Andrea Wulf

speaker

625 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 8 Jun

Andrea Wulf’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

stand up against the kind of literary establishment and the scientific establishment.

It was part of the fun also to kind of take those stuffy older kind of thinkers and say like, we are doing this very differently.

And I think one of the important aspects for them was also that

it was quite ephemeral.

So it was not about coming up with a theory that was finished.

So Fichte, for example, with his philosophy of the self, he would develop quite a lot of that in front of his students.

So his students, instead of listening to, I don't know, the philosophy of Aristotle or something like that, they actually saw how in front of their eyes,

their professors were developing something very new and dynamic.

And that was also incredibly thrilling for the students.

So you suddenly have all these students really flocking to Jena, wanting to see these new young professors who are really trying to change the world and who are shouting from their lecterns about their kind of new ideas.

Yes, I think it was really, I mean, I think we have to kind of paddle back a little bit and think about, you know, what's the kind of world they were brought up in?

So this is the world when most of Europe is kind of held in the iron fist of absolutism, when your life is pretty much, you know, determined by your place of birth and

the class you were born into, the ruler of the nation you live in.

So you don't have a lot of choice or freedom.

And it's a world where thinkers believe that there are absolute truths, that there's kind of God-given truths.

And then you have this kind of

philosophers who come along and say, well, the only certainty we have is that the world is experienced by the self.

So there is a shift, an emphasis on the self, on the subjective kind of view of the world.

And so it's Fichte who, he kind of takes ideas from Immanuel Kant and he kind of puts them in another framework.

And he basically says,

Showing 401–420 of 625 · page 21 of 32