And 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 LMU in Munich, online at

www. History of Philosophy. net.

Today's episode, neither the time nor the place.

Hasdi Kreskus.

If you want to build something new, you sometimes need to destroy something old.

It's true in the construction business when you might need to dynamite an abandoned building to build a new one.

In the agriculture business, when you need to clear a field to plant your crops, and of course in the philosophy business too.

I'm sure many of you have spent this tour of philosophy looking forward to the rise of modern physics.

We're not there yet, but in this episode we're going to look at a figure who helped clear the

ground on which modern physics would be built.

His name was Hastay Krescas. The writings of Mymonities and Gersonities provoked

Crescus into a stunning assault on the assumptions underlying Aristotelian physics.

His criticisms were not wholly new.

Some of his ideas are prefigured in the ancient Christian critic of Aristotle, John Philoponus,

and the more Aristotle-Friendly Andalusian Muslim thinker Ibn Baja.

But Kreschus went further than them, both in the daring of his arguments and in his historical

reach. This aspect of his writings caused little excitement among Jews in the following generations, but he would be cited by Renaissance philosophers like Pico de la Mirandola and later by Sminosa.

It would be going too far to say that without Crescus there would have been no modern science,

but it would not be going far enough if we didn't credit Crescus with some part in the gradual demise of Aristotelian science.

As Scientific Revolutionaries go, Crescas cut a somewhat unlikely figure.

For one thing, his intentions concerning natural philosophy were mostly destructive.

He was more demolition man than architect. Yet in arguing that Mymonities and Aristotle a malicious

...