Video Documentaries

In the final episode, Bettany travels to China on the trail of Confucius, a great sage of Chinese history whose ideas have fundamentally shaped the country of his birth for around 2,500 years.   Historian Bettany Hughes travels to India, Greece and China on the trail of three giants of ancient philosophy: The Buddha, Socrates and Confucius. All three philosophers lived, between the 6th – 5th BC, during a period of unprecedented, and intense, intellectual development. They were trailblazers, whose radical ideas signaled a key change in human consciousness. They embodied the shift, from a reliance on the supernatural, as the sole way to explain humankind’s place in the cosmos, to one where rational argument and logical reasoning offered new, exciting possibilities. Their game-changing ideas came about in response to huge changes in society; growing urbanisation, advances in technology, flourishing trade and large-scale wars. In a rapidly changing world, they were the first people to appl

Bettany Hughes' series profiling the most celebrated thinkers of the Ancient world continues as she turns her attention to Socrates. Heading to Greece, she details how the Athenian philosopher secured a reputation as an influential maverick.   [video poster="https://video-clump.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/GOTAW-ep-2-mp4-image.jpg" width="832" height="468" mp4="https://video-clump.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/GOTAW-ep.2.mp4" id="1025" src="" loop="false" autoplay="false" preload="metadata" videopress_guid=""][/video]   She also highlights how his contributions as one of the founders of Western philosophy did not please his detractors, as his outspoken defence of his beliefs ultimately led to his execution. Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC) was a classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and is known as the first moral philosopher, of t