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Hello, one view is that the Renaissance gave birth to the concept of the individual, and Shakespeare must brilliantly define this individual.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form, in moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god.

According to Michel Foucault, French philosopher, polar opposite of Shakespeare, and back, as he thought by Marx and Freud, our century has killed off the individual.

But has it? And what is the individual?

With me to discuss this is the philosopher Richard Volheim, professor of philosophy at the University of California in Barclay, an author of the thread of life, and out today his new book on the Emotions.

I'm also joined by the cultural critic Jonathan Dolemore, who's professor of English at York University, and the author of death, desire, and loss in Western culture.

Jonathan Dolemore, why do you think individualism, or the concept of individual, was as it were invented or born in the time of the Renaissance?

Well, historians of course disagree about when it was born, but yes, I think there is a good argument for saying that it was the Renaissance.

You quoted from Hamlet, and of course, in a way, Hamlet is the modern individual. I mean, for hundreds of years now, we've been fascinated by this figure.

He's enigmatic, he's complex. In some sense, we see ourselves in this figure, and yet at another level, what is he? He's a dysfunctional depressive.

Now, there are two things going on in that play. Earlier on, when Polonius gives advice to his son on how to behave in that sinful city, Paris, he's given a lot of good humanist advice in the very end.

He said, above all else, to find own self be true. Now that idea, I think, is a crucial touchstone for individualism throughout the last few hundred years.

The trouble with Hamlet is, he tries to introspect this self, and what does he find? The quote continues, the one you gave us at the beginning with, what is meant to me about the quintessence of dust.

But do you think that Hamlet, or the Renaissance, discovered an individual who is markedly and decisively different from Plato, from Julius Caesar, from Edward the Confessor, just spread over the last, whatever it is.

The person who wrote about this most influential Jacob Burkhart, he was the one who said the Renaissance was the place where the individual emerges.

He was talking of a very different kind of person from Hamlet. He was talking about the Renaissance man, the great individual, the individual who was thirsty for power, thirsty for knowledge, self-affirming, but in often a brutally self-regarding way, a brutally self-serving way.

But yes, in a way, life-affirming, one thinks in English terms of soul to rally. But the only thing about rally is the great man of action.

But if you read his poetry, it's amazing that he got anything done, because there is a melancholy there, similar to Hamlet.

I'd just like to come back before I go to Professor Volheim to ask you, what is the different about the individual at the time of the Renaissance?

In what ways could you tell listeners, that person is a different person from, I'm just chosen to run them from part of us, Plato, Julius Caesar, and Edward the Confessor.

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