Kant's Categorical Imperative

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the group which came to be known as the Levellers and emerged during what would become arguably one of the bloodiest and most turbulent periods of English history. After the First English Civil War, the Levellers started calling for reforms to achi ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss an ancient civilisation who lived over 2000 years ago in the southwest of modern-day Libya. During prehistoric times, the Sahara Desert was greener and even had large lakes, but for the last 5000 years it has been a hyperarid environment. Extreme s ...  Show more

In 1956 Oxford University awarded an honorary degree to the former US president Harry S. Truman for his role in ending the Second World War. One philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919 – 2001), objected strongly. She argued that although dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Naga ...  Show more

Second lecture in the 2011 John Locke Lecture Series. Philosophy is a demanding intellectual discipline, with many facets: logic, epistemology, philosophy of nature and science, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of art, rhetoric, philosophy of language and min ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss morality by taking a long hard look at the idea of guilt. The 18th century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke was once moved to comment: “Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it l ...  Show more

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant's work of ethics, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Specifically it examines his discussion of what he calls "heteronomy" in moral theories other than his own. He examines empirical princ ...  Show more