Courage Comes With Practice -- This I Believe
I believe that embracing fear produces courage.
After my brother died in an accident, my mother was inconsolable. I was only four-years old at the time but I still understood the seismic shift in my mom's attitude toward safety. Suddenly everything around us was potentially dangerous. Overnight, the world had gone from a playground to a hazardous zone.
The program that questions everything ...except your intelligence.
Only a Theory -- Science Friday broadcast Friday, June 13th, 2008
Once, there was the battle over whether the concept of evolution should be taught in public schools at all -- a fight remembered for the trial of high school teacher John Scopes in 1925. More recently, the terms of the debate shifted to whether the idea of 'intelligent design' needed to be taught alongside the scientific theory of evolution in the classroom. Now, the terms are shifting again...
Guest: Kenneth Miller, Professor, Biology, Brown University
BBC/OU Open2.net - Ethics Bites Podcast - Trolleys, Killing And Double Effect
You're standing by a railway line. An out-of-control trolley is heading towards you. Tragically, there are five people tied to the track ahead. It looks like they'll all be killed. Fortunately you have a chance to save them. By turning a switch you can send the trolley hurtling down a spur, a side track, where, most unfortunately, one man is tied to the rails. But killing him would save the five. There's another option. A second switch would operate a trap door on an overhead footbridge, dropping an overweight unsuspecting train-spotter onto the track below, stopping the train (he's large enough to do this), but, of course, killing the train-spotter. What should you do?...
In fact, you might be surprised to learn that psychologists have actually hooked individuals up to what are called functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. People are able to see what bits of the brain light up when people are confronted with these problems and decide what they should do. And as it happens, when people are presented with the footbridge case and the prospect of pushing someone off the footbridge and when they recoil at that prospect, parts of the brain that are associated with emotional responses light up, whereas when people contemplate turning the switch so that the trolley goes off onto the side spur and decide that they ought to do that, other bits of the brain light up, where these bits of the brain are associated with cognition and means, and reasoning and the like.
BBC/OU Open2.net - Ethics Bites Podcast - Practical ethics
We make decisions all the time. Some of these can be trivial (should I wear the white or the blue shirt?) and some can be important (should we operate or leave the patient to die?). Some of these decisions will involve thoughts about ourselves and what we want (where should we go for the weekend?) and some thoughts about other people (should we close the firm and make everyone redundant?). Some of these decisions will involve tastes and appetites (which chocolate?) and others questions of morals and ethics (should I tell my partner about my affair?)...
In the Ethics Bites you'll hear some of the leading contemporary philosophers talking about a whole range of issues. Some of these deal directly with ethical theory - for example, Miranda Fricker talking about making moral judgements about people6 distant from us in time or space - and some with issues of immediate practical relevance - for example, Peter Singer on the treatment of animals1.
Philosophy: The Classics Audio Commentaries
Nigel Warburton offers excerpts from his book Philosophy: The Classics. Listen to short audio overviews of many classic philosophy texts.
Archived audio and video from Richard Dawkins, MIchael Shermer, James Randi, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and others.
Is this just a handbook for psychopaths, or a satirical attack on his contemporaries, or did Machiavelli have a moral message? In this reading from his book Philosophy: The Classics, Nigel Warburton explains the central themes from Machiavelli's great work The Prince and explores different interpretations of the book.
Podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics...
