356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity (opens in new tab)

All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, humanity, and the self. Andrea Wulf is a writer of narrative histories, examining the origins of ideas through the lives of the people who explored them. In this episode we discuss three of her books: , about Alexander von Humboldt and environmentalism; , about the Jena circle of Romantics including Goe...