The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you

with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at

www history of philosophy dot net. Today's interview will be an interview with Robert Pasnau, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, and we're going to be talking about substance and the transition from medieval philosophy to early modern philosophy.

Hi Bob, thanks for coming on the past.

Great to be here.

You've written a book about this general historical period which basically goes from the death of Thomas Aquinas to the

publication of Locke's essay which is quite a large historical span so I wanted to ask you first of all what led you to write a book with that kind of historical

periodization.

Yeah, I, uh, it felt to me like obviously a lot of work is done on high scholasticism of Aquinas in his era.

An even greater amount of work is done on 17th century philosophy from Descartes forward, but hardly anyone has tried to tell the story of what happens between the two.

And I just thought this is something that needs to be done.

And so I set out to do it at least a narrow sort of swath of territory

having to do with the metaphysics of substance.

And in fact, that's in the title of the book. So the book is about metaphysical themes during the period from the

late 13th century to the earliest and that's right yeah yeah so it goes the book goes all the way through Descartes up to lock.

It officially it stops in 1671 which was when lock wrote the first drafts of his essay and I stopped in 1671 because I just couldn't bring myself to try to talk about Spinoza and Leibniz who were very difficult and I thought well I've got to stop somewhere and I'm stopping there.

Right.

And do you think of that in some sense as the history of scholasticism

or of late scholasticism, or would you be reluctant

to apply the word scholacism all the way down into the 17th century?

No, I think it's fine to think of scholasticism as running through the 17th century and even into the 18th century

it took a long time for scholastic philosophy to go out of existence.

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