In 2007, David Edmunds, a documentary film maker for BBC World Service, and Nigel Washington, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, began a free podcast featuring bite-sized interviews with philosophers on a variety of topics. In their first two years, they generated five million downloads and fanfare from around the world. In this small volume, Edmunds and Washington have chosen what they consider to be the 25 best interviews. They are to be commended for taking an old and musty academic subject and infusing it with contemporary flare. In an early section of this book, philosophers give the following definitions of what they do:
• John Armstrong: "Philosophy is the successful love of thinking."
• Wendy Brown: "Philosophy asks about life's meanings. Philosophy asks about who we are, what we might be, how we conceive ourselves, and how we can even think these questions."
• Richard Bradley: "Philosophy is 99 percent about critical reflection on anything you care to be interested in."
• Alex Neill: "Philosophy is thinking that is obsessed with clarity."
Among our favorite conversations are those by Peter Singer on animal rights, Alexander Nehamas on friendship, John Cottingham on the meaning of life, and Alain de Botton on the aesthetics of architecture. Some of the topics covered in other conversations are time, tolerance, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, the paradox of tragedy, and sport and enhancement.
