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Long before Philosophy Talk hit the Internet, even before the popular WHHY radio talk program Fresh Air with Terry Gross hit the airwaves, there was Soundings. Soundings was a popular weekly radio talk show, produced from 1980 to 1997. Recorded and produced at the National Humanities Center, Soundings host Wayne Pond interviewed many of the Center’s fellows as well as a bevy of politicians, artists, and writers who passed through the Center’s doors during the show’s 17-year run. While production closed down just before the advent of the multi-media Internet, the evergreen content of the discussions is the sort of thing that is perfect for digital archiving.

With a varied guest list that includes such luminaries as Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty as well as hundreds of scholars who are not household names, the Soundings episodes are a collective document of American intellectual life in the latter part of the 20th century. I had the honor of working on the team that undertook digitally preserving the Soundings archive — transferring recordings from vinyl and tape to digital format — while I worked at the National Humanities Center. And in the course of sifting through the 862 episodes and thousands of interviewees, I was most excited to find an interview with Gregory Vlastos. If you don’t know him, Vlastos is the man largely responsible for renewal in interest in ancient Greek philosophy because of his application of analytic techniques to the dialogues of Plato. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher is one of the best books written on Socrates, Plato, and the problems introduced by the literary nature of our existing record of Socrates’ contributions to the field of philosophy. In a 1981 interview, you can listen to Vlastos discussing the life of Socrates (see below).

There are many more radio interviews with professional philosophers hosted by The Soundings Project, the website re-broadcasting the recordings via streaming or downloadable mp3s. Browse the list of episodes tagged Philosophy, most of which include interviews with professional philosophers who spent some time at the National Humanities Center between 1980 and 1997 and agreed to be interviewed by Wayne Pond, and enjoy the philosophical debate or discussion brought back to the public.

“Vlastos: Socrates in his Time” March 8, 1981

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