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Date	Combined Rank	Apple Podcasts	Castbox
Oct 7	#93	#84	#80

About the show

From Altruism to Wittgenstein, philosophers, theories and key themes.

Latest episodes

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

April 24, 2025 · 59 min

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…
Socrates in Prison

February 20, 2025 · 51 min

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…
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom

November 14, 2024 · 53 min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which Hayek (1899-1992) warned that the way Britain was running its wartime economy would not work in peacetime and could lead…
Philippa Foot

June 13, 2024 · 58 min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, Philippa Foot (1920 - 2010). Her central question was, “Why be moral?” Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, Foot spent her life working through…
Panpsychism

February 22, 2024 · 54 min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that some kind of consciousness is present not just in our human brains but throughout the universe, right down to cells or even electrons. This is panpsychism and its proponents argue it offers a…
Condorcet

February 8, 2024 · 51 min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94), known as the Last of the Philosophes, the intellectuals in the French Enlightenment who sought to apply their learning to solving the problems of their world. He became a…
The Theory of the Leisure Class

December 14, 2023 · 56 min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most influential work of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). In 1899, during America’s Gilded Age, Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class as a reminder that all that glisters is not gold. He picked on…
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

November 30, 2023 · 52 min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristotle's ideas on what happiness means and how to live a good life. Aristotle (384-322BC) explored these almost two and a half thousand years ago in what became known as his Nicomachean Ethics. His…