And the Hi and welcome to the history of philosophy without any gaps brought to you with the

support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Today I have another guest to interview and we're going to be talking about the pre-Socratic's.

My guest this week is Professor Malcolm Schofield of Cambridge University.

Hi Malcolm, thank you for coming.

Pleasure.

So we've already covered a lot of the Free Socrates

or really all the Free Socrates in previous episodes.

So this episode is just kind of to wrap things up and I thought

I might start by asking you a little bit about the very first pre-Sachratics the my lesions

so one question that arises here, I suppose, is what do the my lesions all have in common?

So if we think about Thales, Anaxamander, and Anaximines,

do you think that there's one feature or several features which

binds them together and makes them a kind of school of free-sacratic philosophy?

Well I think there are two or three features that unite them.

Perhaps start with Thales and Anaximander.

One thing that is reported about Thales is that he was an enormously inventive practical

person and he's supposed, for example, to have used elementary mathematics, elementary geometry,

to make calculations and indeed to have accurately more or less predicted an eclipse.

Anex Amanda likewise seems to have been keen on inventing gadgets and he too is interested in the mathematical.

He's said to have been the first Greek ever to draw a map of the world.

It seems to have been a primitive map constructed with compasses.

...