Melvyn Bragg hosts In Our Time: it’s reassuring that there are still some intelligent and sober mainstream radio programmes around. Though Bragg ain’t no Bryan Magee (few, if any, can match him) Bragg’s series could nonetheless be a useful supplement. Remember kiddies, even if you are formally enrolled on a university course, in essence the burden of getting an education is still an autodidactic experience — unless of course you have given over your mind to robotically assimilate and regurgitate your activist professor’s whingeing off-the-peg worldview, thereby compromising your intellectual and moral integrity, and consigning yourself to being mere cannon fodder. Some of the episodes that caught my eye include: The categorical imperative, The Republic, Hannah Arendt, Animal Farm, Zeno’s Paradoxes, sovereignty, Tristan and Iseult, utilitarianism, Josephus, The Wealth of Nations, Thucydides, phenomenology, truth, The Trial, the philosophy of solitude, Berkeley, the trinity, The Symposium, complexity, ordinary language philosophy, Pascal, Montaigne, epicureanism, Russell, the ontological argument, scepticism, game theory, Neo-Platonism, Moses Mendelssohn, Erasmus, Hume, the cogito, freewill, Maimonides, logic, Burke, The Varieties of religion Experience, Schopenhauer, Aquinas, logical positivism, The Consolations of Philosophy, probability, Kierkegaard, Camus, Socrates, Ockham’s razor, Spinoza, Popper, Mill, The Oxford Movement, Don Quixote — and many more episodes besides.
- Share
