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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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|  | | EMPIRICISM
England’s greatest contribution to philosophy is Empiricism. At the end of the seventeenth century the philosopher John Locke wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
“All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:- How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.”
It was a body of ideas that for Voltaire, and for Kant after him, defined the English attitude to thought; a straight talking pragmatic philosophy that was hand in glove with a practical people.
How was the philosophy of empiricism developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? And what effect did this emphasis on experience have on culture and literature in Britain?
Contributors
Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London
Murray Pittock, Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the University of Manchester
Jonathan Rée, philosopher and author of Philosophy and its Past (Humanities Press, 1978)
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