Kant's Copernican Revolution

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), who was part of the movement known as phenomenology. While less well-known than his contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, his popularity has increased among philosophers in ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato's Crito and Phaedo, his accounts of the last days of Socrates in prison in 399 BC as he waited to be executed by drinking hemlock. Both works show Socrates preparing to die in the way he had lived: doing philosophy. In the Crito, Plato shows ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the insight into our relationship with the world that Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) shared in his book The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. It was as revolutionary, in his view, as when the Polish astronomer Copernicus realised that Earth revolves arou ...  Show more

<span lang="es" xml:lang="es">Este capítulo va a ser un poco distinto a todo lo que hemos hecho hasta el momento. Esta vez nos pondremos más filosóficos que de costumbre y hablaremos de los 300 años del nacimiento de Inmanuel Kant y de su legado para occident ...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) on history. Hegel, one of the most influential of the modern philosophers, described history as the progress in the consciousness of freedom, asking whether we enjoy more freedom now than those w ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Plato's Symposium, one of the Greek philosopher's most celebrated works. Written in the 4th century BC, it is a dialogue set at a dinner party attended by a number of prominent ancient Athenians, including the philosopher Socrates and the playw ...  Show more