大象传媒

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the attempt to define humanity鈥檚 part in the natural world. In Childe Harold鈥檚 Pilgrimage Lord Byron wrote:鈥淭here is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore,There is society where none intrudes,By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:I love not man the less, but Nature more.鈥� In the Bible鈥檚 book of Genesis, 鈥榥ature鈥� was the paradise of Eden, but for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was a place of perpetual war, where the life of man was 鈥渟olitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short鈥�. The defining of Nature, whether 鈥渞ed in tooth and claw鈥� or as the fount of all innocence, is an attempt to define man鈥檚 origins and purpose and humanity鈥檚 part in the natural world. With Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick; Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham; Karen Edwards, Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter.