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, Keynes College London, and the LMU in Munich.

Online at historyofilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Peter Ramesh and mathematics, with Robert Golding, who is associate professor in the program of liberal studies and director of the program in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame.

Hi Robert. Hey, Hey Peter, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Can you just start by reminding our listeners who Peter Ramesh was, like, when did he live, where did he live, what sort of things did he write about?

Sure, so the simple answer is that he was a French logician. More complicated, he was someone who tried to range their interests over the entire curriculum of the liberal arts, in a way that was controversial at the time.

He was born in 1515, a kind of poor, provincial kid, who made his way to the University of Paris, where he excelled, he pretty much stayed there for the rest of his life.

He came into the public scene in 1543, when he published a couple of books that were extremely critical of Aristotle, and in the wake of that, he was banned for several years from teaching philosophy at the University.

So when he came back to philosophical teaching, it was as a member of the collège Royale, now the collège de France, where he stayed the rest of his life.

He was a Protestant, or at least he became a Protestant later in his life, and in 1572 was killed in the massacre on St. de Bâtholomew's Day when Catholics in Paris turned against their Protestant neighbors.

You said that he came back to teaching after this hiatus of young Ben, was he more polite about Aristotle once he returned?

No, if anything, he considered that his safe space in the collège Royale gave him the license to be even more outspoken against Aristotle.

And he used it as a kind of a safe chair from which to try and reform the whole curriculum of the University of Paris, particularly along mathematical lines.

In the eight years also that he was banned from teaching philosophy, he turned to mathematics instead and gave lectures and mathematics.

And on his return tried to come up with a way of reforming the curriculum that would be based around the quadrivium as much as the trivium.

Okay, so that brings us on to our main topic, which is mathematics short start.

But before we get into what ramus thought about mathematics, can you say something about how mathematics was seen in the time leading up to him and what the main issues in philosophy of mathematics were up to his time.

I think there's two parts of the answer. First of all, how was it treated at the University of Paris in particular where ramus was a professor and then the larger question of what was going on in the philosophy of mathematics at the time.

At the University as ramus was very outspoken in indicating mathematics was very much a second class subject.

It was not taught very seriously at the University. In fact, two professorships of the college Royale had been reserved for mathematicians specifically because the University was felt not to be living up to its mission of actually teaching the whole of the liberal arts mathematics in particular.

So ramus came into a system in which mathematics was neglected in terms of interest in mathematics. There was a whole lot going on. I guess in philosophy of mathematics in this period as well.

One question that was being debated at the time was a so called question on the certainty of mathematics, whether mathematics lived up to the standards of Aristotelian demonstration.

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