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 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

He's 12 years old.

And so he translates into English, which is not his mother tongue.

And English, he basically picked up on the journey from Russia to England because they were traveling on an English ship.

As one does.

At the age of 16, he starts to attend the...

learn at meetings of the Royal Society.

So he has no formal education, but quite an extraordinary education if you think that this is, you know, the Royal Society at that time is the place where all the great ideas are exchanged.

And then at 17, he joins Captain Cook's second voyage, the Resolution.

And he...

So this is a voyage of extremes where they kind of sail through labyrinths of icebergs and tropical islands in the South Pacific.

But for George Foster, it really is a voyage of human interaction.

And he returns with an unshakable belief in humankind, which is very unusual.

So this is a time when...

I mean, almost everybody in the Western society, in Western Europe, is deeply racist, where explorers have looked at indigenous people with arrogance at best and utter disgust and brutality at worst, where European philosophers such as Immanuel Kant

or David Hume, they have no qualms in talking about black people as being an inferior race.

So his attitude, young George Foster's attitude to the indigenous people is very, very unusual.

He believes that they are humans like everybody else.

He does not see them as savages or barbarians.

So he also turns against Rousseau's idea of the kind of peaceful, noble savage, because he sees a war armada in Tahiti, for example.

He says, so, you know, this is not the kind of peaceful savage, in quotation marks, who lives in this kind of happy, natural state.

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