Free Thinking - Sir Thomas Browne
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Sweet talks to Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Claire Preston and Gavin Francis about the mind-adventures of doctors in time and space. Sir Thomas Browne was a man fascinated by everything from nature to religion, to the shock of the new. How does his story resonate now?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I just say? |
| 0:01.5 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | It's such a wonderful listen. |
| 0:05.6 | So nice. |
| 0:06.5 | There are loads more like it on BBC sounds. |
| 0:08.8 | Different paces, different heights. |
| 0:10.6 | The roof is buckling. |
| 0:11.9 | Where you can also listen to live sports commentary. |
| 0:14.2 | It's right foot goes for goal. |
| 0:16.6 | And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories. |
| 0:21.7 | The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession. |
| 0:25.2 | And she's had to live with that. |
| 0:26.8 | So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion. |
| 0:29.8 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.8 | Sort of expecting that every week now. |
| 0:34.6 | Knowledge is made by oblivion. |
| 0:36.8 | And to purchase a clear and warrantable body of truth, we must |
| 0:40.5 | forget and part with much we know. |
| 0:43.5 | They're the words of a 17th century doctor called Sir Thomas Brown, a physician, an experimenter, |
| 0:49.0 | a literary man, an expert witness at a witch trial in which two old women were accused of causing their young neighbours |
| 0:56.0 | to vomit nails and pins. Tonight's edition of free thinking will try to put this dictum into practice |
| 1:02.4 | and enter a world in which knowledge is partial, where the limits of empirical inquiry are close, |
... |
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