After the death of Alexander the Great, the intellectual center of the Greek world shifted from Athens to Alexandria. His general and childhood friend Ptolemy built the city, along with its famous museum and library, and called upon the philosopher and physicist Strato of Lampsacus to aid him in this Read more…
Just a quick note for those of you follow this series via iTunes or some other podcast app. The costs of video hosting are simply too high to justify, so I’ll soon be pulling the plug on the podcast. But have no fears, the series will continue on YouTube. You Read more…
Just a quick note that the first episode of season 2 is available to Patreon subscribers. Alexandria, the Museum, the Library and Strato is available here. The official version will be released June 1st.
The next episode (Season 2, Episode 1) is scheduled for release on June 1st, but I’ve decided to make it available early to my Patreon subscribers. From here, I need to spend some more time building up a backlog of episodes, so it might be a while until the next Read more…
Aristotle tried to base his physics on actual observations of the world, but due to inadequate observations and hidden assumptions, nearly all of it is wrong. He separated the cosmos into the terrestrial and celestial regions. In the terrestrial region, all matter is made of a mixture of the four Read more…
Although much of what Aristotle taught is wrong, he is remembered as the Father of Science because of his method of understanding the world. He insisted that we first observe the world and compare our theories to our observations. If our theories disagree with observations, they are wrong. He catalogued Read more…
After Socrates’ death, his most devoted follower, Plato, founded his famous institution of higher learning, the Academy, inspired in part by the Pythagoreans. Upon challenging his colleagues to explain the motions of the planets in terms of perfect uniform circular motion, his former student Eudoxus invented the first geometric model Read more…
Good News New episodes soon! I’ve recently finished producing season one, and since this series is young I’ve decided to release it all in the coming weeks. You’ll be able to start watching the rest soon! Bad News It will be a little while until I start releasing season two Read more…
After the Persian wars, the center of Greek philosophy shifted from Ionia to Athens. The man to bring Ionian philosophy to Athens was Anaxagoras, who posited that the sun and moon are just rocks that can reflect light and cast shadows. Meanwhile, Philolaus the Pythagorean suggested that the earth moves. Read more…
After the Greek Dark Age, Greek culture was reborn, and the center of the emerging Greek philosophy was Ionia. We meet three philosophers who laid the groundwork for future scientific inquiry: Thales of Miletus, credited with looking past the Greek gods and instead thinking rationally about the cosmos. Anaximander, who Read more…