Learning about love from Kierkegaard & Socrates. The Wellcome Book Prize
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2019
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kierkegaard humiliated the woman he was due to marry by publicly breaking the engagement - yet one of his most important books is a detailed analysis of the meaning of love. Socrates loved asking the question 'What is love?' but his conversations on the topic are often inconclusive. Matthew Sweet discusses new biographies of each thinker, with their authors Clare Carlisle and Armand D'Angour.
Plus Matthew talks to the winner of this year's Wellcome Book Prize for writing which illuminates the many ways that health, medicine and illness touch our lives.
Clare Carlisle is the author of Philosopher Of The Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard Armand D'Angour has written Socrates In Love Information about the books listed for this year's Wellcome Prize for science writing can be found here https://wellcomebookprize.org/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.2 | So everybody here has their coffee. |
| 0:39.8 | And how many sugars? |
| 0:41.5 | Claire, how much does the record say? |
| 0:43.4 | How many should I put into this cup? |
| 0:44.9 | I think you need to fill it right up to the brim. |
| 0:46.9 | Up to the brim? |
| 0:47.5 | Okay, well, there's one. |
| 0:49.2 | We should all do the same here in the studio, those of us with coffee. |
| 0:52.0 | Two, three. Oh, blimey. Four. I think four will do. |
| 0:58.9 | I'll give that a stir. Here's a quote. It amused him every day to see the sugar melt. This really |
| 1:05.1 | delighted him, but the coffee was so strong, he nearly destroyed himself. I've got some whipped cream here |
| 1:10.6 | now. I'm going to dip |
| 1:11.6 | my spoon in there, and I should say that this has been whipped for us by a Scandinavian cafe, |
| 1:18.7 | just around the corner from the BBC. I'm going to pass the cream to you now, Claire Kail. |
| 1:24.9 | That's being spooned now by Claire, who's a theologian and philosopher, |
| 1:29.7 | and the biographer of one of the great thinkers of the 19th century, |
| 1:33.8 | the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who drank his coffee like this. |
| 1:38.7 | Are we going to try this now? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.