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Saturday 04 September 2010
Listen Now - 2010-09-04 |
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- 04092010
When the President of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda said that Margaret Thatcher was "truly a person," what on earth did he mean? He was invoking a concept central to the philosophy of the Akan people of West Africa. This week, we look at what it means to be a person in a culture where the community matters more than the individual and why the idea has very immediate practical implications.
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Saturday 28 August 2010
Listen Now - 2010-08-28 |
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- 28082010
Now that Australia has made its choice - sort of - The Philosopher's Zone looks as the very idea of choice. Much more than previous generations, we can pick and choose where we live, how many children we have or don't have, what type of bread we would like to eat and even what our gender will be. But the flipside is that that these choices don't always seem to fulfil us. This week we look at the connections between choice and contemporary capitalism and freedom, and the ideologies that underpin all three.
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Saturday 21 August 2010
Listen Now - 2010-08-21 |
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- 21082010
What is the ideology that propels scientists to go to so much trouble? Think, for example, of the hazards involved in a voyage from Europe to our part of the world in the 18th century. Why would you go to all that effort just to observe the transit of Venus? For Science Week, we explore the philosophy of northern astronomy in the Southern Hemisphere with Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge.
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Saturday 14 August 2010
Listen Now - 2010-08-14 |
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- 14082010
Tony Abbott has been admiring cows at the Brisbane Show, Julia Gillard has, it's said, been patronising Mark Latham by brushing him down the front, but is there anything ideological happening in this election? This week, we go in search of political philosophy and ask whether the world we live in - not just Australia, but the whole of the West - is any longer a world in which political elites can articulate the issues and meet the challenges of the age.
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More Past Programs...
Philosophy is a way of grasping our visible and invisible social world. But there is another way, and it's called anthropology, which studies the way in which various human cultures extend their grasp. This week, we take a philosophical look at what anthropologists get up to. Do they just observe people in grass huts or do the people have a say in what they get to observe?
10pm AEST