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 Kings College London and the LMU in in Munich online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Metal More Attractive, William Gilbert and Magnetism.

A pretty standard way of demarcating early modern philosophy and the way I'll more or less be using on this podcast is to say that it spans the 17th and 18th centuries. If we take this really literally, that would put the divide between

pre-modern and modern philosophy in 1600. Imagine if they'd known at the time, they might have

thrown parties to celebrate the fact that the Enlightenment

was just around the corner. Of course that didn't happen, but the year did see one publication

that rather poignantly brings the story of pre-modern philosophy full circle.

According to another standard historical convention,

Western philosophy is assumed to start with the pre-Sachratics,

and in particular with Thales of Myletus.

As you'll remember, since we just covered him a mere 434 episodes ago,

one of the very few things known about him is that he said,

the magnet has a soul.

And more than two millennia later,

in that momentous year of 1600,

William Gilbert published,

Concerning the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies,

and this great magnet, the Earth, a new philosophy demonstrated by means of many arguments and experiments.

Here we are after more than two millennia of philosophy and we're still worrying about magnets. But we've come a long way,

not least in terms of having more information to work with. Just that title gives us

more information about Gilbert than we have for Thales' ideas about magnets. In fact, we can about

...