OM DENNE EPISODE
This week, Steve and Christabel answer Mylo’s question: ‘Is infinity a number?’ They enlist the help of the Milesians; Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes (who were Presocratic philosophers, and NOT Pokémon) and long-serving friend of the podcast Heraclitus. Unfortunately Pythagoras comes along and spoils the fun with his weirdly loaded takes on infinity (and women, rectangles and even numbers) and Aristotle banishes Zeno’s concept of the infinitesimally small to the realm of merely hypothetical mathematics.
Steve reveals why Pythagoras feared the eternal, and Christabel draws on the work of Annemarrie Schimmel, Elaine Howes, Bill Rosenthal and Rudy Rucker to conjecture that this ancient prejudice against the concept of infinity might have just been weak men expressing their misogyny all along. Steve takes this opportunity to inform other strong feminists of the proper etiquette to follow when called upon to open tightly-lidded jars for friends. Christabel quietly reflects on the fact no one has ever solicited her with such a request.
But if the Pythagoreans were so offended by the infinite, then they shouldn’t have offered such enjoyable proofs of its existence: next up is Archytas of Tarentum (and his philosophical reflections on poking sticks into places they don’t belong). Archytas’ paradoxical conception of The Endless Void is compared with Margret Cavendish’s views on the matter, and Steve recounts a conversation with his son about the size of the universe that Christabel suspects these philosophers would have loved to butt in on.
The episode wraps up on a more practical note with Brian Rotman’s concerns about the implications of infinitude for embodied counters, and Penelope Maddy’s observations as tohow children learn to construct both long numbers and long sentences. But the close of the episode serves as proof that all finite things must come to an end – until next week, that is!
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