231 | Sarah Bakewell on the History of Humanism

231 | Sarah Bakewell on the History of Humanism

Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are themselves the source of meaningfulness and mattering in our lives, rather than those being granted to us by some higher power. In today's episode, Sarah Bakewell discusses the origin and evolution of this dramatic idea. Humanism turns out to be a complex thing; there are religious humanists and atheistic anti-humanists. Her new book is Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Sarah Bakewell did postgraduate work in philosophy and artificial intelligence before becoming a full-time author. Among her previous books are How to Live: a life of Montaigne, and At the Existentialist Cafe. She has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, as well as the Windham-Campbell Prize in non-fiction.


Episoder(419)

336 | Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI

336 | Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI

Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To understan...

24 Nov 20251h 14min

AMA | November 2025

AMA | November 2025

Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

17 Nov 20253h 34min

335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe

335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe

Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoveries a...

10 Nov 20251h 17min

334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But the process by which we learn about the universe, ...

3 Nov 20251h 14min

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to convince ourselves of something that isn't quite ...

27 Okt 20251h 10min

332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music

332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music

Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical properties of the frequencies to which they correspon...

20 Okt 20251h 21min

AMA | October 2025

AMA | October 2025

Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pat...

13 Okt 20253h 37min

331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse

331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse

Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as features of the initial conditi...

6 Okt 20251h 54min

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