Oral (History of) Philosophy

This is the most methodological of my research areas: it asks how philosophy is transmitted, and whether the spoken word deserves a place beside the written text in the history of the discipline. Under the heading “oral history of philosophy,” I argue that orality is not a mere prelude to “real” philosophy but an element of historico-philosophical research in its own right — with its own methods, sources, and standards of evidence.

Philosophy, after all, began in conversation. My work on the rebirth of the Socratic origins of philosophy asks what that dialogical inheritance means in a digital era of recorded talks, interviews, and online exchange, where the living voice is once again central to how ideas circulate. I treat interviews and dialogue as primary material, and ask how they should be gathered, interpreted, and cited without flattening them into ordinary text. The larger ambition is to sketch a future discipline: a rigorous practice of doing the history of philosophy through the spoken and remembered word. This research has appeared in Sententiae and informs my broader interest in how communities of thinkers preserve, contest, and renew their ideas over time.