Free Thinking

Latest Episodes:

Re-writing C20th British Philosophy Oct 16, 2018

Show notes

Putting women back into the C20th history of British philosophy. Shahidha Bari talks to Alex Clark about the 2018 Man Booker Prize, considers the thinking of Mary Midgley whose death at the age of 99 was announced last week and puts her alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch who were undergraduates at Oxford University during WWII. The In Parenthesis project of Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman asks whether you can call them a philosophical school. Plus, Mark Robinson of the University of Exeter on how new archaeological discoveries in the Amazon are changing our understanding of the rain forest.

http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/about/

Mary Midgely talks to Rana Mitter about her philosophy in 2009 https://bbc.in/2RRA4qF Mary Midgley at Free Thinking Festival November 2010 plus Havi Carel https://bbc.in/2P1wqf6

What Nietzsche teaches us https://bbc.in/2OxoLFR Edith Hall, Simon Critchley, Bernard-Henri Levy https://bbc.in/2PBLld1

Radio 3's Into the Forest playlist of programmes https://bbc.in/2RUE1La

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Discrimination Oct 11, 2018

Show notes

Helena Kennedy on #MeToo and the message it sends that the British legal system needs to get its house in order. Plus power in Pinter's plays and rape in Chaucer. Shahida Bari talks to theatre directors Jamie Lloyd and Lia Williams about language and the roles for women on stage in the Pinter at the Pinter Season, an event featuring all of Harold Pinter's short plays, performed together for the first time. And Professor Elizabeth Robertson has been researching references to rape in Chaucer's writing and attitudes towards consent in Medieval times.

Helena Kennedy's book is called Eve was Shamed: how British Justice is Failing Women Pinter at the Pinter runs in London's West End until 23rd February 2019. Elizabeth Robertson, Professor and Chair of English Language, University of Glasgow has written Chaucer, Chaucerian Consent: Women, Religion and Subjection in Late Medieval England

You can hear a longer conversation with Elizabeth Robertson in our new podcast about academic research https://bbc.in/2yrTZU5

Greed and Landownership Past, Present, Future Oct 11, 2018

Show notes

The Scottish Clearances by Tom Devine, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh. The Farm, a new novel by Hector Abad is translated by Anne McLean The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony's College.

Anne McElvoy presents a short film Is Capitalism Here to Stay for BBC Ideas https://www.bbc.com/ideas/ Browse their A-Z of Isms

Drugs and Consciousness Oct 10, 2018

Show notes

Does LSD open the doors of perception or just mess with your head? Leo Butler tells Matthew Sweet about writing a play inspired by taking part in the world's first LSD medical trials since the 1960s. Philosophers Peg O'Connor and Barry Smith lock horns with neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt over whether drug-induced hallucinations allow access to a deeper reality.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A Feminist Take on Medieval History Oct 06, 2018

Show notes

How does Chaucer write about rape and consent ? What links Kim Kardashian West & Margery Kempe - an English Christian mystic and mother of 14 children who wrote about her religious visions in the 1420s in what has been called the first autobiography in English. Alicia Spencer-Hall, Elizabeth Robertson and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes join Shahidha Bari for a conversation about new research and what a feminist take brings to our understanding of the medieval period.

Made with the assistance of the AHRC - the Arts and Humanities Research Council which funds research into the humanities and works with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.

The Frieze Debate: Museums in the 21st Century Oct 04, 2018

Show notes

Museum directors from USA, Austria and Britain look at the challenges of displaying their collections for new audiences. Anne McElvoy's guests include Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA, Sabine Haag, Director, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum.

Recorded with an audience at the Royal Institution in London as one of the events for the 2018 Frieze London Art Fair.

Find our playlist of discussions about the Visual Arts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sarah Perry’s Melmoth, Spookiness and Fear. Oct 03, 2018

Show notes

Matthew Sweet talks to the author of The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry, about her re-imagining of the Melmoth story, first published in 1920 by the Irish playwright, novelist and clergyman Charles Maturin. His Melmoth the Wanderer was a critique of Catholicism following a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for living 150 years longer. Sarah Perry's version begins in Prague with a female scholar who feels she's being watched. Plus, experts on the Gothic Roger Luckhurst and Helen Wheatley discuss the apparently perennial appeal of the Gothic in literature, cinema and on television. And, Matthew talks to Richard Maclean Smith, whose podcast and book UNEXPLAINED report on the odd, mysterious and uncanny.

Melmoth by Sarah Perry is out now. Professor Roger Luckhurst is the author of The Mummy's Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy, Helen Wheatley's publications include Gothic Television Rosemary's Baby (1968) was directed by Roman Polanski from the novel by Ira Levin. Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent horror film written, directed, photographed and edited by George A. Romero

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Gandhi's power, portable citizenship & Indian writing - China's missing film star Oct 02, 2018

Show notes

Gandhi's power, portable citizenship and Indian writing. Rana Mitter talks to Ramachandra Guha about his new biography of Gandhi, hears about "portable citizenship from Indrajit Roy and discusses Indian writing and literary tradition with Amit Chaudhuri and Sandeep Parmar. Rana also breaks off from the subcontinent briefly to explore the mysterious disappearance of China's biggest film star, Fan Bingbing with the historian, Julia Lovell.

Ramachandra Guha has written Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1915-1948 Amit Chaudhuri's new collection of essays is called The Origins of Dislike: A Geneaology of Writerly Discontent New Generation Thinker Sandeep Parmar is a poet and Professor of English at the University of Liverpool whose books include Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. Dr Indrajit Roy lectures at the University of York and is the author of Politics of the Poor in Contemporary India Julia Lovell is the author of The Opium War and will publish a global history of Maoism next year. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Transfiguring Places. His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) and his An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (2003) have helped shaped ways of looking at Indian writing.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Loss, Grief and Anger Sep 27, 2018

Show notes

Lisa Appignanesi, prize-winning writer and Freudian scholar, with a personal memoir that explores public and private loss and anger. Presenter Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough also looks at a Festival of Canadian and North American writing meeting authors Heather O'Neill and Cherie Dimaline whose novels explore the meaning of family in dystopian visions of Canada, urban and rural. And, as the Oceania exhibition opens at the Royal Academy in London and a new Pacific Gallery opens at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Jo Walsh, artist and art producer, and cultural adviser, discusses the cultural protocols and disciplines which should be taken into account when mounting exhibitions of art from the Pacific nations and we look at the idea of cultural loss.

Lisa Appignanesi : Everyday madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love

Heather O'Neill is one of Canada's best known fiction writers. Also a poet and journalist, her latest novel is The Lonely Hearts Hotel. Cherie Dimaline is a writer and editor from the Georgian Bay Metis Community in Ontario. Dimaline's latest book is The Marrow Thieves. They are taking part in the inaugural Festival America in London this September.

Jo Walsh, (Māori / Pākehā) is a London-based artist and founding member of In*ter*is*land Collective and works with major institutions, including the British Library and National Maritime Museum.

Oceania at The Royal Academy, London, 29 September — 10 December 2018. Sackler Gallery: Pacific Encounters, one of four new galleries at National Maritime Museum, now open.

Slavoj Žižek, Camille Paglia, Flemming Rose Sep 26, 2018

Show notes

Can causing offence be a good thing? Philip Dodd explores this question with the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, the American author, Camille Paglia and the Danish journalist, Flemming Rose. Camille Paglia is a Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia whose Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson was rejected by seven publishers before it became a best-seller. Flemming Rose was Culture Editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten when in September 2005 it published a series of cartoons of Muhammad which caused controversy. Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism by Slavoj Zizek is out now. Provocations: Collected Essays by Camille Paglia will be available from October 9th. Flemming Rose is the author of The Tyranny of Silence, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Washington DC. Our playlist looking at Culture Wars and Discussions about Identity can be found here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jngzt

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