Piers Norris Turner, Associate Professor of Philosophy and PPE Co-coordinator, recently appeared on "In Our Time," the BBC Radio 4 broadcast and podcast with a weekly audience of two million listeners. His episode discussing the classic work On Liberty from 1859 was the first with new host Misha Glenny after the retirement of Melvyn Bragg. He was joined by Helen McCabe (Nottingham) and Mark Philp (Warwick). It is available at the BBC website, or wherever your get your podcasts.

The episode also nearly coincides with the release of a new scholarly edition of On Liberty (Hackett Publishing) that Piers has co-edited along with McCabe and four others. It is the first to recognize Harriet Taylor Mill as co-author along with John Stuart Mill, and it includes extensive supplementary writings by both authors to help illuminate the main text. 

"We hope it will become the new standard edition of this classic text, which has been so important to our understanding of living in a pluralistic and open society," Piers says.

Among other topics, On Liberty contains the classic defense of freedom of discussion in a liberal democracy. In that spirit, Piers has been a leader of campus initiatives on free discussion and civil discourse through the "Civil Discourse for Citizenship" program at Ohio State's Center for Ethics and Human Values.