The 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 I'll be doing an interview with

Professor James Wilberding of the University of Bochem. Hi James.

Hello. And today we're going to be talking about of the University of Bochem. Hi James.

Hello.

And today we're going to be talking about nature in Neoplatinism and especially in Plitinus and

his student Porphyry.

Maybe you can start by just talking a little bit about the issue in general, because people have a tendency to think of the neoplateness as being not very interested in natural philosophy.

Why do they think that and to what extent is that true?

Well maybe we should start by defining what natural philosophy actually is and

there's a lot to it but I think we can capture the nature of natural

philosophy just by saying something like it's the science of explaining

motion and change in the sensible world so that's going to encompass all sorts of things,

like celestial motions, elemental motions, and elemental change,

biological motions and changes, including embryology.

And so this is something that, know you can see Aristotle doing you can

see Plato doing and the Neoplatanists are interested in this too but for them of

course they have a special sort of approach to it which is to explain these

sensible motions and sensible changes as expressions of

intelligible principles so that these forms are actually at work in the sensible world.

So you're right, it's generally said that the Neoplatinists aren't interested in this sort of thing.

In fact, in the big history of philosophy by Zeller, this German

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