And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the

Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at

History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode, There and back again, Zabarella on scientific method.

At some point you've probably heard a young child explain the plot of a movie,

even if it's one you've seen yourself, you may find it hard to follow. If you'd

asked me to explain my favorite movie to you when I was eight years old, I would have said something

like, first you see a little ship and then a big ship and then the two funny robots are wandering around in the

sand and then later they all get squeezed in a rubbish dump and at the end the

desk star blows up because of the force.

Of course, even adults vary in their ability to convey the plot and tone of a movie.

This is why we turn for advice to professional film critics, Though maybe we shouldn't,

given that the famous critic Pauline Kale

said of Star Wars that it has no emotional grip

and suffers from an absence of wonder,

the greatest cinematic misjudgment since someone suggested that Buster Keaton's movies would be better if they weren't silent.

It's also why Hollywood insiders pride themselves on being able to give an elevator pitch, which distills a vision for a movie down to just one or two big ideas.

It's a samurai epic, but in space.

Though philosophers claim to prize clarity when trying to convey their own ideas, in practice some are easier to follow than others.

In the more difficult category, one thinks inevitably of Martin Heidegger.

His most important work, Being and Time, is so difficult to read

that Edmond Husser, himself not the most lucid of writers, had his wife asked for a face-to-face

meeting with Heidegger. She wrote that Husserle had occupied himself the whole vacation

...