Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. history of philosophy dot net. Today's episode, Let's Get Physical, Aristotle's

Natural Philosophy. Let's get physical, Aristotle's natural philosophy.

Simplicity, they say, is a virtue, but is it really?

I guess it depends what you're trying to accomplish. Producing a piece of minimalist art, then simplicity should be your

watchword. But designing a Baroque church? Not so much. Scientists seem to side with the minimalist artists and not the Baroque architects.

As we can see from modern attempts to produce a unified theory of physics,

scientists often seek to provide the simplest possible explanations of the world around us.

If you can reduce the number of principles or concepts needed to account for what you see around you, that seems to count as a scientific

advance even if the simpler explanation doesn't, for instance, allow you to predict things with any greater

accuracy. We seem instinctively to feel that explanations of

nature should be simple, and that if we can restrict ourselves to a smaller number of explanatory

factors, we must be getting closer to the underlying reality.

Whatever you make of this feature of science, it has clearly been around for a long time.

Indeed, for as long as there has been anything we can plausibly

call science.

If you cast your mind back to the first pre-Sachratics, you may recall that they sought to explain all natural phenomena in terms of a single

principle which might be water according to Thales, air according to Anaximines, or the more obscure infinite of anneximander. These my lesion

thinkers are often called material monists because of their attempt to derive

the whole natural world from a single original matter.

The search for simplicity reached its climax with parmenities, for whom everything is one and complexity

...