Podcasts-Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, James...

In Our Time-

MILL. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great nineteenth century political philosopher John Stuart Mill. He believed that, 'The true philosophy is the marriage of poetry and logic'. He was one of the first thinkers to argue that a social theory must engage with ideas of culture and the internal life. He used Wordsworth to inform his social theory, he was a proto feminist and his treatise On Liberty is one of the sacred texts of liberalism. J S Mill believed that action was the natural articulation of thought. He battled throughout his life for social reform and individual freedom and was hugely influential in the extension of the vote. Few modern discussions on race, birth control, the state and human rights have not been influenced by Mill's theories. How did Mill's utilitarian background shape his political ideas? Why did he think Romantic literature was significant to the rational structure of society? On what grounds did he argue for women's equality? And how did his notions of the individual become central to modern social theory? With A C Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics at University College London; Alan Ryan, Professor of Politics at Oxford University.

DARWIN. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 2009 and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, Melvyn Bragg presents a series about Darwin's life and work.Melvyn visits Darwin's home at Down House in Kent. Despite ill health and the demands of his family, Darwin continued researching and publishing until his death in April 1882.Featuring contributions from Darwin biographer Jim Moore, geneticist at University College London Steve Jones, Darwin expert Alison Pearn of the Darwin Correspondence Project and former garden curator at Down House Nick Biddle

DARWIN Series.As part of Radio 4's Charles Darwin season Melvyn Bragg presented a major series re-assessing Darwin's life and work and asked why Darwin's writing remains such a profound influence on our understanding of the natural world.

KIERKEGAARD. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.In 1840 a young Danish girl called Regine Olsen got engaged to her sweetheart – a modish and clever young man called Søren Kierkegaard. The two were deeply in love but soon the husband to be began to have doubts. He worried that he couldn’t make Regine happy and stay true to himself and his dreams of philosophy. It was a terrible dilemma, but Kierkegaard broke off the engagement – a decision from which neither he nor his fiancée fully recovered. This unhappy episode has become emblematic of the life and thought of Søren Kierkegaard - a philosopher who confronted the painful choices in life and who understood the darker modes of human existence. Yet Kierkegaard is much more than the gloomy Dane of reputation. A thinker of wit and elegance, his ability to live with paradox and his desire to think about individuals as free have given him great purchase in the modern world and he is known as the father of Existentialism.With Jonathan Rée, Visiting Professor at Roehampton University and the Royal College of Art; Clare Carlisle, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool; John Lippitt, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire.

MARX. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Karl Marx. "Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains", "Religion is the opium of the people", and "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". That should be enough for most of you to work out whom Radio 4 listeners have voted as their favourite philosopher: the winner of the In Our Time Greatest Philosopher Vote, chosen from 20 philosophers nominated by listeners and carried through on an electoral tidal wave of 28% of our 'first-past-the-post' vote is the communist theoretician, Karl Marx.So, when you strip away the Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet era and later Marxist theory, who was Karl Marx? Where does he stand in the history of philosophy? He wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it" - which begs the question, is he really a philosopher at all? With Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Francis Wheen, journalist and author of a biography of Karl Marx; Gareth Stedman Jones, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University.

NIETZSCHE. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morality - A Polemic, which he published in 1887 towards the end of his working life and in which he considered the price humans have paid, and were still paying, to become civilised. In three essays, he argued that having a guilty conscience was the price of living in society with other humans. He suggested that Christian morality, with its consideration for others, grew as an act of revenge by the weak against their masters, 'the blond beasts of prey', as he calls them, and the price for that slaves' revolt was endless self-loathing. These and other ideas were picked up by later thinkers, perhaps most significantly by Sigmund Freud who further explored the tensions between civilisation and the individual.

FREUD. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relevance of psychoanalysis at the end of the 20th century. It’s 100 years since Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, a term which he coined, published The Interpretation of Dreams. Sixty years after his death, Freud’s influence and the influence of that book, has been felt in the 20th century in everything from the arts, history and anthropology, to of course psychology and even science. Dreams have inspired political speeches, songs, and seduction, captivating and fascinating mankind since time immemorial. For Sigmund Freud, they were the key to unlocking the working of the unconscious. But at the end of the 20th century, has psychoanalysis become too fractured and too insistent on privileging the past over the present to go forward into the future? Has it failed to develop and adapt to an age increasingly dominated by science? With Dr Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalyst, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Department of Political and Social Sciences; Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of The Beast in the Nursery.

WILLIAM JAMES. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' by William James. The American novelist Henry James famously made London his home and himself more English than the English. In contrast, his psychologist brother, William, was deeply immersed in his American heritage. But in 1901, William came to Britain too. He had been invited to deliver a series of prestigious public lectures in Edinburgh. In them, he attempted a daringly original intellectual project. For the first time, here was a close-up examination of religion not as a body of beliefs, but as an intimate personal experience. When the lectures were printed, as 'The Varieties of Religious Experience', they were an instant success.They laid the ground for a whole new area of study - the psychology of religion - and influenced figures from the psychiatrist Carl Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley. To date, James's book has been reprinted thirty-six times and has been hailed as one of the best non-fiction books of the twentieth century.With:Jonathan ReeFreelance philosopherJohn HaldaneProfessor of Philosophy at the University of St AndrewsGwen Griffith-DicksonEmeritus Professor of Divinity at Gresham College and Director of the Lokahi FoundationProducer: Natasha Emerson.

PRAGMATISM. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American philosophy of pragmatism. A pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad apriori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power". A quote from William James' 1907 treatise Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. William James, along with John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, was the founder of an American philosophical movement which flowered during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the 20th century. It purported that knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action. Nothing is true or false - it either works or it doesn't. It was a philosophy which was deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world he inhabited. In essence, practical application was all. But how did Pragmatism harness the huge scientific leap forward that had come with Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution? And how did this dynamic new philosophy challenge the doubts expressed by the Sceptics about the nature and extent of knowledge? Did Pragmatism influence the economic and political ascendancy of America in the early 20th century? And did it also pave the way for the contemporary preoccupation with post-modernism? With A C Grayling, Professor of Applied Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford; Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine; Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.
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Philosophy Bites-

• Richard Reeves on Mill's On Liberty What are the acceptable limits of individual freedom? John Stuart Mill addressed this question in his classic defence of liberalism, On Liberty (1859). In this episode of Philosophy Bites, Richard Reeves, author of a recent biography of ...

• Clare Carlisle on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

  What is faith? Are human beings capable of it? What part does reason play in life? These and more questions are raised by Søren Kierkegaard's book Fear and Trembling. Clare Carlisle illuminates many of the themes of the book in this inte...

• Christopher Janaway on Nietzsche on Morality

  Friedrich Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morality presents a highly original account of the sources of our values. Christopher Janaway, author of Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy, discusses Nietzsche's influential book in...

• Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche on Art and Truth

  In this interview Aaron Ridley explores Nietzsche's changing views about the relationship between art and truth including his views about the dionysian and appollonian aspects of existence. Listen to Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche on Art and...

• Robert Talisse on Pragmatism

  'Truth is what works'. So does Pragmatism work? Robert B. Talisse talks about this important philosophical movement and some of the differences between the ideas of its founders James, Peirce and Dewey in this episode of the Philosophy B...

• Women of Ideas edited by Suki Finn

  We are delighted to announce that Suki Finn, lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, has selected and edited a collection of transcripts of Philosophy Bites interviews with women. This is to be published by Oxford University Press as Women of Ideas on 22nd April 2021. This is the fourth book of interviews from Philosophy Bites. 

  From Amia Srinivasan on gender to Mary Warnock on public philosophy, from Martha Naussbaum on disgust to Onora O’Neill on consent, this new volume features interviews with leading women philosophers on some of the pressing issues in the world today.

  

  Here is a list of the interviews included in Women of Ideas:

  Amia Srinivasan: What is a Woman?

  Janet Radcliffe Richards: Men's and Women's Natures

  Patricia Smith Churchland: What neuroscience can teach us about morality

  Christine M. Korsgaard: The Status of Animals

  Ashwini Vasanthakumar: Do victims have obligations too?

  Miranda Fricker: Blame and Historic Injustice

  Kimberley Brownlee: Social Deprivation

  Sarah Fine: The Right to Exclude

  Anne Phillips: Multiculturalism and Liberalism

  Jennifer Saul: Implicit Bias

  Martha C. Nussbaum: Disgust

  Elisabeth Schellekens: Disagreement about Taste

  Emma Borg: Language and Context

  Rebecca Roache: Swearing

  Teresa M. Bejan: Civility

  Katherine Hawley: Trustworthiness

  Onora O'Neill: Medical Consent

  Katalin Farkas: Knowing a Person

  Jennifer Nagel: Intuitions about Knowledge

  Susan James: Michel Foucault and Knowledge

  Kate Kirkpatrick: The Life and Work of Simone de Beauvoir

  Katherine J. Morris: Merleau-Ponty on the Body

  Alison Gopnik: Hume and Buddhism

  Katrin Flikschuh: Philosophy in Africa

  Angie Hobbs: Plato on War

  Helen Beebee: Possible Worlds

  Tamar Szabó Gendler: Why Philosophers use Examples

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Progress in Philosophy

  Mary Warnock: Philosophy and Public Life

  About the editor:

  Suki Finn is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. She researches in the areas of metametaphysics, the philosophy of logic, the metaphysics of pregnancy, the epistemology of love, and feminist and queer theory. Suki has published her work in various philosophy journals, edited collections, and in the online magazine Aeon. Women of Ideasis Suki’s first book. Suki is on the Executive Committee for the Society for Women in Philosophy UK, and on the Council for the Royal Institute of Philosophy. In her other life, Suki is a musician. Suki is represented by Ben Clark at the Soho Agency.

  Women of Ideas is already available for pre-order:

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And see The Philosopher Queens: The lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women ($7.99 kindle edition)