Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview with Hugh Benson, who is a professor at the

University of Oklahoma and a visiting research fellow here at Kings.

Hi, you.

Hi, Peter.

And I should point out that Hugh is in London the semester with the support of the

Liberty Human Trust, which also funds this podcast.

So thank you, Lever Hume Trust.

Yes, thank you.

Hugh, I wanted to talk to you in this interview about Aristotelian method,

which I suppose raises the question of what we would mean by a method.

What do you think philosophical method means in the context of ancient thinkers like, say, Aristotle

or Socrates in Plato?

Yeah, I think that's a really good question to start with because I don't think we think much

about Method anymore, it's about Philosophical Method, and one of the things that I really like about Plato and

Aristotle is they did devote so much time to the nature of philosophical method.

I suppose I enjoy thinking about what I'm doing more than doing it, and fortunately

they did it and thought about what they were doing. But I think when because they are concerned with method I think there are

some distinctive features about their concern. One of those distinctive features I think

is that they, even though they recognize that there were a variety

of philosophical activities, they thought of philosophy as primarily the search for knowledge

...