The Examined Life

9 May, 2002 100 Philosophy

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss self-examination. Socrates, the Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, famously declared that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” His drive towards rigorous self-enquiry and his uncompromising questioning of assumptions laid firm foundations for the history of Western Philosophy. But these qualities did not make him popular in ancient Athens: Socrates was deemed to be a dangerous subversive for his crime, as he described it, of “asking questions and searching into myself and other men”. In 399 BC Socrates was sentenced to death on the charge of being “an evil-doer and a curious person”. Two thousand years later, the novelist George Eliot was moved to reply to Socrates that “The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all”. For Eliot too much self-scrutiny could lead to paralysis rather than clarity. What did Socrates mean by his injunction? How have our preoccupations about how to live altered since the birth of ancient Greek philosophy? And where does philosophy rank in our quest for self-knowledge alongside science, the arts and religion?

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Guests

  • Dr Anthony Grayling 10 episodes
    Reader in Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
  • Janet Radcliffe Richards 5 episodes
    Philosopher of Science and Reader in Bioethics, University College, London
  • Julian Baggini 4 episodes
    Editor, The Philosopher's Magazine and co-editor of New British Philosophy: The Interviews

Related episodes

Programme ID: p00548dx

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548dx

Auto-category: 100 (Philosophy)