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 King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, The Measure of All Things, Renaissance Mathematics and Art.

My grandfather on my father's side was a brilliant engineer who designed jet engines.

His brother built his own plane by hand in his garage and his sister had a PhD in biochemistry.

My grandmother and her sisters all had degrees in mathematics,

and then there's my father, who has always loved numbers

just as much as he's hated vegetables.

He worked in computing, having been a math progeny

who won statewide competitions as a high school student.

Once my twin brother and I received phone call from him on the same day

to congratulate us on being exactly 33 and a third years old.

I have an aunt who's a wizard at business administration and my non-existent sister is an expert on imaginary numbers.

So it would be fair to say that mathematics runs in my family, but it ran right around me.

My feeling about math is much like my feeling about using a motorcycle to jump over a row of

burning cars, amazing wondrous even, but something I'd just as soon leave to other people.

Rather than reflect upon my failure to carry on a family tradition,

I comfort myself by telling myself that I'm in good company. Many philosophers have admired

mathematics while failing to work seriously at it themselves. Aristotle, for example, wrote

no technical treatises on geometry, astronomy, or music, but his posterior

analytics, which we just saw taking center stage in the methodological theories of Zabarala,

is full of examples involving triangles.

And the reason is not far to seek. Mathematics seems to offer the ultimate example of

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