And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at

www. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode. W. An engineer, a geologist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island.

They have some precious food, but it is all lodged in tin cans.

Somehow, they need to get at the food before they starve to death.

Let's find a sharp rock and use it to open the cans, suggests the engineer.

No, let's put them in the surf and let erosion do the work for us, suggests the geologist.

The economist smiles at their naive proposals and says, why not just assume we have a can opener?

Ah yes, the remote desert island.

Mainstay not only of joke tellers and cartoonists,

but also a long-running BBC radio program

and more than a few films.

Perhaps you yourself have wondered how you might fare if stranded alone on an island.

I think that if I had my copy of Plato's collected dialogues, I'd be just fine, at least until my utter practical incompetence

led me to die of starvation, thirst, or exposure, whichever came first.

That's assuming that I wound up on the island at my current relatively advanced age.

If I had arrived as a newborn infant, I could have done much better.

Even without a copy of Plato's dialogues, I might have transformed myself into a perfect philosopher and visionary mystic.

All I would need is a little bit of help from a gazelle.

I take this optimistic assessment of my chances from one of the most memorable and entertaining

philosophical texts produced in the Islamic world. Its title is the name of the main and almost only character,

Hai Iin Yachlan, which means Living, Son of Awake.

Its author was Iden Tufeil, who lived in 12th century Andalusia, serving two Almohad caliphs in the city of Granada.

...