Summary
Rocks have shaped the fates of civilizations and the study of geology has transformed our intellectual landscape. In the 19th century developments in earth sciences led to the scientific rejection of Biblical timescales in favour of the far greater spans of geological time, which opened the way for Darwin's development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. More recently, historians have been keen to incorporate factors like access to natural resources and major events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions into their accounts of the past and analyses of the present. Matthew Sweet asks how disciplines in the humanities, like history and political theory, might be transformed by incorporating insights and data from the earth sciences, and also how the earth sciences might be transformed if they become more historically and culturally aware. With historians Peter Frankopan and Rosemary Hill, geologist Anjana Khatwa, philosopher Graham Harman, and poet Sarah Jackson.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it. |
| 0:13.3 | But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go? |
| 0:19.2 | I remember having this very sharp thought |
| 0:21.7 | that what you do right now, |
| 0:23.6 | this is it, this defines your life. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm ready to talk and ready to listen. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm insulted by how little the medical community |
| 0:32.1 | is ever bothered with this. |
| 0:33.9 | Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, |
| 0:35.6 | is my new podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.8 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:46.7 | A stone has no world, said the philosopher Martin Heidegger, by which he meant that it can |
| 0:52.8 | experience nothing, interpret nothing, |
| 0:56.0 | its being is devoid of meaning. Not like us and not like our guests here. Humans, said Heidegger, |
| 1:03.1 | are world builders. We pick up stones, do stuff with them, and suddenly there's an axe or a temple |
| 1:09.8 | wall. And while we're at it with Philosopher's stones, Emmanuel Kant put them in their place too. |
| 1:16.6 | For him, they lacked inner purposiveness. |
| 1:19.6 | And this also makes them quite unlike our guests, whose purpose here is to ask what happens if we put geology at the heart of human inquiry. |
| 1:29.3 | So in the next hour on free thinking, which I like to think of as Radio 4's scatter cushion-filled conversation pit, |
| 1:36.3 | for the intellectually curious, we'll talk about rocks, but we might talk to them as well, |
... |
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.