Knisely began videotaping his dialogues with the students after he noticed what an impact television – MTV was just hitting its stride then – had on the fashion, conversation and worldview of the younger generation. Knisely set up his living quarters inside a 45-ft tall, 15-ft wide milk bottle that had been left behind by the former tenants. With a few of his more gifted students, he established the Richmond Philosophical Institute in an abandoned dairy that had been renovated into a colony for craftsmen and artists. He was nearly handed the hemlock for that.Īfter graduating, Knisely took a job in the public school system in Richmond, Virginia, teaching philosophy to junior high schoolers. While serving on a campus budgetary committee, he called for the university to drop scholarship athletics, a move that would have meant the end of its nationally-ranked basketball program. He had great style and a sense of humor.”Įven then Knisely was developing a reputation as a gadfly. “There are no answers, but Socrates asks such good questions. “It was unlike anything I'd ever read,” he recalls. The obligatory Philosophy 101 course introduced him to the tumultuous give-and-take of the Greek marketplace circa 400 BC. Knisely's journey began in the late 1970s while studying at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. You can miss your turn-off and wind up in a completely different country.” It takes you on a different path every night.
You can make money along the way, and hopefully as a philosopher you grow in wisdom. “One of my favorite metaphors for philosophy is the cab,” he explains. Many of the shows begin with Knisely cruising the city streets in a yellow taxi, chatting with a fare.
#Diogenes of sinope cave series
This is the first in a series of ‘Road Trip’ films dramatizing basic ideas in philosophy. ‘The Cave,’ an examination of Plato's famous image, which depicts Knisely spelunking in a West Virginia cavern 100 feet below ground, roasting marshmallows over a flickering campfire and making shadow pictures on the wall.
a program on the ‘many worlds thesis’ of quantum mechanics with a split screen representing different realities.
#Diogenes of sinope cave tv
“We reach over ten million homes in the U.S. “We've sold the show to over 250 universities in 27 countries, including Malta, Taiwan and New Zealand,” estimates Knisely. No Dogs has evolved from a cheaply-done public access program to a polished presentation broadcast regularly on the University-House channel on the DishTV system, and north of the border on Canadian Learning Television and Book Television. During that span he's logged over 200 hours of airtime, tackling topics ranging from St Augustine's theory of a just war to the joy of logic to philosophy of sports. For the last 15 years he's hosted a show called No Dogs or Philosophers Allowed. If Socrates were among us, would he live in a giant milk bottle, host his own TV talk show, and periodically check out the hits on his website?Īs a TV philosopher, Knisely feels more at home on a sound stage with a microphone attached to his lapel, than he would hunched over a podium in a stuffy lecture hall. SUBSCRIBE NOW Articles Can TV Drag Us Out of Our Cave of Ignorance? Greg Kitsock takes a look at the philosophical television show No Dogs or Philosophers Allowed and its founder Ken Knisely.
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