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Hello and welcome to The Spectators' Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor to The Spectator to The Spectator.

And I'm very pleased this week to welcome the physicist Carlo Rovelli, whose new book, well, it's a new old book, is Anaximander and the Nature of Science.

Carlo, welcome.

Many of us will never have heard of Anaximander, but this is a book that's absolutely full of love for him.

Can you tell me, first of all, why he's so important and who he was, and second, I suppose, why we, why we don't

know him, why he's more famous, not more famous? Well, thanks a lot, Sam, that's wonderful.

I almost didn't hear about an axiomander before starting the project of this book, and that's

the motivation for the book. I was shocked by the fact that he's not well known. When I stumbled

upon him and I sort of started, studied what he has done in his role in the development,

I would say of human thinking. I couldn't believe that it's not one of the, recognisers, one of the

major names around.

And we might go into ask why he was not recognized.

He's the very beginning of the line of development that evolved into Western philosophy and Western science.

We're talking about almost three millennia ago, 26 centuries ago, in the early

times of the Greek civilization. We know his thinking through a lot of references to him

in ancient authors. Aristotle talks a lot about him, for instance. And if we trace back a number of

key ideas, methodological tools in our Western thinking, a number of lines

point directly to him. Both, I would say, the naturalistic approach to the world,

trying to understand nature in its own terms, rather than trying to understand nature

as the manifestation of something non-natural

or extra natural thing.

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