Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophy professors connect big ideas to everyday life.

In this case, one's concerning the four elements because we are in the middle of our four elements series.

I'm David Pena-Wisman.

And I'm Ellie Anderson.

When thinking about the Earth, I feel like it's hard to distinguish Earth as element from Earth as planet and Earth as world.

We're going to be getting into some of those differences in the episode today.

But we do have a world episode already, David's.

And I think also when we're talking about Earth as element, it's not exactly the planet, right?

It's more...

Correct.

Yeah.

I mean, as we talked about already in our water episode, the idea of the four elements

comes from ancient Greek philosophy and doesn't really make a whole lot of scientific sense,

but it's a fun little theme for these episodes.

Interestingly, though, like Earth is the only planet, if we're speaking planets for a hot second,

in the solar system that etymologically

derives from old English or Germanic and not from Greco-Roman mythology. So the old English word

from which we get Earth, it's literally spelled in a way that I like truly won't attempt to pronounce,

including a letter I've never seen before. So it means ground,

soil, dirt, dry land, or also country and district. And it can also mean the material world,

the abode of man, like as opposed to the heavens or the underworld. And I like this because it

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