Symposium: Johnny Hartz Søraker, {SuchThatCast | Behind the Philosophy}

SuchThatCast (www.SuchThatCast.com) is a podcast dedicated to getting to know some of the most influential philosophers (broadly speaking) of today. It seeks to provide an alternative to most other philosophy podcasts, by taking the form of a face-to-face, free-form conversation where the guest is free (and encouraged) to share information about themselves that may not be appropriate in other forums: this includes stories about their unique and often unconventional career paths, seminal events and figures in their lives, undeveloped ideas and generally whatever they are passionate about. The inspiration for the podcast comes from having attended numerous conference pub crawls, many at IACAP, which is when the outrageous stories and philosophies often come out – and I just felt that it was a shame that these incredible stories would be restrained to these events. I own the inspiration in a large part to IACAP, since Terrell Ward Bynum’s story about when he met Bertrand Russell, told late at night at IACAP 2011, was the decisive factor. Former IACAP president Luciano Floridi was the first guest, interviewed at IACAP 2012 in Birmingham, and several IACAP regulars have been featured in later episodes.

Although the podcast is usually a face-to-face, free-form conversation, I have now organized this as a live panel twice where a selection of guests are interviewed in a panel in front of an audience, at IACAP’14 (featuring Bringsjord, Chaitin, Taddeo and Sieg) and IACAP’15 (featuring Vallor, Hongladorom, Rapaport and Deborah Johnson), and both events worked out really well.

The recording of the live event in 2014 was released as episode 11 of SuchThatCast, available at http://suchthatcast.com/iacap-live/. The recording of the live event in 2015 is (unfortunately) still undergoing editing due to some technical issues, but will be released shortly.