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IN OUR TIME
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds in the world. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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BIOGRAPHY |
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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LATEST PROGRAMME |
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THE EXAMINED LIFE, 9 May 2002.
Socrates, the Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, famously declared that "The unexamined life is not worth living." His drive towards rigorous self-enquiry and his uncompromising questioning of assumptions laid firm foundations for the history of Western Philosophy.
But these qualities did not make him popular in ancient Athens: Socrates was deemed to be a dangerous subversive for his crime, as he described it, of "asking questions and searching into myself and other men". In 399 BC Socrates was sentenced to death on the charge of being "an evil-doer and a curious person".
Two thousand years later, the novelist George Eliot was moved to reply to Socrates that "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all". For Eliot too much self-scrutiny could lead to paralysis rather than clarity.
What did Socrates mean by his injunction? How have our preoccupations about how to live altered since the birth of ancient Greek philosophy? And where does philosophy rank in our quest for self-knowledge alongside science, the arts and religion?
Guests
Dr Anthony Grayling
Reader in Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
Janet Radcliffe Richards
Philosopher of Science and Reader in Bioethics, University College, London
Julian Baggini
Editor, The Philosopher’s Magazine and co-editor of New British Philosophy: The Interviews
Next programme: Order or Chaos?
Is the world is a fundamentally chaotic or orderly place? Chemical reactions, electronic circuits and even our own brains seem to function chaotically, but are they controlled by logical and predictable systems? Might there be an inherent order behind the fluctuations of the stock market or the vagaries of the British weather? Newton’s message in Principia Mathematica was that "Nature has laws and we can find them". Does the Universe function like clockwork and, if everything is pre-determined, what does this mean for our notions of human free will? Guests: Susan Greenfield, David Papineau and Neil Johnson.
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