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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

really really like each other and they experiment together and they kind of dissect frogs and mice and people and they go to lectures together and they do experiments with light and optics and botany and they watch kind of caterpillars hatch so they you know they really go into this

scientific thinking, but at the same time it is Goethe who inspires Humboldt to just move a little bit away from this very, you know, in quotation marks, objective science.

So he basically says, well, it is the eye through which you see the world, but it is your eye.

So this will shape the way you see the world.

So he gives Humboldt a slightly stronger emphasis on subjectivity.

And Humboldt himself says that Goethe has given me new organs to see the world.

Because the Jena set has this greater emphasis on the self,

Humboldt, when he sets off on his five-year exploration of South America after his visits to Jena, he sees this new world through these new eyes that Goethe has given him, through a kind of greater emphasis on subjectivity.

So you have Humboldt

Exploring South America with, I mean, he carries 42 scientific instruments, like all wrapped individually.

He's obsessed with measurements.

I'm very sympathetic.

He climbs up, he climbs up, you know, volcanoes and sets up his instruments every few hundred yards and measures everything.

But, and I think that's very important, he's not just interested in empirical data.

He also always says, in order to truly understand nature, you also have to feel it.

So it's a bit like, I think it was Humphrey Davy who his journals have on the one page, he describes his observations of an experiment and on the other page, he describes his feelings.

And that's what Humboldt does.

He really wants to also inspire the sense of wonder in nature.

So for me, Humboldt, inspired by first Georg Foster, because Humboldt always said throughout his long life that Georg Foster inspired him to go on his own exploration and really guided his ways

of thinking about nature and politics.

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