TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: In Our Time: Philosophy

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157 episodes
1998 to 2025
Median: 42 minutes
Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast is a wide-ranging exploration of philosophy, centred on major thinkers, foundational texts, and recurring problems in ethics, politics, and human understanding. Across discussions of ancient, medieval, early modern and twentieth-century figures, it returns to enduring questions about how to live, what morality requires, and what makes political authority legitimate. Ethical themes include virtue and human flourishing, duty and universal moral law, the status of moral objectivity, the difference between doing and allowing harm, and the role that concepts like hope and authenticity play in practical life.

A strong strand of political and social thought runs through the programme, examining ideals and failures of democracy and republicanism, the nature of sovereignty and law, the dynamics of charismatic leadership, and debates about liberty, planning, markets and inequality. Economic ideas are treated as part of intellectual history as well as moral and political argument, from early modern trade doctrines to critiques of consumer status and influential accounts of capitalism and state power.

The podcast also covers philosophy of mind and metaphysics, including approaches to consciousness and the mind–body problem, and epistemological questions about how perception and the structures of the mind shape what we can know. Cultural and intellectual history is woven in through treatments of art, rhetoric, education, religion and science, with attention to how philosophical ideas developed in specific historical contexts—from classical Athens and imperial Rome to the Enlightenment, revolutionary eras, and the crises of the twentieth century.

Episodes:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2025-Apr-24 59 minutes

Socrates in Prison 2025-Feb-20 50 minutes

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom 2024-Nov-14 53 minutes

Philippa Foot 2024-Jun-13 58 minutes

Panpsychism 2024-Feb-22 53 minutes

Condorcet 2024-Feb-08 50 minutes

The Theory of the Leisure Class 2023-Dec-14 55 minutes

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 2023-Nov-30 52 minutes

Elizabeth Anscombe 2023-Jul-20 54 minutes

Solon the Lawgiver 2023-Apr-20 51 minutes

Mercantilism 2023-Apr-13 57 minutes

Tycho Brahe 2023-Mar-02 53 minutes

Rawls' Theory of Justice 2023-Feb-16 60 minutes

Plato's Atlantis 2022-Oct-20 54 minutes

Hegel's Philosophy of History 2022-Jun-23 52 minutes

Comenius 2022-Jun-16 56 minutes

Charisma 2022-Apr-14 52 minutes

The Arthashastra 2022-Mar-31 56 minutes

Walter Benjamin 2022-Feb-10 50 minutes

Plato's Gorgias 2021-Nov-25 50 minutes

Iris Murdoch 2021-Oct-21 54 minutes

Kant's Copernican Revolution 2021-Jun-03 53 minutes

Marcus Aurelius 2021-Feb-25 52 minutes

Mary Astell 2020-Nov-05 51 minutes

Deism 2020-Oct-08 48 minutes

Rousseau on Education 2019-Oct-10 51 minutes

Bergson and Time 2019-May-09 51 minutes

Authenticity 2019-Mar-14 50 minutes

Aristotle's Biology 2019-Feb-07 50 minutes

Hope 2018-Nov-22 53 minutes

The Fable of the Bees 2018-Oct-25 50 minutes

Montesquieu 2018-Jun-14 49 minutes

Tocqueville: Democracy in America 2018-Mar-22 50 minutes

Augustine's Confessions 2018-Mar-15 47 minutes

Sun Tzu and The Art of War 2018-Mar-01 48 minutes

Cicero 2018-Jan-25 49 minutes

Kant's Categorical Imperative 2017-Sep-21 49 minutes

Plato's Republic 2017-Jun-29 48 minutes

Roger Bacon 2017-Apr-20 50 minutes

Seneca the Younger 2017-Feb-23 51 minutes

Hannah Arendt 2017-Feb-02 47 minutes

Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality 2017-Jan-12 48 minutes

Zeno's Paradoxes 2016-Sep-22 46 minutes

Sovereignty 2016-Jun-30 47 minutes

The Muses 2016-May-19 45 minutes

Simone de Beauvoir 2015-Oct-22 46 minutes

Utilitarianism 2015-Jun-11 43 minutes

Al-Ghazali 2015-Mar-19 44 minutes

The Wealth of Nations 2015-Feb-19 46 minutes

Phenomenology 2015-Jan-22 46 minutes

Truth 2014-Dec-18 42 minutes

Zen 2014-Dec-04 45 minutes

The Philosophy of Solitude 2014-Jun-19 47 minutes

Weber's The Protestant Ethic 2014-Mar-27 50 minutes

Bishop Berkeley 2014-Mar-20 47 minutes

Plato's Symposium 2014-Jan-02 42 minutes

Ordinary Language Philosophy 2013-Nov-07 41 minutes

Pascal 2013-Sep-19 41 minutes

Epicureanism 2013-Feb-07 42 minutes

Bertrand Russell 2012-Dec-06 42 minutes

Simone Weil 2012-Nov-15 42 minutes

The Ontological Argument 2012-Sep-27 42 minutes

Scepticism 2012-Jul-05 42 minutes

Al-Kindi 2012-Jun-28 41 minutes

Neoplatonism 2012-Apr-19 41 minutes

Moses Mendelssohn 2012-Mar-22 42 minutes

Heraclitus 2011-Dec-08 41 minutes

The Continental-Analytic Split 2011-Nov-10 42 minutes

David Hume 2011-Oct-06 42 minutes

Malthusianism 2011-Jun-22 42 minutes

Cogito Ergo Sum 2011-Apr-28 42 minutes

Free Will 2011-Mar-10 42 minutes

Maimonides 2011-Feb-15 42 minutes

Aristotle's Poetics 2011-Jan-27 42 minutes

Daoism 2010-Dec-15 42 minutes

Logic 2010-Oct-21 42 minutes

Edmund Burke 2010-Jun-03 42 minutes

William James's 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' 2010-May-13 42 minutes

William Hazlitt 2010-Apr-08 41 minutes

Ibn Khaldun 2010-Feb-04 42 minutes

The Frankfurt School 2010-Jan-14 42 minutes

Mary Wollstonecraft 2009-Dec-31 41 minutes

Pythagoras 2009-Dec-10 41 minutes

Schopenhauer 2009-Oct-29 42 minutes

St Thomas Aquinas 2009-Sep-17 42 minutes

Logical Positivism 2009-Jul-02 42 minutes

Baconian Science 2009-Apr-02 42 minutes

The School of Athens 2009-Mar-26 42 minutes

Thoreau and the American Idyll 2009-Jan-15 42 minutes

The Consolations of Philosophy 2009-Jan-01 42 minutes

Aristotle's Politics 2008-Nov-06 42 minutes

Godel's Incompleteness Theorems 2008-Oct-09 42 minutes

The Translation Movement 2008-Oct-02 42 minutes

Miracles 2008-Sep-25 42 minutes

Materialism 2008-Apr-24 42 minutes

Kierkegaard 2008-Mar-20 42 minutes

The Social Contract 2008-Feb-07 41 minutes

Camus 2008-Jan-03 42 minutes

Avicenna 2007-Nov-08 41 minutes

Guilt 2007-Nov-01 42 minutes

Socrates 2007-Sep-27 42 minutes

Common Sense Philosophy 2007-Jun-21 42 minutes

Ockham's Razor 2007-May-31 42 minutes

Spinoza 2007-May-03 28 minutes

Popper 2007-Feb-08 42 minutes

Anarchism 2006-Dec-07 42 minutes

Altruism 2006-Nov-23 42 minutes

Averroes 2006-Oct-05 42 minutes

Mill 2006-May-18 42 minutes

Friendship 2006-Mar-02 41 minutes

Relativism 2006-Jan-19 28 minutes

The Oath 2006-Jan-05 42 minutes

Hobbes 2005-Dec-01 28 minutes

Pragmatism 2005-Nov-17 42 minutes

Cynicism 2005-Oct-20 28 minutes

Marx 2005-Jul-14 42 minutes

Beauty 2005-May-19 28 minutes

Abelard and Heloise 2005-May-05 41 minutes

Stoicism 2005-Mar-04 28 minutes

The Mind/Body Problem 2005-Jan-13 42 minutes

Machiavelli and the Italian City States 2004-Dec-09 42 minutes

Jung 2004-Dec-02 28 minutes

Rhetoric 2004-Oct-14 42 minutes

The Han Synthesis 2004-Oct-14 27 minutes

Sartre 2004-Oct-07 42 minutes

Politeness 2004-Sep-30 28 minutes

Empiricism 2004-Jun-10 28 minutes

Heroism 2004-May-06 42 minutes

Wittgenstein 2003-Dec-04 42 minutes

Duty 2003-Nov-13 28 minutes

Bohemianism 2003-Oct-09 42 minutes

The Art of War 2003-Jun-12 42 minutes

Originality 2003-Mar-20 41 minutes

Redemption 2003-Mar-13 28 minutes

The Enlightenment in Scotland 2002-Dec-05 27 minutes

Freedom 2002-Jul-04 28 minutes

The Soul 2002-Jun-06 28 minutes

The Examined Life 2002-May-09 42 minutes

Virtue 2002-Feb-28 42 minutes

Happiness 2002-Jan-24 28 minutes

Confucius 2001-Nov-01 28 minutes

Democracy 2001-Oct-18 28 minutes

Existentialism 2001-Jun-28 27 minutes

Evil 2001-May-03 28 minutes

The Philosophy of Love 2001-Mar-29 28 minutes

Humanism 2001-Feb-08 28 minutes

Nihilism 2000-Nov-16 28 minutes

Laws of Nature 2000-Oct-19 28 minutes

Economic Rights 2000-Jan-27 27 minutes

Consciousness 1999-Nov-25 27 minutes

Progress 1999-Nov-18 28 minutes

The Individual 1999-Oct-21 28 minutes

Utopia 1999-Oct-07 28 minutes

Just War 1999-Jun-03 28 minutes

Good and Evil 1999-Apr-01 28 minutes

Feminism 1999-Jan-07 28 minutes

Cultural Rights in the 20th Century 1998-Dec-10 28 minutes