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Episode details

Radio 3,9 mins

Professor Sophie-Grace Chappell on Plato's Symposium

Free Thinking

Available for over a year

Sophie-Grace Chappell chooses Plato’s Symposium for Queer Icons, BBC Radio's celebration of LGBTQ culture. The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–370 BC in which a group of men at a banquet take part in a friendly competition giving a series of speeches about love. Professor Sophie-Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, The Open University. This interview was broadcast on Radio 3's Arts and Ideas programme Free Thinking presented by Shahidha Bari The episode also features a longer discussion about how philosopher/writers including Jeremy Bentham, Rousseau, Foucault, Freud and Barthes speak of love. Taking part in this are literary theorist Martin McQuillan, and writer, Katherine Angel author of Unmastered : A Book on Desire Most Difficult to Tell and critic and author Adam Mars Jones. Many more Queer Icons can be found on Radio 4 Front Row's Queer Icons website.

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