Fennie pray a cost in the news

and there's to all of physical

and bless you all of physical.

He bless you, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings

College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www. History of Philosophy. Net.

Today's episode The Shadow Knows. That's in their bewildering seemingly infinite variety derived from only one single cause?

If so, you're in good company.

It might just be the very oldest idea in the history of philosophy. It emerged in Mediterranean culture with the

pre-Socratics who proposed that all things arise out of some fundamental constituent,

perhaps air, water, or as an axiomander proposed, the indefinite.

And as we're seeing in the episodes on philosophy in India, at around the same time the authors

of the Upanishads were tracing all things to the single reality that is

Brahman. Yet objections to the idea are almost as antique as the idea itself. As Aristotle pointed

out, some pre-Socratic preferred to introduce two or more causal principles.

Think of Empedocles' love and strife, or the atomists infinite indestructible particles.

Aristotle thought they were on the right track, because a single cause would remain inert,

having nothing to act upon.

In fact, even two principles wouldn't be enough, since they would cancel each other out.

But as Ferris Buehler discovered, it's not so easy to avoid a single principle.

In late antiquity, all philosophers accepted that the universe derives from one cause, with the pagan neoplatinists identifying this cause as the one, or good, and the Jews and Christians, of course, seeing the God of their scriptures as the Almighty Creator of all things.

Still, like an offer of marriage from a Montague to a capulate, the proposal continued to cause trouble.

philosophers worried less that a single cause would remain entirely inactive, as Aristotle claimed,

...