Hi, I'm

there in

so 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 historyof philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Galileo and the telescope with Eileen Reeves,

who is professor of comparative literature at Princeton University.

Hello, Eileen.

Hello.

Great to have you on the podcast. I'm very excited to talk to you about this,

especially because you're an expert on, among other things, Galileo's telescope.

And I thought an obvious thing to start with would be the question of how Galileo's

telescope worked.

How was it constructed? What did it look like? How powerful was it?

Thank you. That's a great question to begin with.

I'm drawing a lot on the work of Albert Van Helden, who gave us the first rudiments of understanding

why it was that the telescope emerged when it did. Because you had its basic components a long time

before the telescope was invented, allegedly in the fall of 1608 in the Netherlands.

So what took them so long?

There was a great engraving about 1600 that almost makes this point.

It's a series of engravings about new inventions, and there's one devoted to eyeglasses in

particular.

And so you see various people reading with eyeglasses

and doing leather work and this and that and the other and an eyeglass shop. And in the middle of

...