Nice Podcast. No surprise that Lewis, Williams and Parfit all get lots of mentions. I was slightly surprised that Kripke only got one shout-out – and from Scanlon of all people.
From the generation of philosophers after Lewis, Williams and Parfit, I personally have to agree with Barry Smith’s nomination of Crispin Wright.
(And I suspect anyone who did their grad work in London in the past decade or so would attest to how impressive/scary Mike (MGF) Martin is . . . )

Scattered, only barely related, thoughts:
(1) In the entire program, only three women mentioned. Marcus, Anscombe, Kamm. Not surprising, for many reasons, but sad. I wouldn’t myself know even how to begin to compare some of the names mentioned (whom I have met), but there were certainly particular men mentioned, not of the Williams-Scanlon-Rawls standing, whom I have met and I can think of women to whom those men don’t hold a flickering philosophical candle.
(2) The overlap between this thread and the one on class in academe. E.g. the story about really getting to know Scanlon because both philosophers have summer homes in freakin’ Martha’s Vineyard.
(3) A number of men mentioned were/are (infamous) problems for women, both of the sexually harassing sort and in other ways. [no, I’m not naming names– not the point] That doesn’t in any way (in my view) entail they were not/are not impressive philosophers. It means women don’t get the benefit of that in the way do men.

Unfortunately I don’t have time to listen, but I’d love more of the data on underrepresented groups in philosophy. How many black philosophers were mentioned? LGBTQ? Disabled? Theist? Poor?

It seems someone always looks for the numbers on women, but never (or at least rarely) these other categories.

Is there any evidence that LGBTQ philosophers are underrepresented in the discipline? (Serious question – I’m genuinely not sure).

didn’t mention any of those other categories, because I don’t know. The very famous names I recognized were all caucasian, there were some male names I didn’t recognize, I didn’t hear any names of any out lbgtq philosophers (out in the sense that a person who doesn’t know them personally would know); a few names were definitely theist but no clue about how many or in what proportion; no clue about economic background. I looked for numbers of women in this case for a simple reason– I could– pronouns.

I wouldn’t be surprised if out-in-the-open theists in some departments are oppressed in rather overt, deliberate ways. It’s a mistake to assume that treatment of theists is universal.

Plouffe: Fair point, and taken. However I’ve always thought that the primary reason to be concerned with the lack of diversity in philosophy was because it was a form of or result of systematic disadvantage and/or oppression, and thus showed us that we, qua philosophers, were committing to or supporting an unjust situation. When viewed this way, the lack of theists isn’t particularly alarming, as it’s unlikely that they’re systematically excluded (or treated poorly) from the profession based on their views. But as Anon (1:08PM) notes, we should perhaps be careful not to assume that they’re not in fact treated poorly.

Bit late to the party, but I think it’s worth saying:

Lots of the people interviewed found ‘impressiveness’ in some narrow notion of intellectual acumen (being super smart), or argumentative fluency; but almost no-one said that they found someone most impressive because they found that person wise, or because they devoted their lives to something really important, or anything along these lines. Impressiveness was always, it seems, due to the impressive person doing what they did/do very well; and never because they did something especially worth doing.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of any particular interviewee. But for me, if there were two philosophers equally good at their area of philosophy, but one is working on something of little import for anyone who doesn’t happen to have some sort of fetish interest in that area (I’ll refrain from betraying my prejudice by giving an example of something I think would fit), and another is working on, say, how best to understand equality in the political sphere and by so doing improves the quality of political debate on the topic, or (to give an example of something that’s valuable in a very different way) what ‘beauty’ in art amounts to in a way that deepens her readers’ appreciation of art, then I would go for the latter every time. I feel, after listening to that Philosophy Bites compilation, that this weighting of philosophical priorities – of wisdom and extraprofessional relevance over narrowly-understood intellectual brilliance – is peculiarly absent among philosophers. And this is rather depressing for me, as in my own work and thought, I strive to be insightful and to say things worth saying over being rigorous (which of course is not to say I disdain rigour), and I feel like I’m trying to enter a profession which nowhere values what I value; and so, I fear I may not be admitted, and even that I may not in fact want admission.