Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, fraughty

with the support of the Kings College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich,

online at historyofilosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Renaissance and early modern science with

Lorraine Dastin, who is a director at the Mox Plunk Institute for the History of Science

in Berlin and visiting professor in the committee on social thought at the University of Chicago.

Hi Lorraine, thanks for coming on.

Hello Peter.

Nice to have you here.

You are a historian of science among other things and one of the many topics you've researched

in that area is something you call and some of your work wonders.

So these are wondrous or monstrous, strange striking phenomena that attracted the attention

of a lot of scientists in the Renaissance in the early modern period.

And we're going to talk about the sorts of things they said about it, how they accounted

for these.

But can you maybe start by just giving us a sense of what sorts of things or events fell

into this category and also how information about them was disseminated?

The short definition of a wonder in this period is anything that's new, rare, or unusual,

anything that snags your attention as being extraordinary.

This could include exotic animals, armadillos from South America.

It could include phenomena whose causes are opaque.

So for example, magnetic attraction and repulsion.

...