Episodes

Aristotle claimed that human beings have a built-in purpose — but is that idea a foundation for a good life, or a blueprint for control? This episode, the second half of a two-part look at Aristotle, brings five thinkers into the conversation across twenty-five centuries of philosophy. Karl Popper, writing in the shadow of the Second World War, warns that a fixed idea of human purpose can curdle into political destiny when scaled up from a person to a nation. Alasdair MacIntyre, Hans-Georg Gadam...

In the last three episodes, Matt Ehret argued that the history of progress is a contest between two competing visions of civilization: one that develops its internal capacities, and one that manages and depletes them. At the center of that argument was a framework introduced in Episode 11 — the open system and the closed system. That framework raised a question we deliberately set aside: what exactly is being opened or closed? What is the standard by which we judge whether a civilization is deve...

What if the divide between Plato and Aristotle is not a chapter in the history of philosophy — but a structural fault line that still determines how civilizations think about knowledge, progress, and discovery? In the final part of his three-part conversation, Matt Ehret presents his argument that this ancient divide carries forward as a kind of civilizational operating system — one whose consequences extend from the classical world to the present, and whose terms determine whether a culture ten...

What if the most cited passage in Western philosophy has been deliberately misread — by both its critics and its supposed followers? In Part 2 of his conversation with Matt Ehret, Marshall examines the Allegory of the Cave, the Sophist movement, and a lineage of misuse running from ancient Athens to Leo Strauss and the neoconservative movement. Ehret argues that the Republic is not the blueprint for authoritarian rule that critics have called it. Plato’s method — as Ehret reads it across episod...

Matt Ehret argues that the divide between Plato and Aristotle is not a historical curiosity confined to the ancient world — it is a living fault line that continues to shape how civilizations understand learning, discovery, and human advancement. In this first of three episodes with Ehret, he makes the case that the Platonic method — learning as recollection, knowledge as something awakened from within rather than deposited from outside — is the engine of genuine human progress. The Aristotelian...

The Academy was built on a wager: that philosophy could be institutionalized, accumulated, and transmitted across generations. Episode 10 asks whether the bet paid off — and finds the answer in the man Plato trained himself. This episode traces Aristotle’s intellectual break with Plato, the philosophical distance between their two theories of human advancement, and the founding of the Lyceum as a counter-proposal, not a repudiation. Drawing on Prof. G.E.R. Lloyd’s account of Aristotle’s develop...

Plato named philosophy. But naming it was only the first move. The harder question was whether an institution could be built to make the progress he was wagering on actually work. Episode 9 examines the Academy — not as an idea, but as a place, a community, and a method. Drawing on Prof. W.K.C. Guthrie’s account in A History of Greek Philosophy (Vols. IV and VI), Prof. Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Vol. II), and Prof. Christopher Moore’s Calling Philosophers Names, this ...

About This Episode Where did the word “philosopher” come from — and who got to decide what it meant? In Episode 8, Part 1 of Notions of Progress, we trace the moment Plato took a word that had begun as a mocking label and transformed it into an institutional claim. Prof. Christopher Moore’s Calling Philosophers Names (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows us how the coining of philosophos was not a neutral act of description but a polemical move — one that drew a sharp line between those who ...

About This Episode Can rhetoric make better citizens — or does it simply make better manipulators through the art of persuasion? In Part 2 of the Plato vs. the Sophists arc, Notions of Progress follows Plato’s argument from the Meno to the Gorgias to answer that question. Building on Part 1’s examination of the Cave allegory and the doctrine of recollection, this episode turns to Plato’s two remaining pillars of response to the Sophists: the unteachability of virtue and the failure of rhetoric ...

In this episode of Notions of Progress — the first of a two-part examination of Plato — we ask what happens to the Sophists’ theory of progress once Plato is done with it. The Sophists had argued that human beings advance through the accumulation of teachable skill: collectively, cumulatively, and through the civic power of persuasion. Plato systematically dismantled each of those claims. This episode traces the first two dimensions of that dismantling through two of the most consequential passa...

About This Episode In this episode of Notions of Progress — the first of a two-part solo series — we ask a deceptively simple question: were the ancient Greek Sophists the original enlightenment-like thinkers of human progress? These were the famous and sought-after educators of fifth-century Athens. They charged fees, itinerant, and claimed that human excellence could be developed, not just inherited. For that, they were called sophists — a word that still, today,carries a negative connotation...

About This Episode In this episode of Notions of Progress - Part Two, we continue exploring the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, author of "Progress in the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In this episode, Professor Retz discusses categories 3-5 of his framework: Relative Progress, Everybody’s Progress and Anti-Progress. He starts this opening by detailing the break from absolute progress to more current conceptions beginning in the 19th...

About This Episode In this episode of Notions of Progress, we explore the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, an intellectual historian at the University of Stavanger in Norway and author of "Progress and the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Professor Retz introduces his innovative five-category framework that traces various conceptions of progress as part of a layered and contingent perspective from antiquity to the present day. Five Cate...

In Episode 2 of Notions of Progress, we explore the "Promethean Question" - examining Greek antiquity's perspectives on technological progress from 700-300 BCE. Did the ancient Greeks view technology as a divine gift or a dangerous curse? SUBSCRIBE & LISTEN: → YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@notionsofprogress?sub_confirmation=1 → Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notions-of-progress/id1837506445 → Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WgTlVMBfFzrIQwqkqhiD9 WEBSITE: h...

In "Notions of Progress," host Marshall Madow explores the concept of progress through history, examining technological advancements and philosophical ideas. This trailer delves into themes like AI, transhumanism, and technological determinism, tracing progress from ancient Greece to modern times. It questions the assumptions behind progress and its impact on human life, offering a glimpse of what's to come in the series. Host: Marshall Madow holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (th...