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Hello, one view is that the Renaissance gave birth to the concept of the individual,

and Shakespeare most brilliantly defined this individual.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form in moving,

how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god.

According to Michel Foucault, French philosopher, polar opposite of Shakespeare, and backed as he thought by Marx and Freud, our century has killed off the individual. But has it? And what is the individual? With me to discuss this is the philosopher Richard Volheim, professor of philosophy at the University of

California in Berkeley, an author of The Thread of Life and Out Today his new book, On the Emotions.

I'm also joined by the cultural critic Jonathan Dollymore who's professor of English at York University and the author of death, desire and loss in Western culture.

Jonathan Dollymore, why do you think individualism or the concept of individual was as it were invented or born in the time of the Renaissance?

Well, historians of course disagree about when it was born, but yes, I think there is a good argument for saying that it was the

Renaissance you you quoted from Hamlet and of course in a way Hamlet is is the

modern individual I mean for hundreds of years now we've been fascinated by this figure.

He's enigmatic, he's complex, in some sense we see ourselves in this figure and yet at another level what is he he's a dysfunctional depressive

now there are two things going on in that play earlier on when Polonius gives

advice to his son on how to behave in that sinful city Paris,

he gives a lot of good humanist advice. In the very end he said,

above all else, to thine own self be true. Now that idea I think is a crucial touchstone for

individualism throughout the last few hundred years. The trouble with

how many it is he tries to introspect this self and what does he find. The quote continues the one you gave us at the beginning with what is man to me but the

quintessence of dust.

But do you think that Hamlet or the Renaissance discovered an individual who is markedly and decisively

...