Someone sent me a link to this site recently and I've been enjoying it ever since. Basically, it's a bunch of short interviews with leading living philosophers (as distinct from recordings of dead ones, for instance) that you can download as mp3 files. Or 'podcasts', as I suppose they are called nowadays...eeeh, when I were a lad...
Even their art for the files you download is clever; they've used Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit, which if you don't know it is one of those pictures that can be seen as either of two things but not both at once, depending on the attitude you choose to adopt to it. It's a simple line drawing that looks like either a duck or a rabbit, as the name suggests (like the one that is either an old woman with a hooked nose or a beautiful young woman turned away in profile). But the really clever thing is that the name "philosophy bites" also has a double meaning; the interviews are of course 'soundbites', short talks, but - at least I think this is the intention - they also want to suggest that 'philosophy bites' in the sense that it has bite, i.e. it has some connection to the real world and that it can be efficacious in one way or another.
And listening to the talks, this is certainly philosophy with bite. They are all in the form of interviews and are very much non-technical, so you don't really need to know anything about philosophy to enjoy them, although those who do will certainly appreciate being able to get an overview of the discipline. There are some real gems. Check out Alexander Nehemas on friendship; Antony Appiah on cosmopolitanism; Anthony Grayling on atheism; Mary Warnock on the right to have a baby; Raymond Geuss on politics; and many more, with new ones being added regularly. After listening to a dozen or so of them I'm filled with new enthusiasm for modern Anglo-American philosophy and the sharpness of mind on display.
So, I can only urge you to go to:
http://philosophybites.libsyn.com/
and check them out for yourself.
