Fiona Hughes

Fiona Hughes, Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Anil Gomes, Associate Professor at Trinity College, Oxford, and John Cullinan, Senior Lecturer at King's College London, dive into Immanuel Kant's groundbreaking ideas. They discuss Kant's revolutionary viewpoint, paralleling it with Copernicus's astronomical shift. The conversation covers how the mind shapes our experience of reality, the tension between rationalism and empiricism, and the limitations of human understanding. Their analysis reveals the profound impact of Kant's work on contemporary philosophy.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morality - A Polemic, which he published in 1887 towards the end of his working life and in which he considered the price humans have paid, and were still paying, to become civilised. In three essays, he argued that having a guilty conscience was the price of living in society with other humans. He suggested that Christian morality, with its consideration for others, grew as an act of revenge by the weak against their masters, 'the blond beasts of prey', as he calls them, and the price for that slaves' revolt was endless self-loathing. These and other ideas were picked up by later thinkers, perhaps most significantly by Sigmund Freud who further explored the tensions between civilisation and the individual.WithStephen Mulhall Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow and Tutor at New College, University of OxfordFiona Hughes Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of EssexAndKeith Ansell-Pearson Professor of Philosophy at the University of WarwickProducer: Simon Tillotson.