Philosopher's Zone

This program was first broadcast on 20 August 2011.

This program was first broadcast on 9 April 2011.

THIS PROGRAM WAS FIRST BROADCAST ON 4 June 2011.

Strangers, people from other countries immigrating to our territory, endangering our authentic culture, destroying what is valuable, good and familiar. But do they and does that idea make any sort of sense at all?  And if we can’t talk about the authenticity of cultures, what about the authenticity of individual persons?  This week, we investigate authenticity, the personal and the political.

We’ve heard a lot in recent times about the legal wrangles of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange but there is another Wikileaker facing life in prison who has been given much less attention: Private Bradley Manning. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of classified defence documents and faces life in prison if found guilty. Over two hundred legal scholars and philosophers have signed a petition claiming his treatment has been unconstitutional and unethical. This week we look at the literal trials and tribulations of Bradley Manning.

These days, you can go to war without shouldering a pack and carrying a rifle: you can take out the enemy’s installations (and, indeed, take out the enemy) just sitting in an office not far from home.  But what are the ethics of a war fought for us by machines, where the only deaths we see are on TV monitors?  This week, we ask how we can bring a moral imagination to bear on a world of robot wars.

This week on The Philosopher's Zone we meet one of the foremost thinkers of our time. Daniel Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Described as the great de-mystifier of consciousness, Dennett has been quoted as saying he developed a deep distrust of the methods he saw other philosophers employing and decided that before he could trust his intuitions about the mind, he had to figure out how the brain could possibly accomplish the mind's work.

In the last decades of the Hapsburg empire, from 1895 to 194, the city of Vienna was opulent, elegant and daring. A group of radical young artists, architects, writers, musicians, designers and thinkers were busy overturning all the rules. This week, we meet two of the brightest stars to have arisen in this febrile world, the enigmatic artist Gustav Klimt and the elusive philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and we look at Klimt through the changing gaze of Wittgenstein.

This week on The Philosopher's Zone we're wagering on God. Well, why not? What have we got to lose? If God doesn't exist, we lose nothing; if he does, we gain everything. This is the famous argument known as 'Pascal's wager' after the great seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. This week, we examine the wager and try to work out what our odds are.

Martin Buber was born in pre-Nazi Austria and emigrated to Israel in 1938 where he spent much of the rest of his life. He grappled with Zionism, Jewish thought, secular philosophy and politics and the result is a body of thought very much based on relationships.