YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Nicolson

lines on the record: 42
first: 2024-01-21
most recent: 2024-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“As if the universe infuses us for that moment, inhabited by a world spirit that both pre-exists us and lasts long after us. It is Anaximenes' great recognition that we are no more than an emanation of the cosmos. The lightest of substances inspires us for a few years, and for that time we are as present and as transient as a cloud or a breath of wind.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, the thing I would like to just read going back almost to the beginning now. Talk about Aximenes' idea about the world's breath. So he said. The air is the principle and frame of all that is. For all things come to be from it, and into it they are again dissolved. This is quoting an earlier account of him. Just as our soul being air, holds us and controls us, so does wind or breath, that means, and air enclosed the whole world. And so for Anaximenes, we are as the world is. We live in an envelope of breath. The air enters us as we are born and leaves us as we die, dissolving back into the constituents of which we were first made. Only for a time does the cosmic breath soul distinguish us from our surroundings.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a sort of almost like the kind of breathing of the world soul like that. And I think this is a much richer conception than those very first thinkers thinking about breath or air or water or fire or whatever, that actually you can see that in the nature of existence, that things disintegrate and reintegrate on almost any time scale you like to choose. They're in constant dialogue with each other, love and strife, love and strife. And obviously Empedocles, a hero of mine, Empedocles, says in the end that's the great, beautiful life enhancing force in the world is love.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the shaping of the world, in the kind of combining and discombining of those four elements, our love and strife, that love is obviously the kind of glutinating force in the world of things that brings elements together. And strife is the opposite is the thing that pushes everything apart. And Empedocles' vision of the world is that Love and strife are in everlasting, almost rotating combinations with each other. And that phases of the world, even phases of one's own life, phases of individual days even, are dominated either by love or strife. And they roll over and round each other, bringing together aspects of the world and pulling it apart, bringing together and pulling”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the great forgotten heroes of history, I think. And Empedocles' kind of long poem, which is how his philosophy has survived, talks about two incredibly powerful things. The first is that the world is made of four elements. This was what was taken up by Aristotle and all through medieval thought until modern scientific revolution that the four elements of the world are earth, air, fire, and water, and that those are the kind of essential constituents of stuff. But the motivating forces of”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were the great apostle of love was a very alluring figure called Empedocles. One of the troubles with this subject is that everyone's name sounds pretty much like everyone else's. But the last figure in my book anyway is called Empedocles. And he was a great leader of men in a city called Akragas in Sicily, great, powerful city. With his reputation as a sort of extraordinarily generous hundreds and hundreds of god children, he would kind of just walk through the streets in his lovely flowing purple rose as a kind of, you know, a great man of the people, great denier of tyranny, a kind of proto-democrat and so on.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enter the afterlife and to really enter Elysian fields. And I can't help but think that it's no coincidence that the great egotist in this story, which is what he is, unlike those others who are often a great denier of ego. The great egotist comes to think that he will himself die and in fact probably come back. He could remember many of his previous own existences, that he was a warrior at Troy earlier. He was said to have been a prostitute for a while in the streets of Pirius and so on. And so I can't help but think that this invention of the soul is itself a kind of Reflection of his own self-importance. All those earlier thinkers who had. Denied the importance of the self, really. Better for it. Flake, a fake.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely radiating charisma, and people see him in various places. When he talks to rivers, the rivers talk back. And he appears at the Olympic Games. And his dress falls aside. And it turns out he has one entirely golden thigh. The intriguing thing about him is that he Know unlike these earlier thinkers, he does come to think that we all have everlasting souls, souls that will survive after death. And even that It is possible to communicate with the world after death and his followers or many of his followers were buried with these golden letters on their chests. That is sort of like a piece of golden foil on which instructions were written to the great commanding figures of the underworld. And they would say on the golden letter it says, I am a son of earth and a daughter of the sky. And I'm here. Allow me to...”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the Gulf of Turin, in the kind of bottom of the boat of Italy. And he really transforms this, turns this whole phenomenon on its head that he hates Heraclitus, for example, all of that, and all of that fluidity thing goes. And he becomes this cult leader and he sets up a cult which has really powerful political dimensions to it that he and his gang end up ruling the city of Croton and much hated others as a sort of elite. And he has a house with a cellar into which he disappears from time to time and emerges in many days later and being able to give to his followers news from the other world in a way that seems like I think he's a complete shot. Pythagoras and a kind of classic fake guru.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He isn't here. He's sort of the leader of the whole second phase, that he's born, you know, along where those others came from in the Easy Synergy and went and set up shop in southern Italy in a town called Coroton, Corotoni now.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we romanticized the fragmentary nature of it, don't we? You know, we kind of love that. There's nothing here. Some fragments just say violets, or don't they, or rose scented or something. And so that's all you get. But my hope is you know they've discovered the way of reading the. Great library, the great burnt library in Pompeii that you know that in Pompeii when the eruption happened, it was an extraordinary library. Which was charred, and all these rolled up papyruses have ended up like kind of like croissants you've left too long in the oven, you know. So, whenever anyone has tried to unfold them, they've broken apart. But now someone's invented a thing that can read through the layers. and disentangle the layers. And who knows what's in there? But the grand hope is that somewhere in there are complete Sappho poems waiting.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that idea that actually the beatings of the heart are as large and great as anything to do with armies or navies and chariots is, as you say, a radiantly modern idea, another invention of the world in which we live. How it connects with the idea of fluidity is interesting and difficult because obviously that is a kind of great elevation of the kind of substantial ego in a way. But I think the point, one of the points about Sappho, is that that self is itself Made of completely malleable substance. She is not a kind of rigidly present warrior figure. She is absolutely subject to all the currents and winds that are blowing like that.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Starts to kind of feel an intensity of desire across the room. It's the most extraordinary folding up of time experience that she says that she feels what she calls a thin fire running up under her skin, you know, which is the most, I mean, this is ancient history for me now, but I can remember her feeling thin fire just coursing up through you when you suddenly feel whatever it is that is drawing you to that person the other side of the room. And there's something absolutely phenomenal about something 2,600 years. Being able to convey that. By using the extreme things that she's using all the language of battle and grief and epic scale that Homer uses in the Iliad, there's a faith, Wordsworth in the Prelude says, there is a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Sappho famously in her fragment 31 it's called her Per Trinity survives in fragments of papyrus discovered here and there. She is sitting in somewhere in Lesbos in the harbourside in Mytilene. She sees on the other side of the room a man talking to a woman. And as she's looking at them across the room She sees this beautiful girl laughing at something the man has said laughing in the most incredibly attractive seductive sexy way and Sappho then.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is turned on its head, and she uses Homer is the great kind of presence in the background here, and she uses all the Homeric language and turns and phrase even. I mean, she is obviously absolutely soaked in Homeric knowledge, but uses that language not to describe a world from the outside, but from within, from within the self. And the self for her and Al-Qas and Archilicus and others, there are many of them, in fact. The self becomes the kind of lens through which reality is understood. And with the self being the kind of way, the sort of access to the world in the poetry, it becomes extraordinarily highly emotive.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, before Sappho and other poets, other lyric poets, lyric poet, meaning poetry that is spoken from the point of view of a person. Emerge for the first time in about 600. And the previous world had been dominated by epic poetry, not only among the Greeks, among other cultures. And epic poetry is extremely public. The voice of the poem does not come from a single person. It comes almost from the culture itself. And with Sappho”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sort of intolerant platonic view which has shaped Christianity and Western civilization. I think in some ways we live in a post-Socratic world. This kind of Socratic phase lasted till Nietzsche or something, or to the romantics maybe, or to Wordsworth, you know. And so, but it's over. And we now need to be and like to be and should, I think, be in more like in this pre-Socratic world of liquidity and fluidity.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pre Socratic idea, you know, because with Plato and Socrates, things become much more definitive, that things become, you know, that Plato imposes a fascistic idea, actually, of what the good society should be and in highly intolerant idea and also cultivates the idea of the good as the good man, as an eternal, everlasting soul, which none of these early thinkers are really considering, that we will last forever and you have to kind of cultivate your own goodness. They're dealers, their merchants in the ideal, these people. And many 20th century philosophers have thought that the great disaster from Western civilization is the abandonment of these ideals, these prescribatic ideals, in favor of a much sort of more”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this time, I think this is terrifying, but also rather wonderful, liberating idea, this fluidity of things that any form of life that you know is only the form that the wave is currently taking. And so that it means there is no. It sort of totally absorbent idea of what existence is made of, that you do not end up defending particular facts, particular nations, particular status quo's, you allow the liquid to run because truth is in the liquid running. I sound like a guru when I say those things, but I think it's magically...”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the great thinkers from Miletus, Thales and Anaximander and Aximenes. And in fact, also Heraclitus from Ephesus all think that the world is made of a kind of fluid, that when you boil things down, that Thales thinks it's water. Anaximander thinks it's what he calls the appeller on the indefinable, the kind of unknowable other stuff from which the material world emerges and into which it will finally disappear. Anaximenes thinks its breath, this kind of world's breath or air. And hereaitus thinks it's fire that the essential material of things is their burning is most extraordinarily powerful, gothic idea that the world is actually a fire and that every Material thing every kind of sense of the substantial that we might have is in fact only a kind of momentary phase in the fight.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of, and know that I must acknowledge its failings, and even this kind of Always the kind of seed, the kind of seed failing that this is, you know. And so I don't know how to resolve this, really. Does this context devalue all the wonders that emerge from it?”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a very, very importantly erosive idea that Walter Benjamin famously said that there is no, I think there is no act or document of civilization, which is not also an act of barbarity. There is something intensely cruel in that bless you in the hierarchy that philosophy kind of elevates.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Next to the well is the person that Socrates describes as a beautiful, witty Thracian girl. And Thracian girl is code, or pretty transparent code for a slave girl from Thrace north of the Aegean. And when Thales falls in, the Thracian girl just laughs and laughs and laughs and says, what is the point of looking at the heavens when you can't even see what's there at your feet? And it's a kind of key question about philosophy, really, that is absent minded, high-minded, idealistic thinking about the higher eternal things really more significant than doing the laundry, drawing water from the well? Or is it even that philosophy allows the idea that there are kind of higher things that the high-minded can think about and a form of sort of being that is entirely dependent on a servile class servicing your needs, you know?”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This and the troubling aspect of it is that. Just as all these extraordinary things in stone, wonderful temples, sculpture, the coinage, law codes, athletics, Olympic games, all these things are epic and lyric poetry are all erupting together. And the thing that they erupt together with is chattel slavery. And there's a story about pronouncing my philosophers from Miletus. Story told by Socrates that Thales is walking around the streets of Miletus late at night. He's a distinguished man, write of law codes, a book about navigation and so on, traveled Egypt and Babylon and a kind of distinguished man. And he's at night looking at the stars. And as he's walking around in the streets at night looking at the stars, he takes a step back and as he steps back, he falls into a well bum first and gets stuck there. And as he falls in,”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so here is a depiction of a slave boy in which the kind of joke or maybe the affectionate statement or whatever says beautiful with a small bee, beautiful with a big B. The capital B, that is, Calos is indeed Calos. And it's both wonderful, let's play, and horrifying. This is definitely a slave society. The Greeks are huge slave traders. They're all their colonies around the shores of the Black Sea, in Ukraine, Crimea and Northern Turkey were all slave ports. The sources of their riches were in slave trading, largely to the great cultures of the Levant. Egypt and Persia into the Persian Empire. And so there is something very important and disturbing about all this. It's very easy to portray this early Greek world as a kind of beautiful sunlit apple blossom, elegant, lovely world, but its foundation is...”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In southern Italy, it's in the museum, wonderful museum. I mean Really, partly, this book is really a tour of the great museums of the Mediterranean. And this extraordinary plate has on it this beautiful boy, it's an African boy. And on the plate, it is written. Beautiful, beautiful. I couldn't understand what this meant. And I talked to someone about it. And they said, well, slaves there, as in many places, were given names. They were given their slave names. And this boy, probably a kind of lover, a sex slave, was probably called beautiful as his name, given beautiful his name.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was extraordinary to remember it was, I was holding Odysseus' stars in my hand in a way, absolutely magical. And she said very well, very, very good. And she put it back in the box. And I'm sure no one else has seen it since.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the excavations, which were all shut up and collapsing and in need of hundreds of thousands of euros to repair them, there, in a dusty little cupboard, the lady who was showing me around got out a tiny green shard about this. It just fitted in the palm of my hand. And she said, have a look at this. And the shard came from the inside of the rim of a big wine mixing bowl, a crater. And so if you had the bowl the right way up, it would be kind of just here. But if you held the bowl above you, it would kind of be a map of the heavens and the shards that she showed me. Had on it the constellation of Botees with a bee saying.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The stars are a kind of map to the universe for them. And in Homer, in the Odyssey, Odissus navigates by the stars. And when he's leaving Calypso's Island, who's imprisoned him and enforced him to sleep with her night after night for seven years and he can't stand it any longer, he sails across the Mediterranean using the stars and Homer names the stars. And one of the stars, one of the constellations he names is Botes, which means the herdsman. And who stands like a great herdsman in the sky with his staff? And I went to the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, where there was a famous very early Greek colony, Pithecusa, as it's called, and through sort of rooting about there got to see the excavations done by kind of maverick archaeologists, priest who died now in Istia. And there...”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, they were, you know, the Greeks were exploring all over the Mediterranean and up into northern the Aegean, into the Black Sea and Levant and the coast of North Africa. And that navigation is absolutely central to this. The idea that you are a vivid self in this cosmically exposed world. And so you navigate and you navigate by the stars in ways that are certainly borrowed from adapted from Babylonian methods. I mean, they're great absorbers of foreign cultures and foreign understanding, Egyptian and Mesopotamian and so on. And so”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Liquidity. I mean, they're very entranced by liquidity and the fluency of things, which also, in my mind, cannot be distinct from the fact that the lives of these cities are completely afloat on the eastern Mediterranean. They have no great, if you take Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley, this enormous substantial material richness of fertility just coming at them from the valley. But these Greek cities have no real hinterland. They have no essential good except the goods that they can exchange.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is very like a kind of Buddhist conception, actually, or relationships with the self to the universe. And so this is not, you know, they're not Hegel, these people. They're more like great poets, I think.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it means into the same rivers those stepping in different things and different waters flow. And so it has a kind of I'm tempted to say holy conception around it, not WHO, but it's a sort of sacred statement. About the nature of being and Others do. There's a wonderful thinker from Miletus called Aximenes. Conception of the universe was that it was essentially made of air. That each of our lives sorry, I have a frog in my throat, each of our lives. Are only a kind of momentary sharing of that world breath that as anything, not only us, but anything, comes into existence, it just absorbs for a moment a fragment of the great cosmic breath. And while we, it is alive, it breathes that. And as it dies, it simply exhales it again. And so...”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, I find the whole idea of philosophy slightly daunting. This great sort of monumental inheritance that we have of the great thinkers. And these people who I think in some ways can be Seen to have thought before philosophy was philosophy, that they are as much, and they share qualities with the great Hebrew prophets and they share qualities with the great Indian thinkers, their contemporaries, or with Zarathustra in Persia. Well, an example is The famous statement of Heraclitus that you can't step into the same river twice. In Greek, he says put a moisi tois enough to sin in Banusin Hetrake Hetre that epire. So you can see already that actually this is a poetic conception of what thought might be Port Moisi Toisin of Toisin Banusa, there's an amazing kind of rippling of the river through the thing.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. I mean, I think we can see that. No, their ideas of these enormously powerful cosmic forces in play to which we are subject. It is not an essentially economic Conception of humanity as they saw it, but it is, I think, as we can see it.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never democratic and always only oligarchic places, but always resisting the idea that there is a single rigid frame of understanding which you have to fit into. And so somehow mercantile entrepreneurial inventiveness floods into the way in which people started to think of their own lives, their own cities, their own conceptions of the cosmos, self-city and cosmos are the three dimensions in which Greek thought kind of begins. And so in that way, it's a kind of classic Marxist idea, really, that you think as the world around you allows you to think, you are the product of your world. And I think that's in a way what this book is about.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those great Bronze Age civilizations all disintegrated at the 1300, 1100 BC in the eastern Mediterranean really collapsed for two, three hundred years. And in that collapse bubbled up something new. And the new thing was these very independent Greek mercantile oligarchic non-monarchical, in many ways non-believing cities. There is a very distinct quality to this new Greek thought which says do not tell me how to be. I will find out how to be. I, just as the city from which I come is a trading, connecting city without an absolute loathing of tyranny.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's the idea I had there and then. Could it be sheer coincidence that these new thinkers, all these new ways of thinking emerged in harbour cities They weren't the first, obviously, the first cities that had ever been made in the world. Cities had been around in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in the Indus Valley for thousands of years even. And so Sorry Why was it that in these particular cities, this particular way of thinking emerge? And it has a kind of deep... Absolutely dominated by very powerful capitals with very powerful kings and very powerful Theologies in which kind of great gods dominated the universe, all thinkers were really servants of palace or temple, were kind of servants of power.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I say. Almost in view from the cockpit of our small chartered boat was the whole province in which Greek philosophy had begun. Grey blue masses of island and mainland hid within them the thinker 30 or 40 miles to the south in Miletus was the birthplace of the first theorists of the physical world. 20 miles to the east in Ephesus was the home of Heraclitus, the first person to consider the interrelatedness of things. Just to the north in the twin cities of Notion and Colophon was the country of Xenophanes, the first philosopher of civility, and just over the horizon was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcheus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos where we'd come from that morning the birthplace of Pythagoras, the man who first imagined an everlasting soul.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about the self or write poetry, lyric poetry that emerged from the vivid self. And so there was this incredible concentration in an area of country, you know, no bigger than, I mean, smaller than an English county of everything that anyone has ever thought. In Europe since, and that's what this book is about, this amazing combination of new thinking with this very, very beautiful series of places.”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely standard guide to what are called the pre Socratic philosophers, those early Greek thinkers who came before Socrates between about 700 and about 500, 450 BC, the absolute birth country of Western thinking. And as we were sailing between Samos and Chios, I suddenly realized that we were actually embedded in the world that this book described, 20 miles over to the south was Miletus, where the first thinkers about the nature of the physical world were born 20 miles a little further north. There was Heraclitus from Ephesus, who the first sort of systems think. Trying to understand the world not in terms of its kind of bits and pieces, but of what connected them. And then just over the horizon to the north in Lesbos, the island of Sappho, the first person really to...”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, a few years ago, Sarah and I were sailing in the eastern Aegean. Know one of the most wonderful places on earth, really, in terms of its natural beauties, its extraordinary climate, its kind of soaked quality, it's historically soaked place. And we were sailing between Samos and Chios, the Greek islands, off the west coast of Turkey. And I had with me a copy of the book that her father, John Raven, who was don at Cambridge, had written and published oddly enough in the very year I was born. I never met him. And so I've only ever known him through what he wrote. And this book... Is really the”
2024-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · Life Lessons from the Early Greeks with Adam Nicolson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT