About Plato's Pod: Dialogues on the works of Plato
Welcome to Plato's Pod, a podcast of discussions on the dialogues of Plato, the philosopher and geometer who wrote nearly 2,400 years ago. Hosted by amateur philosopher James Myers, the first four seasons of the podcast featured group discussions and some incredible insights on many of Plato's works. Now in our fifth season, we continue to probe the philosophy of Plato's dialogues, with invited guests discussing selected topics and applying the timeless philosophical principles to contemporary issues and circumstances.
We welcome your thoughts and suggestions for discussion topics, and please contact us if you or someone you know would be interested in being a guest on the podcast. We can be reached by e-mail to dialoguesonplato@outlook.com.
Episodes are lightly edited for clarity, with care to avoid compromising the contributions made by participants. Wherever our discussions take us, we gain knowledge from each other’s perspectives and Plato, without a doubt, would have imagined no better way than in dialogue for knowledge – which is the account of the reasons why – to find its home.
Alfred North Whitehead, Part 2: The Mathematician Who Added Plato to Modern Science
In their second episode featuring the works of modern Platonist Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick brought Plato into the 21st century through Whitehead’s perspectives as a mathematician and philosopher. The discussion relates Whitehead’s perspectives to many of Plato’s dialogues, including The Sophist, The Timaeus, The Republic, The Parmenides, and The Philebus.
Writing his landmark work Process and Reality during the years when quantum mechanics and general relativity were discovered, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism treats the universe as a web of interconnected processes and changes. Whitehead applied the logic of Plato’s writing from 2,400 years ago to identify crucial connections in the web and, by following their paths, he related concepts in general relativity and quantum mechanics to the universe as an organism. From Whitehead’s perspective, there was clear logic for an eternal co-dependency of the infinite universe and the finite connections within its web.
The mathematician had much to say about the nature of time, which was a prominent in the episode’s discussion. To Whitehead, time was not linear but circular, and likewise Plato’s character Timaeus described the universe as spherical. Timaeus also stated that the changes we see everywhere around us are in a “moving image of eternity, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity.” The appeal of Timaeus’ perspective to a mathematician becomes even more obvious in the character’s next statement: “This number, of course, is what we now call 'time'.”
Can science and philosophy be reunited? If ever there was a time for such unity, the time is now, and Whitehead paved the way to connecting ancient principles with the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Nils Bohr that have transformed the modern world.
11 Feb 2026
On Modern Platonist Alfred North Whitehead, Part 1: The Mathematician Philosopher
In this episode, James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick continue to discuss modern Platonists with an introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), a mathematician who ended up as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University even though he didn’t hold a degree in philosophy. Whitehead hadn’t formally trained as a philosopher but came to be highly regarded for his mathematically-informed process philosophy that relates the oneness of all things to the continual becoming of many things. Whitehead viewed the universe as an organism of unending interconnections, and mathematics as describing the transformations of the particular connections that shape the physical world. The transformations Whitehead called “process,” and his book Process and Reality is discussed in this introductory episode where we begin to look at the current relevance of Whitehead’s thinking and how it connects to the thinking that Plato introduced to the world 2,400 years ago.
5 Jan 2026
Why Artificial Intelligence is Impossible
Plato’s Pod host James Myers brings the logic of the characters in ten of Plato’s dialogues to bear on the question of “what is intelligence?” and concludes that “artificial intelligence” is impossible. Plato’s message, that intelligence is developed only in a soul on the basis of the soul’s understanding of motion, is especially empowering for the potential of intelligent humans when big tech companies are racing to generate and profit from algorithmic intelligence that exceeds any human capacity. But the path to intelligence is very different from “machine learning,” because algorithms have no experience of motion and no access to the timeless characteristics of motion. Plato’s characters say that a soul is that which possesses self-generating motion, so that the universe itself has a soul, human souls are part of the universal soul, and understanding the causes and effects of motion – all of which springs from the self-generating motion of the universe – is key to intelligence. Changing our mindsets toward intelligence, and deleting the word “intelligence” in relation to algorithms, could put humanity on a path to a very bright future with our creative intelligence and the technology we are fully capable of developing to serve human intelligence.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
9,319
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.3 / 5
10 ratings
Spotify
4.8 / 5
6 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 40 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
17
Social presence
0
YouTube
74
Engagement
84
Host of Plato's Pod: Dialogues on the works of Plato?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
