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

philosophy department at King Scholars London and the LMU in Munich online at

history of philosophy.net. Today's episode, Spirits in the material world, Telesu and Campanella on nature.

If Aristotle or any one of the Legion of Aristotelian philosophers who worked in the 2000 years after his death

were confronted with a textbook on modern physics, they would be stunned by many new and unfamiliar

ideas, from gravity to magnetism to the structure of the atom.

But they might be even more surprised at what was missing.

Where they would ask themselves are all the references to the four elements, to the natural places toward which the elements tend, fire and air

moving upward, water and earth downward, where above all are the references to forms.

For the Aristotelians, understanding nature was in large part about understanding

forms, both accidental and substantial. Ultimate matter in their worldview was pure

potentiality to receive form.

So whenever a scientific investigation revealed something about determinant properties,

causal powers, or the natures of things, this was a matter of understanding the forms that reside in matter.

There was no one moment that European philosophy gave up on,

holomorphism, that is the theory that all things are constituted from matter and form in Greek hule and morphe.

Science did not move from Aristotelian physics to modern physics in just one step.

The change was instead and as usual in the history of philosophy

incremental.

This is nicely illustrated by the profound challenge posed to Aristotelianism in late 16th century

Italy by several thinkers above all Bernardino Telesio and Thomas Campanella.

Their natural philosophy was explicitly presented

...