Free Thinking

Laurence Scott hears about a pioneer of vegetarianism and advocates for nudism and camping as the academics Elsa Richardson, Annebella Pollen, Ben Anderson and Tiffany Boyle discuss the Life Reform Movement. Ideas included arguments for a basic income, healthy eating, gymnastics, world peace and what a perfect body looked like. The movement emerged in the second half of the 19th century and was a loose collection of groups and individuals who pursued social reform of all kinds and their ideas were mainly Utopian, but had a darker side.

Annebella Pollen teaches at Brighton University and is the author of The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians

Elsa Richardson teaches at the University of Strathclyde and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHRC to promote research on radio

Ben Anderson teaches at Keele University and is also a New Generation Thinker

Tiffany Boyle is a curator, researcher and writer at The Glasgow School of Art and her interdisciplinary doctoral research examines the visual representations of artistic gymnastics

Sally Potter joins Rana Mitter to discuss the relationship between philosophy and film. Also in the studio are philosophers Helen Beebee, Max de Gaynesford, and Lucy Bolton.

You can find more discussions on the Free Thinking programme website Philosophy playlist

Producer: Luke Mulhall

How do I know that anybody else experiences the world in the way I do? Or even if other people experience anything at all? In the 20th century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein responded to this challenge by thinking about whether we can make sense of the idea of a private language, a language understood only by the speaker. His so-called 'private language argument' has the potential to transform both the way philosophy is done, and the way we understand ourselves and our relationship with others.

Shahidha Bari is joined by the philosophers Stephen Mulhall and Denis McManus, and the historian and New Generation Thinker Tiffany Watt Smith.

You can find more discussions about philosophy on the Free Thinking website Philosophy playlist: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Panpsychism is the view that all matter is conscious. It's a view that's gaining ground in contemporary philosophy, with proponents arguing that it can solve age-old problems about the relationship between mind and body, and also fill in gaps in other areas of our understanding of nature. But is it true? And if it is, how could it change our understanding of ourselves?

Matthew Sweet is joined by panpsychists Philip Goff and Hedda Hassel Morch, the neuroscientist Daniel Glaser, who is sceptical of panpsychism, and Eccy de Jonge, artist, philosopher and deep ecologist, who has written about the 17th-century philosopher and possible precursor of panpsychism, Spinoza.

The first of three programmes looking at philosophy and ideas making waves in our contemporary world. You can find a playlist Philosophy on the Free Thinking website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx

Philip Goff's book Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness is out now.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Nosing around Osterley House, currently owned and run by the National Trust, Matthew Sweet and guests discuss our enduring fascination with the grand country estate.

Countless stories, films and plays are set in the rarefied and actually very rare setting of the country estate, a world of valets and scullery maids, viscounts and self-mades, Kind Hearts and Coronets. This year has seen the TV series Downtown Abbey become a film. Every weekend hundreds of thousands of us visit the former homes of the 1% to gawp at the gardens and taste the tea. Have they become a place of reflection, of societal introspection where history was conceived and carved into the plaster? Or is it more about the lovely chutney and special scones? And what might visitors a hundred years from now expect to see about the current period of these houses' history?

Alison Light is a historian and author who has written about the realities of life in service. Her latest book, A Radical Romance, is out now by Penguin Random House.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

Philip Dodd is joined by Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds, the commentator David Goodhart, the writer and campaigner Beatrix Campbell, and the academic Maya Goodfellow, author of Hostile Environment - How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, to reflect on the role of culture and identity in politics in Europe and post election Britain.

Have the so-called culture wars consumed traditional politics? Are debates about race, nation, values and belonging injecting a much-needed dimension to traditional left-right democracy, or are they distracting from essential socio-economic concerns? Are the culture wars a feature of the left, the right, or both?

Producer: Eliane Glaser.

Rana Mitter looks at the ideologies surrounding climate disaster with guests including Rupert Read of Extinction Rebellion, investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, professor of psychosocial theory Lisa Baraitser, and lawyer Tessa Khan. How do we make sense of the idea of ecological collapse, and what are the assumptions hidden in the way we discuss climate disaster?

The annual BBC Sports Personality of the Year competition with its different categories presents a very different picture from the newspaper reports studied by Dr Fiona Skillen, which congratulated sportswomen in past times by linking their success to the achievements of their fathers or brothers. And Professor Matthew Smith from the University of Strathclyde has run a project called "Out on the pitch, sport and mental health in LGBT people" which looks at both the positive side of sport and mental health, and the pressures. They talk to John Gallagher about why we need new stories about sports.

The book written by Dr Fiona Skillen from the Glasgow Caledonian University is called Women, Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain. She is now starting a project looking at women's experiences of playing golf.

You can find a BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour presented by Matthew Sweet called PE - A History of Violence on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002g6z

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Further podcasts are available on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking website under the playlist New Research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Producer: Robyn Read

Matthew Sweet asks how did the English language grow & what are the key election phrases? He's joined by historian John Gallagher who's written about language in Shakespeare's time and how refugees and migrants to England learnt English. In 1578, the Anglo-Italian writer, teacher, and translator John Florio said of English that it was ‘a language that will do you good in England, but past Dover, it is worth nothing’. Other guests in the studio include researcher Stephanie Hare who writes on technology ethics, research and development expert Mathieu Triay; and Kate Maltby who writes about theatre, politics and culture.

John Gallagher has published Learning Languages in Early Modern England. He teaches at the University of Leeds and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to promote research on the radio.

Laurence Scott, Sarah Churchwell, Francesca Segal and Alice Kelly re-read Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence. First published in 1920, it depicts new money in 1870s New York and limited choices for women.

Francesca Segal's novel The Innocents, inspired by Edith Wharton's book, won the Costa First Novel Award in 2012. Her latest novel is Mother Ship.

Behold America by Sarah Churchwell was published last year.

Readings by Florence Roberts.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod