Kant's Categorical Imperative

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the exchange of cultures and biology across the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492. That was when Columbus reached the Bahamas, a time when Europe had no potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers or, arguably, syphilis in its most virulent form; the Americas had ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the short life and lasting works of Keats (1795-1821), who in one year wrote some of the most loved poems in English. Among these are Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy. That most productive year began in autumn 1818, ...  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