Thomas Hobbes
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2011
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thomas Hobbes: the writer and psychologist Steven Pinker joins Matthew Parris to discuss the life of the great English philosopher. Noel Malcolm from All Souls College, Oxford provides the expert analysis. Power and violence are themes of the discussion of Hobbes who, Steven Pinker argues, was "perhaps the first cognitive psychologist." Although he was born in the late sixteenth century, we are fortunate to have some rich biographical description of Hobbes thanks to his contemporary and friend, the writer John Aubrey. Now, the word Hobbesian is often used to describe a world in which life is "nasty, brutish and short." But Professor Pinker suggests Hobbes was actually "a nice man, despite the fact his name became a rather nasty adjective."
Producer: Chris Ledgard.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | My name is Annie Matmanis and my name is Nick Grimshaw. How long have we known each other babe? |
| 0:05.0 | Probably 20 years now and in that time we've always worked in and around music right? |
| 0:10.0 | We have. So it kind of makes sense that we do a podcast better. It sounds |
| 0:13.9 | like he's been 20 years in the making. It's not a avatar for podcasts basically, but it is good. |
| 0:18.6 | So we put the world to rights with Thank you for downloading this great lives podcast from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:34.0 | For more information and details of other podcasts, just visit BBC.co. |
| 0:39.0 | UK slash Radio 4. |
| 0:41.0 | In these programs it can be fun, informative even to compare my studio guests with their choice of great life. |
| 0:49.0 | So let's start that way this week. |
| 0:51.0 | My guest and his great life are both Polymaths whose interests |
| 0:54.6 | spread far across science and the humanities. They are by the different standards |
| 0:59.0 | of their times, celebrity thinkers, widely admired, although each has their share of academic enemies. |
| 1:05.7 | Both are popularizers of thinking as well as of thinkers. |
| 1:09.6 | Both in their youth sported, flowing, dark hair, though my guest is going a little grey now and our |
| 1:16.1 | great life went rather bald towards the end. Neither has much time for religion. |
| 1:21.8 | My guest is Stephen Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, |
| 1:26.4 | whose books include the language instinct, how the mind works, the blank slate, and the |
| 1:31.1 | stuff of thought. His latest takes as its title a phrase coined by Abraham Lincoln, |
| 1:36.0 | The Better Angels of Our Nature. It's a study of violence. |
| 1:40.0 | Stephen, you've chosen as your subject one of the greatest English philosophers |
| 1:45.2 | Thomas Hobbs. You must think his ideas important and we'll come on to that. |
| 1:50.3 | But is he also a personal hero to you as a man as a human being? He's struck me as a nice man and perhaps |
... |
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.