Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, 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

LEMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode

Do the Math Science in the Peliologen Renaissance.

Next time you're helping a child with her math homework and get the inevitable question,

when am I ever going to need to know any of this stuff?

I suggest you tell the story of Leo the philosopher, also known as Leo the mathematician.

He was a ninth century Byzantine scholar whose student was captured by Muslim forces and then dazzled his captors with the learning he had received from Leo.

So impressed with the Muslims that the Caliph wrote to offer Leo a position at court, but he was outbid by the emperor. Leo wound up staying in

Constantinople enjoying a healthy salary. It's a particularly impressive story

given the high standard of sciences in the Islamic world at that time and the fact that as we've seen

Muslims were usually very disparaging about the state of Byzantine learning.

The feeling was for the most part, mutual.

Very few Byzantine were alive to the intellectual achievements of their contemporaries in the Islamic world.

In a previous episode, I've already mentioned Simmy and Seth, who was that rare thing, a translator of Arabic scientific and literary material into Greek.

He went so far as to borrow from Muslim medical authors, while criticizing the greatest of the Greek physicians, Galen.

Simian translated works by the ninth century Persian philosopher and Dr. Arrazi, who had had the temerity to assemble a list of errors in Galenic works, which he candidly

titled Doubts about Galen.

Simian followed suit, mentioning places where Galen seemed to contradict himself and prefer in of Greek medicine, though it seems they did less to improve on Galen's medicine than their counterparts in the Islamic world.

Like the Muslims, they did have hospitals, pharmacists, and surgeons.

We even hear of an operation to separate conjoined twins, which was a

partial success, in that one twin survived it and lived on for a few more days.

...