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 L.MU in Munich, online at historyof philosophy.net.

Today's episode, written in mathematics, Descartes Physics.

Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book that is constantly open before our eyes,

that is, the universe, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand

the language and knows the characters in which it is written.

It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and

other geometrical figures. Without these, it is

humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders around pointlessly in a dark

labyrinth. These lines were written by Galileo, in his treatise the Assayer, El Sagittore,

which appeared in 1623.

As it happens in that very same year, Descartes went to Italy as part of his youthful wanderings around Europe.

Those travels had already brought him to the Netherlands a few years earlier, where he

worked with Beekmann, who, like Galileo, cherished the idea that the study of nature

could best be pursued through mathematics.

Beekman would also have encouraged Descartes to embrace corpusularianism,

the idea that the physical objects around us are made of far smaller bodies, too tiny to see.

As we've seen, Descartes was later reluctant to share credit for these ideas with

Baikman, so I suppose he would

be annoyed with me for pointing out that the two men were carrying on developments that had

already been underway for decades. Apart from Galileo himself, there were the humidists who laid

foundations for his work, like Giovanni Battista Benedetti, Federico Camandino, Leon Battista Alberti, and Reggio Montanus.

As I discussed way back in episode 361, these scholars devoted philological studies and commentaries

...