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IN OUR TIME
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MISSED A PROGRAMME?
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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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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LISTEN AGAIN |
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PRESENTER |
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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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IMAGINATION
Immanuel Kant said, "Imagination is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we should have no knowledge whatever but of which we are scarcely even conscious".
Imagination has been the companion of artists, scientists, leaders and visionaries but what exactly is it?
When did human beings first develop an imagination and why? How does it relate to creativity and what evolutionary function does creativity have? And is it possible to know whether our brains’ capacity for imagination is still evolving?
Guests
Dr Susan Stuart
Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Glasgow.
Steven Mithen
Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading.
Semir Zeki
Professor of Neurobiology at the University of London and author of Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain.
Next Week
Next week on In Our Time we’ll be looking at the Scottish Enlightenment.
In 1696 an Edinburgh student claimed theology was "a rhapsody of feigned and ill invented nonsense" and was hanged for his trouble - just one victim of a repressive religious society called the Scottish Kirk.
Yet within 60 years Scottish society was transformed by the ideas sweeping across Europe in what we call the Enlightenment.
The Scottish Enlightenment emerged on a broad front, from philosophy to farming it championed the cause of reason and was crowned by the philosophical brilliance of David Hume and by Adam Smith – the father of modern economics.
What caused this ‘Scottish Miracle’, how important was the 1707 Act of Union with England and is the church rightly cast as villain or did Scottish Calvinist traditions inform the Enlightenment as much as oppose it.
With Melvyn to discuss the Scottish Enlightenment will be Tom Devine, Karen O’Brien and Alexander Broadie.
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