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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. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |  |  |  |  | LISTEN AGAIN  |  |  | |
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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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 |  |  | NATURE
In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Lord Byron wrote: “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more.”
In the Bible’s book of Genesis, ‘nature’ was the paradise of Eden, but for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was a place of perpetual war, where the life of man was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short”.
The defining of Nature, whether “red in tooth and claw” or as the fount of all innocence, is an attempt to define man’s origins and purpose and humanity’s part in the natural world.
Contributors
Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick
Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham
Karen Edwards, Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter
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