From Facts to Feelings
Where once facts were the path to knowledge, 'lived experience' and 'my truth' now offer an alternative. Professor Abigail Williams explores the history of facts versus feelings.
Where once facts, evidence and rationality were the path to knowledge, now the logic of feeling, of 鈥榤y truth鈥� and 鈥榣ived experience鈥� offers an alternative. Do we know our world through objective facts, or through subjective feelings?
It鈥檚 become easy to explain this fault line as something peculiarly modern, a cocktail of culture wars and social media frenzy. But is this right? Could there be a longer, deeper and more complicated story? The history of the rational Enlightenment is familiar, but we don鈥檛 talk so much about how and why we might have come to privilege personal feelings and experiences.
Professor Abigail Williams begins with the cultural notion that personal feelings matter and individual experience might in some ways be the ultimate truth. From the cult of sensibility to the birth of Romanticism, Freud's couch to Oprah Winfrey's celebrity interviews, how does feeling offer a different way of seeing the world?
Producer: Julia Johnson
Presenter: Abigail Williams
Executive Producer: Samir Shah
A Juniper Connect production for 成人论坛 Radio 4
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Broadcasts
- Tue 14 Feb 2023 11:30成人论坛 Radio 4
- Mon 20 Mar 2023 23:00成人论坛 Radio 4