Ibn Khaldun

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

Ibn Khaldūn was a Muslim writer who covered history, economics and sociology. He lived during a time of chaos and strife, and his life was mired in the political drama and intrigue of the day.

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Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Central Asian polymath al-Biruni and his eleventh-century book the India.Born in around 973 in the central Asian region of Chorasmia, al-Biruni became an itinerant scholar of immense learning, a master of mathematics, medicine, astronomy an ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Central Asian polymath al-Biruni and his eleventh-century book the India.Born in around 973 in the central Asian region of Chorasmia, al-Biruni became an itinerant scholar of immense learning, a master of mathematics, medicine, astronomy an ...  Show more

From all accounts, Nietzsche did not read nor comment upon the work of Ibn Khaldun, outside of a few remarks from Schopenhauer in one of his essays that Nietzsche might have read. But what we find in his Muqaddimah is a theory of cyclical history, in which many of the key princip ...  Show more