PODULARITY

 

 Mark Vernon: Wellbeing [14:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mark Vernon has just brought out a book on wellbeing in a new series of which he’s general editor. But this isn’t a run-of-the-mill self-help series.
The series is called The Art of Living  and it’s published by independent philosophy specialist, Acumen. Their stated aim is to “open up philosophy’s riches to a wider public once […]

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 Julian Baggini: The Duck that Won the Lottery [12:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“In marketing and in politics people have got more sophisticated in their manipulation techniques, so more than ever we need to know what they are, so that we can spot the truth when we see it.”
Julian Baggini is the first guest to pay a return visit to the Podularity studio. I last interviewed him back […]

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 Simon Critchley: The Book of Dead Philosophers [24:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“The book is written against the view that a philosopher’s biography is of no importance and that philosophy can be reduced to a series of systems of thought.
It’s really an attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers. That was the way that philosophy was taught until the eighteenth century.
“So in […]

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 Mark Lynas: Six Degrees [24:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“The chemistry of this is more than a century old… The basic physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been known for a very long time. In fact some back-of-the-envelope calculations were made then which more or less stand the test of time a century later.”
A few weeks back I met Mark Lynas […]

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In May I made a number of recordings for this year’s Bristol Festival of Ideas, a series of very popular events which brought some high-powered thinkers to the city to stimulate discussion on subjects as diverse as the legacy of ‘68 to why the human brain is not quite ‘fit for purpose’.
I’m editing my interviews […]

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“In politics there’s a constant endeavour to expose hypocrisy. Because people don’t like hypocrisy, it’s a very useful weapon to attack an opponent.
But the exposure of hypocrisy - the anti-hypocritical movement - doesn’t drive hypocrisy out of politics. It doesn’t even diminish the amount of hypocrisy that there is. If anything it […]

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 Martin Kemp: The Human Animal [22:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

‘As soon as humans make images, they make them about humans and they make them about animals and the relationship between them.’
My guest on this week’s programme is Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford, whose latest book, The Human Animal is a rich and thought-provoking study of the relationship between the […]

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 Julian Baggini Everytown [23:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Philosophy can seem the most cerebral and abstract of disciplines. So what would happen if a philosopher stepped out of his study and ‘embedded’ himself in an ordinary (but unfamiliar) community in his own country and tried to work out whether the English people have anything which could reasonably be called a philosophy?

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 Frans de Waal: Our Inner Ape [15:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What aspects of our human character do we inherit from our fellow primates? Until recently, the answer would have been ‘all the bad bits’. Footage of chimpanzees killing their own kind influenced the view in the popular imagination that ‘killer’ and ‘ape’ were virtual synonyms.

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 Standard Podcast [17:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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