up Early Modern Texts, where he and his team have paraphrased many of the great works of philosophy in to contemporary English ; the website Five Books, contains many interviews with philosophers (disclaimer – I am its consultant Philosophy Editor), as does What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? , and there are even places where you can find philosophical humour, such as Daniel Dennett’s Philosophical Lexicon this useful summary of Sidney Morgenbesser’s witticisms (for those who don’t know, Morgenbesser was certainly the wittiest of 20th Century philosophers), and the very popular Existential Comics
There are conventional magazines, such as The New Philosopher (of which I am consultant Editor at Large), The Philosophers Magazine, and Philosophy Now, and other magazines such as Prospect, New Republic, The Atlantic, and Quartz, which publish philosophical essays from time to time: content from all these is available online, and not always behind a paywall. The New York Times even has a regular column, The Stone , edited by Simon Critchley, that features a wide range of philosophers and topics, and philosophers also occasionally write for The Guardian’s Comment is Free section.
On social media, particularly on Twitter, philosophers are very active – check out Kelly Truelove’s list of more than 400 philosophical tweeters with over 1,000 followers - among them you’ll find Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kate Manne, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and quite a few Aeon authors, including Massimo Pigliucci, Luciano Floridi, Skye Cleary, Julian Baggini, Peter Adamson, Stephen Law, John Tasioulas, Gary Francione, Brian Earp, and many more.
There are also numerous philosophy podcasts, animations, and videos, some of which receive millions of downloads. Podcast include the series I make with David Edmonds Philosophy Bites , Aeon-author Peter Adamson’s ambitious A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps and Barry Lam’s excellent Hi-Phi Nation . BBC Radio 4’s long-running In Our Time series includes some outstanding episodes https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01f0vzr, and the BBC Reith Lectures archive includes interesting series by the philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Sandel, and the 1948 series given by Bertrand Russell Authority and the Individual. There are also individual gems to be found online if you search hard, including this 1978 radio programme about the brilliant Cambridge philosopher and mathematician F.P. Ramsey who died at the age of 26 Kelly Truelove has convenient lists of philosophy audio
I was lucky enough to be invited to write the scripts for BBC Radio 4’s History of Ideas series of 48 animations, brought to life by the brilliant animator Andrew Park. There is so much available that it is hard to keep abreast of it all. One YouTube discovery that I’d recommend dipping into feels like a time capsule from the early 1970s: it’s the experimental documentary Logic Lane (the name of a real lane in Oxford), featuring the Oxford philosophers A.J.Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Gilbert Ryle, and more, with a soundtrack by Michael Nyman. Some of the best Philosophy videos and animations are reposted on Aeon, including this episode of Bryan Magee’s BBC television series The Great Philosophers on Schopenhauer.
The Internet has also provided a forum in which to discuss topics that don’t necessarily get the attention they deserve within some philosophy departments. For instance, Bryan Van Norden’s Aeon Essay ‘Western Philosophy is Racist’ diagnoses the Anglo-American biases of many academic philosophy courses, and there are numerous online projects addressing the question of why there are relatively few women in philosophy, and in drawing attention to neglected women thinkers of the past. These include the sites History of Women Philosophers, and Women in Philosophy. The experience of women philosophers online has not been uniformly good – some have received abusive and threatening messages, and this is worrying. But the speed with which other people have come to support those under attack online has been gratifying. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that everything about doing philosophy online has been wonderful, but on balance there hasn’t been a better time in history for the subject.
This post is based on a newsletter I wrote for the online magazine Aeon.co (you can become a friend of Aeon and get access to regular newsletters and other benefits).
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