Aristotle, al-Fārābī, and the Dawn of Arabic ...

There’s no mistaking that alchemy laid a foundation for the modern science of chemistry. And though the contributions of alchemists have been dismissed by scholars for years – centuries, to be more accurate -- some of the names we recognize as being influential in ...

Let’s talk about witch panic. If your crime is not of being a witch, but rather of falsely accusing and then punishing an alleged witch, what led up to that moment? Well, probably more than one thing. There’s a lot of talk about the religious factors that have long been part of p ...  Show more

Piet looks at how the works of famous ancient thinkers such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid or Ptolemy traveled from culture to culture and formed the basis of Muslim, Christian and Jewish science and philosophy alike. Ancient Greek science and philosophy reached Christian Euro ...  Show more

Greek philosophy and science make their way into the Islamic world via Syriac and Arabic translations and interpretations. 

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Arab philosopher al-Kindi. Born in the early ninth century, al-Kindi was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy and supervised the translation of many works by Aristotle and others into Arabic. The author of more than 2 ...  Show more

Peter begins to look at the systematic rethinking of Hellenic philosophy offered by al-Farabi, focusing on his logic and metaphysics.