Sciences (e.g. astronomy, optics, zoology)

Posted on 16 January 2011

Early Greek medicine up until Hippocrates, and its relation to Pre-Socratic philosophers like Empedocles.

Posted on 24 July 2011

Aristotle’s scientific outlook is perhaps best displayed in his zoology. Peter looks at his theories of inheritance, spontaneous generation, and the eternity of animal species.

Posted on 17 June 2012

Posted on 25 August 2012

James Wilberding joins Peter to show that contrary to what is often claimed, Neoplatonists did make contributions to the philosophy of nature. Topics include Plotinus on the cosmos and Porphyry on embryology.

Posted on 8 June 2013

Ibn al-Haytham draws on the tradition of geometrical optics to explain the mystery of human eyesight.

Posted on 6 April 2014

Leading scholar of medieval Jewish thought Gad Freudenthal joins Peter in a concluding episode on Andalusian thought.

Posted on 28 June 2014

Philosophy and science survive and even thrive through the coming of the Mongols.

Posted on 28 September 2014

18th and 19th century intellectuals in India and the Ottoman empire, from Shāh Walī Allāhto the Young Turks, continue Islamic traditions and grapple with European science.

Posted on 28 June 2015

Translator, scientist and theologian Robert Grosseteste sheds light on the cosmos, human understanding, and the rainbow.

Posted on 5 July 2015

Roger Bacon extols the power of science based on experience and uses a general theory of "species" to explain light and vision.

Posted on 8 November 2015

Albert the Great earns his nickname “universal doctor” by devoting himself to the whole of nature, from geology and botany to the study of human nature.

Posted on 2 July 2017

An interview with Monica Green reveals parallels between medicine and philosophy in the middle ages.

Posted on 18 February 2018

The impact of ancient Indian thought upon the Muslim scholar al-Bīrūnī and upon European thinkers like Hume, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.

Posted on 2 December 2018

Princess Anna Komnene makes good use of her political retirement by writing her Alexiad and gathering a circle of scholars to write commentaries on Aristotle.

Posted on 17 March 2019

Paulin Hountondji (pictured) and other African philosophers criticize ethnophilosophy and advocate a universalist approach.

Posted on 7 April 2019

Mathematics and the sciences in Byzantium, focusing on scholars of the Palaiologan period like Blemmydes and Metochites.

Posted on 15 September 2019

Ignatius Sancho and Benjamin Banneker make their mark on the history of Africana thought through letters that reflect on the power of sentiment.

Posted on 21 June 2020

Africanus Horton looks toward a future of self-government for West Africa beyond slavery and colonialism.

Posted on 6 September 2020

Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin debunks racist pseudo-science and argues that inequalities among humans are caused by social, not biological, factors.

Posted on 13 September 2020

The blurry line dividing humanism and scholastic university culture in the Italian Renaissance.

Posted on 27 September 2020

Aristotle’s works are edited, printed, and translated, leading to new assessments of his thought among both humanists and scholastics.

Posted on 22 November 2020

An interview with Dag Nikolaus Hasse on the Renaissance reception of Averroes, Avicenna, and other authors who wrote in Arabic.

Posted on 20 December 2020

Connections between philosophy and advances in medicine, including the anatomy of Vesalius.

Posted on 27 December 2020

W.E.B. Du Bois emerges as a historian, sociologist, and innovative philosophical thinker in the 1890s, and introduces his famous idea of "double consciousness."

Posted on 28 February 2021

Brian Copenhaver joins us to explain how Ficino and other Renaissance philosophers thought about magic.

Posted on 14 March 2021

Giordano Bruno’s stunning vision of an infinite universe with infinite worlds, and his own untimely end.

Posted on 28 March 2021

Did Galileo’s scientific discoveries grow out of the culture of the Italian Renaissance?

Posted on 11 July 2021

From the latter half of the nineteenth century to the 1970s, African Americans only rarely obtain jobs as philosophy professors but bring distinctive perspectives to the profession.

Posted on 10 October 2021

Luther’s close ally Melanchthon uses his knowledge of ancient philosophy and rhetoric in the service of the Reformation.

Posted on 17 October 2021

Guest Liam Kofi Bright discusses Du Bois' ideal of value-free science and the place of science within his wider thought.

Posted on 16 January 2022

Paracelsus adapts the tradition of alchemical science for use in medicine, and in the process overturns the scientific theories of Aristotle and Galen.

Posted on 30 January 2022

Schegk, Taurellus, Gorlaeus, and Sennert revive atomism to explain chemical reactions, the composition of bodies, and the generation of organisms.

Posted on 27 March 2022

How revolutionary was the Copernican Revolution?

Posted on 10 April 2022

Responses to Copernicus in the 16th century, culminating with the master of astral observation Tycho Brahe.

Posted on 24 April 2022

Kepler combines Brahe's observations, Copernicus' astronomy, and Platonist metaphysics.

Posted on 8 May 2022

Comets! Magnets! Armadillos! In this wide-ranging interview Lorraine Daston tells us how Renaissance and early modern scientists dealt with the extraordinary events they called "wonders".

Posted on 18 December 2022

A chat with Ann Blair about the "Theater of Nature" by Jean Bodin, and other encyclopedic works of natural philosophy. (Pictured: Prof Blair holding the annotated copy of Bodin's Theatrum she describes in the episode.)