This is a question demanding two very different answers:
On the one hand, the question is clearly muddle headed, in that until five hundred years or so ago, all philosophy was performance based. If one thinks back to the early masterpieces of ancient philosophy, they take the form of gnomic sayings, long poems, formal dialogues or mere lecture notes, and so are all, if in differing manners, part of an oral tradition. Likewise the philosophy of the Middle Ages was arranged within elaborate questions, which travelled from university to university by word of mouth as much as by book, and to which differing universities strove to give answers. Philosophy, or at least pre-modern philosophy was as much a part of the oral tradition as were folktales. All these shows aim to do is to explore the non-written dimensions of ancient philosophy.
But neither should one move too quickly to suppose that even modern philosophy is utterly a creature of the book. Perhaps one of the excitements of seventeenth century philosophy, lies in the feeling one gets, as one reads it, that there is a strange vibrancy to the writing, which might well be attributed to the fact that this was the first mass literate generation. The excitement fairly rips off the page and it is in part the aim of these shows to communicate it. Finally it is of course a deep mistake to think that even modern philosophy is all based in book, for where would it be without its seminars or lectures?
Picture top of page; Heraclitus
Picture bottom of page; Michel Foucault
Playing introduction to what is philosophy?
On the other hand, there is no real need to justify material that makes not only compelling stories, but also challenges many of the standard habits or ways thinking, and so, allows one to really ‘think the world otherwise’. It is of course a maxim of storytelling that really good stories involve multi-layered meanings, it seems then only natural that an enquiry into the complexities of meaning, should be caught up in composing deep and very rich stories. These shows aim to explore this dimension.
ArchMage demo