In Our Time: Philosophy
by BBC Radio 4
From Altruism to Wittgenstein, philosophers, theories and key themes.
Copyright: (C) BBC 2024
Episodes
Sovereignty
47m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the idea of Sovereignty, the authority of a state to govern itself and the relationship between the sovereign and the people. These ideas of external and internal sovereignty were imagined in various ways in ancient Greece and Rome, and given a name in 16th Century France by the philosopher and jurist Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the Commonwealth, where he said (in an early English translation) 'Maiestie or Soveraigntie is the most high, absolute, and perpetuall power over the citisens and subiects in a Commonweale: which the Latins cal Maiestatem, the Greeks akra exousia, kurion arche, and kurion politeuma; the Italians Segnoria, and the Hebrewes tomech shévet, that is to say, The greatest power to command.' Shakespeare also explored the concept through Richard II and the king's two bodies, Hobbes developed it in the 17th Century, and the idea of popular sovereignty was tested in the Revolutionary era in America and France.
With
Melissa Lane
Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University
Richard Bourke
Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London
and
Tim Stanton
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
The Muses
45m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Muses and their role in Greek mythology, when they were goddesses of poetry, song, music and dance: what the Greeks called mousike, 'the art of the Muses' from which we derive our word 'music.' While the number of Muses, their origin and their roles varied in different accounts and at different times, they were consistently linked with the nature of artistic inspiration. This raised a question for philosophers then and since: was a creative person an empty vessel into which the Muses poured their gifts, at their will, or could that person do something to make inspiration flow?
With
Paul Cartledge
Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge
Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, University of Sheffield
And
Penelope Murray
Founder member and retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Warwick
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Image: 'Apollo and the Muses (Parnassus)', 1631-1632. Oil on canvas. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665).
Simone de Beauvoir
46m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it. Many male critics felt men came out of it rather badly. Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a high bourgeois family and it was perhaps her good fortune that her father lost his money when she was a girl. With no dowry, she pursued her education in Paris to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, came second only to Jean Paul Sartre. He was retaking. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy; Beauvoir explored that, and existentialist ethics, plus the novel and, increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, the situation of women in the world.
With
Christina Howells
Professor of French and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford
Margaret Atack
Professor of French at the University of Leeds
And
Ursula Tidd
Professor of Modern French Literature and Thought at the University of Manchester
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
Utilitarianism
43m · Published
A moral theory that emphasises ends over means, Utilitarianism holds that a good act is one that increases pleasure in the world and decreases pain. The tradition flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and has antecedents in ancient philosophy. According to Bentham, happiness is the means for assessing the utility of an act, declaring "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Mill and others went on to refine and challenge Bentham's views and to defend them from critics such as Thomas Carlyle, who termed Utilitarianism a "doctrine worthy only of swine."
With
Melissa Lane
The Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University
Janet Radcliffe Richards
Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford
and
Brad Hooker
A Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
Al-Ghazali
44m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Al-Ghazali, a major philosopher and theologian of the late 11th century. Born in Persia, he was one of the most prominent intellectuals of his age, working in such centres of learning as Baghdad, Damascus and Jerusalem. He is now seen as a key figure in the development of Islamic thought, not just refining the theology of Islam but also building on the existing philosophical tradition inherited from the ancient Greeks.
With:
Peter Adamson
Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich
Carole Hillenbrand
Professor of Islamic History at Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities
Robert Gleave
Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter
Producer: Victoria Brignell.
The Wealth of Nations
46m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Adam Smith's celebrated economic treatise The Wealth of Nations. Smith was one of Scotland's greatest thinkers, a moral philosopher and pioneer of economic theory whose 1776 masterpiece has come to define classical economics. Based on his careful consideration of the transformation wrought on the British economy by the Industrial Revolution, and how it contrasted with marketplaces elsewhere in the world, the book outlined a theory of wealth and how it is accumulated that has arguably had more influence on economic theory than any other.
With:
Richard Whatmore
Professor of Modern History and Director of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews
Donald Winch
Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex
Helen Paul
Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Phenomenology
46m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss phenomenology, a style of philosophy developed by the German thinker Edmund Husserl in the first decades of the 20th century. Husserl's initial insights underwent a radical transformation in the work of his student Martin Heidegger, and played a key role in the development of French philosophy at the hands of writers like Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenology has been a remarkably adaptable approach to philosophy. It has given its proponents a platform to expose and critique the basic assumptions of past philosophy, and to talk about everything from the foundations of geometry to the difference between fear and anxiety. It has also been instrumental in getting philosophy out of the seminar room and making it relevant to the lives people actually lead.
GUESTS
Simon Glendinning, Professor of European Philosophy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics
Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University
Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy and Tutor at New College at the University of Oxford
Producer: Luke Mulhall.
Truth
42m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of truth. Pontius Pilate famously asked: what is truth? In the twentieth century, the nature of truth became a subject of particular interest to philosophers, but they preferred to ask a slightly different question: what does it mean to say of any particular statement that it is true? What is the difference between these two questions, and how useful is the second of them?
With:
Simon Blackburn
Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities
Jennifer Hornsby
Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Crispin Wright
Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, and Professor of Philosophy at New York University
Producer: Victoria Brignell and Luke Mulhall.
Zen
45m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Zen. It's often thought of as a form of Buddhism that emphasises the practice of meditation over any particular set of beliefs. In fact Zen belongs to a particular intellectual tradition within Buddhism that took root in China in the 6th century AD. It spread to Japan in the early Middle Ages, where Zen practitioners set up religious institutions like temples, monasteries and universities that remain important today.
GUESTS
Tim Barrett, Emeritus Professor in the Department of the Study of Religions at SOAS, University of London
Lucia Dolce, Numata Reader in Japanese Buddhism at SOAS, University of London
Eric Greene, Lecturer in East Asian Religions at the University of Bristol
Producer: Luke Mulhall.
The Philosophy of Solitude
47m · Published
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of solitude. The state of being alone can arise for many different reasons: imprisonment, exile or personal choice. It can be prompted by religious belief, personal necessity or a philosophical need for solitary contemplation. Many thinkers have dealt with the subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Hannah Arendt. It's a philosophical tradition that takes in medieval religious mystics, the work of Montaigne and Adam Smith, and the great American poets of solitude Thoreau and Emerson.
With:
Melissa Lane
Professor of Politics at Princeton University
Simon Blackburn
Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
John Haldane
Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews
Producer: Thomas Morris.
In Our Time: Philosophy has 154 episodes in total of non- explicit content. Total playtime is 106:47:27. The language of the podcast is English. This podcast has been added on November 28th 2022. It might contain more episodes than the ones shown here. It was last updated on May 22nd, 2024 04:41.
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