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The John Locke Lectures are among the world's most distinguished lecture series in philosophy. The series began in 1950 and are given once a year.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Academic philosophy lectures • Ancient Greek philosophy as way of life • Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, Plotinus • Reasons, normativity, expressivism • Logic’s normative role, revisability • Epistemology, metaphysics • A priori scrutability, Carnap vs Quine • Philosophy of mind: externalism, phenomenal knowledge, knowledge argument, self-locating beliefThis podcast presents recordings from the John Locke Lectures, a long-running annual lecture series in philosophy. The episodes are organized as multi-part sequences from particular years, with each sequence developing a sustained argument across several lectures rather than offering standalone discussions. As a result, listeners encounter philosophy in an academic, seminar-like format, focused on careful distinctions, theoretical frameworks, and the step-by-step construction of positions and objections.
Across the lectures, a recurring concern is how reasons, norms, and rationality should be understood. Several strands explore normativity in relation to metaphysics and epistemology, including questions about what makes reasons “realistic,” how normative structures might be characterized, and what epistemological problems arise for such views. Another major theme is logic’s role in reasoning: what it means for logic to be normative, whether and how logical principles could be rationally revised, and what implications such revisability would have for epistemology and theory choice.
The podcast also includes substantial work in philosophy of mind and language, particularly around mental content, self-knowledge, and phenomenal consciousness. Topics include externalism about content, the idea that we have privileged access to our own thoughts, and classic thought experiments such as Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument (including “Mary” cases). These lectures examine how to model the contents of belief and knowledge, how self-locating or indexical information might matter, and what these considerations imply for materialism and the characterization of mental states.
In addition, the series reaches into broader systematic projects in analytic philosophy about “constructing the world”: whether the world is in some sense scrutable a priori, how conceptual change and revisability relate to figures like Carnap and Quine, and how difficult domains—mathematics, ontology, intentionality, and normativity—fit into an overall picture.
Alongside these contemporary analytic themes, the podcast also treats ancient philosophy as a practical enterprise, emphasizing the tradition in which philosophical reasoning was meant to guide how one lives, tracing approaches associated with Socrates and later ancient schools.