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Lesson 2.4: Make Your Self (Pt. I)
15 Plays1 month ago
Topics discussed:
- Biographical details about Aristotle
- Key notions in Aristotelian thinking
- Key aspects in Aristotelian physics, logic, and ethics
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Transcript
Aristotle's Early Life and Education
00:00:03
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Aristotle was born in Stagira in 384 BCE. If you want to find Stagira or Stagira on a map, go ahead and find Athens first.
00:00:15
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Move north. You're to fall into the Aegean Sea for a moment. But if you keep going, eventually you'll hit dry land once more. And around there, that's where the archaeological site of Stagira is today.
00:00:31
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what modern-day Greece. At the time, however, this was the kingdom of Macedonia. And there, Aristotle lived a happy and privileged childhood.
00:00:44
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We can guess as much because his father was the court physician to Amentus III. In other words, Aristotle's father was a doctor the king of Macedonia.
00:00:59
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You can imagine this comes with immense privileges. Among them is this. According to a legend, Aristotle was a childhood friend of Amentus' son, Philip.
00:01:11
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History knows this Philip as Philip the Great or Philip the Barbarian. But Aristotle probably just called him, you know, his buddy Phil. So that is the sort of childhood that Aristotle had, at least for a time.
00:01:27
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Things can't be rosy forever. Aristotle's father did die when Aristotle was still ah young boy. We're not sure exactly what it was, probably some kind of plague that, you know, being a doctor, he was exposed to.
00:01:42
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And so Aristotle went to go live with his uncle. After a period of uncertainty, Aristotle's uncle decided to send Aristotle to Athens so that he can study at Plato's Academy.
00:01:56
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was 367 BCE, e and Aristotle would end up spending ah about 20 years there at Plato's Academy. As I've mentioned before, Plato had what might be referred to as a magnetic quality.
00:02:11
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Many people spent a lot of time with him, and they didn't want to leave his side, right? They wanted to stay at his school. And that's where Aristotle was then from his late teens until his late
Philip's Influence on Aristotle's Life
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30s.
00:02:24
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But to tell you what happens after this point, we have to backstep a little bit and talk about his childhood friend, Philip. It's because the second half of Aristotle's life wouldn't have happened if it weren't for Philip.
00:02:40
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So let's talk about Philip for a second. And in order to talk about Philip, we actually have to talk about a different city-state altogether. Let's talk about Thebes for a second. In the 370s BCE, e the city-state of Thebes started to become more militarily dominant.
00:02:59
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This was done through experimentation with their ways of waging war. If you don't know much about ancient warfare, um the Greeks used to fight in something called a phalanx.
00:03:12
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These are essentially big rectangles of men, right? Big rectangles of armored soldiers. And what Thebes began to do is experiment with the shape of this basic phalanx.
00:03:25
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In the end, they made him look more like a trapezoid with one very long side, but they would also toy around with where the veterans would be in this trapezoid. and Nonetheless, after some experimentation, Thebes began to grow quite mighty in terms of military prowess.
00:03:45
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And in fact, just to kind of cut a long story short, who do they beat in 371 BCE? Who do they wage war against and win that would impress you?
00:03:56
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Well, that would be the city-state of Sparta. Now, in the decades leading up to this, Sparta had dominated the area. It was the hegemon of the region and had indeed defeated two major alliances that went up against it.
00:04:12
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But Thieps, through its experimentation and military tactics, was able to defeat Sparta. And this is where Philip comes back into the story. What do some kingdoms do to ensure the good behavior of the people that they conquer or of the people that they are in alliances with, even if they are very loose alliances?
00:04:34
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Well, let's just say that your kingdom defeats my kingdom. One of the things that you might do is take my son with you, right? You might say, hey, I'm going to go ahead and raise your child for you. Don't worry. It'll be an amazing upbringing.
00:04:50
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He will be part of my court. But if you get uppity, if you get a little rebellious, we will kill him. That is exactly what happened to Philip. Philip is held in Thebes from 368 to 365 BCE.
00:05:06
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And this is, you know, essentially kind of a hostage situation, although he is getting a wonderful education. And so it is during this time period that Philip learns from the Thebans.
00:05:19
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He is picking up some of their military strategies, some of their, you know, spirit for inquiry into the art of waging war, and he starts to get ideas of his own.
00:05:32
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And so Philip eventually becomes king of Macedon, and in 359 BCE, e Macedon begins to expand. Philip, in other words, has decided to initiate an imperial project.
00:05:47
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He wants his kingdom to be the next hegemon of the area. And it was early in this imperial project that Philip has ah son. Well, yes, multiple sons, but he has one son in particular who will be the next king of the kingdom of Macedon.
00:06:06
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That would be Alexander. although history knows him as Alexander the Great. So Philip continues conquering. And the same year of Plato's death, that would be 348 BCE, e Philip conquers Olynthus.
00:06:23
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Olynthus is an important city-state because it was the seat of an alliance that essentially served as a buffer between Macedonia and Athens. In other words, once Philip conquered Olynthus, there is nothing really blocking him from going all the way south to Athens to wage war.
00:06:46
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So, Olynthus had sort of played that role of just having a little bit of distance, a little bit of an obstacle for Philip before he decided to go and and wage war on Athens.
00:06:58
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Well, now that obstacle had been removed, the Athenians were shocked, dismayed, horrified, and they knew that it was only a matter of time before Philip would come to wage war on Athens.
00:07:11
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And so, this brings us back to Aristotle.
Aristotle's Return to Macedon and Role at the Court
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Once more, this was the year of Plato's death, which means that the position of director of the academy, that would be Plato's school, is now open.
00:07:26
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And undoubtedly, Aristotle wanted the gig. But he was passed up. He did not get the job. Why? Why couldn't Aristotle be the next sk scholar of the academy?
00:07:39
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Well, there's probably quite a few reasons for this. One of them is that maybe he was still too young. He was considered too young by the people at the academy and, you know, he just wasn't there yet.
00:07:51
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Speaking of not being there yet, maybe another reason is that when we think of Aristotle, we think of one of the greatest minds of Western history, maybe global history. But maybe he just wasn't there yet in that regard either.
00:08:07
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He was not the Aristotle that we think of today. Maybe his period of flourishing came just a little bit later, so he wasn't yet ready for the job. To whatever extent those two reasons might be true, it certainly is a case that Aristotle's ties to Macedonia probably also played a role and him not getting the job.
00:08:29
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The Athenians were very weary of anything having to do with Macedon and Aristotle had some very clear connections to Philip. As I've mentioned multiple times now, childhood friends, right? So,
00:08:45
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For those reasons, and probably some other ones, Aristotle did not get the gig, and he ends up leaving Athens. It was a little too hot for him at the time, and so he goes to an island colony to spend some time there, resting.
00:09:00
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But it wouldn't be very long before Philip calls Aristotle to join his court. So in 342 BCE, Aristotle goes back to Macedonia to join Philip's court.
00:09:15
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And it is there where he very likely, among his duties, tutored the future king of Macedonia, the person that history knows as Alexander the Great.
00:09:28
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Aristotle now being in Philip's court, Philip continues his project of empire building. In 338 BCE, Philip finally conquers Athens.
00:09:41
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And what is happening here is that the Greek world is being unified by force.
Aristotle's Philosophical Contributions and the Lyceum
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These Greek city-states that have fought each other for centuries, ferociously protecting their autonomy,
00:09:56
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they are all now being forced to be under the same banner right the macedonian yoke and so now we find ourselves back in athens in 335 bce it is this year that with some macedonian financial backing aristotle opens up his school the lyceum What does Aristotle teach at the Lyceum?
00:10:23
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Well, there is i want to make two general points about Aristotle before we begin to get into what might be called Aristotelian thinking. And it it's basically this, if you want to think about why he's such a big deal, there's two reasons for it.
00:10:39
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And the first one is actually quite important. Aristotle knew that he was the inheritor of a tremendous amount of generational knowledge.
00:10:50
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So many influential and important thinkers had come before him and he knew it. In fact, he wrote a little history of philosophy, the first history of philosophy apparently, because he knew that he stood sort of at an important period in history, an important period of intellectual history in particular.
00:11:09
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And so one of the things that he does for us is that he synthesizes many of the ideas that came before him. Now, strictly speaking, they are you know antagonists to each other. You can't be both, for example, on the side of Plato and the Milesians.
00:11:25
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But what Aristotle does is finds a way to make theories compatible. Sure, he weakens some and modifies others, but he tries to garner what he can from all his intellectual forefathers.
00:11:41
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Now, if that were the only thing he had done, he would still be a massively important figure. People we will cover later on in this course did exactly that, and we give him a lot of credit just for that part.
00:11:54
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But Aristotle goes one step further, and that's this second bit that I was mentioning earlier. Aristotle, standing on the shoulders of giants, builds on the knowledge of his intellectual forefathers and blazes forward, building a systematic type of philosophy.
00:12:12
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As you will learn throughout this lesson, Aristotle is a system builder. He is a big-time theoretical philosopher. He wants to introduce a program of thinking. And that's exactly what he does. And it's a program of thinking that sometimes gets called the Aristotelian worldview.
00:12:30
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And this will dominate Western thought for ah about 2000 years. In other words, he will initiate a way of looking at the world that will be basically commonplace for two millennia.
00:12:45
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And it was a fairly resilient way of looking at the world. In fact, the next worldview that comes to dominate, you probably have heard of it. It's the one that was brought about by people like Isaac Newton and Galileo and Kepler.
00:13:01
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And you can tell that by the gravitas of those names, I mean, those are big names in the history of science. And what I want to say here is that it took them, right? Newton, Galileo, Kepler, to bring down the Aristotelian worldview.
00:13:15
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So Aristotle is a big deal on those two counts. He synthesized what previous generations had taught and worked on all those ideas, and then he blazed forward with them creating his own programmatic way of thinking.
00:13:31
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So I want to talk about those two things. Let's begin though with the synthesis, the grand synthesis that Aristotle engages in. so let's talk about three things that Aristotle very likely stressed in his Lyceum.
00:13:44
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They're almost sort of methods, we can guess. These are the methodological ah approaches that he would take in his school. So let's begin with naturalism. We've already talked about naturalism.
00:13:56
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We mentioned it in particular when we were talking about democratism. But that was a naturalism about explanations. so Let me talk about that for a second. That kind of naturalism, naturalism about explanations, basically means that when you are explaining something, you shouldn't incorporate anything non-natural into it.
00:14:18
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If you want to talk about, for example, why it is that storms happen, or you talk about, you know, precipitation and wind and that kind of stuff, you don't talk about God being angry or the gods being angry.
00:14:32
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And so that's naturalism about explanations. Aristotle is, like I said, he takes that idea and then he goes forward with it, adds to it, learns something new from it.
00:14:43
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So here's what Aristotle adds. In his work on physics, Aristotle gives us a definition of what natural objects are. So now he's defining nature.
00:14:56
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And this is a big step forward, especially because we're going to get some normative elements out of this. In other words, we're going to get some shoulds out of it, right? So we'll get to that in a second. Let me give you the definition.
00:15:09
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Things that are natural are things that have an inner source of change and robustness. In other words, natural things have an inner force that makes them do what they're supposed to do.
00:15:23
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Let me give you an example of this actually this let's talk about a couple of different things. Let's talk about a human a city and a table Let's begin with a human. Clearly a human being is a natural thing, a natural object.
00:15:37
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So that must mean that they have some inner source of change and robustness. That's exactly correct. Once a human is born, they have within them already the power to change over time and be robust. In other words, you know, a baby will develop into a tween, then a teen, then a young adult, then an adult, and eventually an elderly person and then all the way through the death process.
00:16:05
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That is an inner source of change. the Basically the recipe for all that happening is already inside of a human. Moreover, we are robust. In other words, if few get a cut or some kind of injury, your body knows how to heal itself, obviously to a certain extent, right? You're not going to regrow an arm, but it knows how to keep itself going into the future. It is robust, in other words.
00:16:29
Speaker
And so that's what a natural thing is. It has this inner power, an inner force to do what it's supposed to do. And humans are supposed to develop from a child into a teen, into an adult, and eventually into an elderly person.
00:16:45
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That's just what we're supposed to do. Something similar could be said of a city. A city is a naturally existing thing. Aristotle basically said, hey, look at the world. there are cities all over the place. This is not unnatural.
00:16:59
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This is perfectly common. This is actually a natural form of association. He also looks at nature and says various different other animals engage in some kind of community building. So this is clearly a natural state of affairs.
00:17:16
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And the same thing, a city sort of has its own inner force to stay alive. It has various processes in it, such as, you know, some kind of government, some kind of economy, some kind of protective border.
00:17:29
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And similarly, it sort of has an attractive force, right? It keeps it alive because it has all these positive features, such that people from other you know places might see the city and say, oh I want to live there.
00:17:41
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And so it adds to the city. It's almost like the city's way of eating or something, you know? And so thus, the city also is a natural object and it has this inner force to keep itself moving to the future and and doing what it's supposed to do.
00:17:56
Speaker
Now let's think of a table. A table is an artifact. Sure, it will, you know, do what it's supposed to do, but it wasn't within the table to begin with.
00:18:09
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A table's robustness, it's, you know, staying upright and not falling apart and, you know, it being able to be used to eat and do work and all that, that all that was put into the table by the skill of the carpenter.
00:18:24
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So a table is an artifact because it had to have its inner force put into it. It didn't have it from itself. So yes, the table has this capacity to stay upright, but it was put into it by something else.
00:18:39
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And that's why it's an artifact as opposed to a natural category. Okay, so out of this way of thinking, out of this way of defining what natural objects are, Aristotle is beginning to have a bit of a normative naturalism.
00:18:54
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And we can see this in, for example, his book on the politics. I've already mentioned that Aristotle argued that the city-state is a natural form of association. Well, he can use this way of looking at the world for arguing against some other philosophers that we've covered.
00:19:14
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Diogenes the dog, if you recall, believed that marriage wasn't really necessary and that there's something kind of wrong with cities. You should be able to get everything that you need completely on your own.
00:19:29
Speaker
It's weird to need someone to grow food for you and someone else to weave your clothes for you and someone else to make your house. You should be able to do all these things on your own.
00:19:41
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Everything that you need, you should be able to procure for yourself. Well, Aristotle can now argue against Diogenes a dog by saying, you're wrong. City-states are a perfectly natural form for humans to group in.
00:19:55
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And so here's the normative element. it's okay to do so. In fact, you should be in a city. That is where humans are most likely to thrive. And so there is that normative element. You should, you should, right?
00:20:09
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And if you have some other idea, you are mistaken. So that's what I mean by a normative element to Aristotle's naturalism. Humans, by the way, also have a function to perform, and that means they should perform that function. There is the normative element.
00:20:27
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Now, we will talk about that much later, when we get into Aristotle's ethics, which is of course the main theme of this course. So we'll get to that in a little bit.
00:20:38
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Let's keep going what Aristotle learned from his intellectual predecessors.
Aristotle's Scientific Method and Natural Philosophy
00:20:44
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The next item on that list is empiricism.
00:20:49
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As I've already mentioned, Aristotle is a big time theoretical philosopher. He likes to build theories. He likes to build systems. And these systems are supposed to help you look at, you know, some domain of inquiry from a bird's eye view.
00:21:05
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In other words, it's a program for looking at the world so that you can understand it more easily. However, you can see pretty clearly from Aristotle's writings that he gave precedence to observation.
00:21:19
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In other words, yes, build your systems, build your theories. But if some observation conflicts with your theory, you can see in Aristotle's writings that he suggests that you fix up your theory, right? Observations have some kind of, you know, primality or fundamentality to them.
00:21:39
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They are important enough so that you have to build your theories so that they can comport or conform to the observations. many historians of science see this as the roots of the kind of empiricism that are characteristic of modern science and so aristotle is a huge deal when it comes to the beginnings of the spirit of science now he can't take all the credit here we already have seen a bit of an empiricist attitude from people that we've already covered
00:22:14
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Heraclitus, for example, has some empiricist-leaning fragments. So does Empedocles, particularly when he's responding to Parmenides. And Xenophanes is another character that has sort of that empiricist ethos about him.
00:22:31
Speaker
But to this lineage, we add Aristotle, who really put forward this in a more systematic way, we can say. Last but not least in our survey of the intellectual environment that Aristotle sort of summarizes for us, we're going to talk about metaphysics.
00:22:50
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And so Aristotle's metaphysics are a wonderful example of how he took all these theories that were around before him and found a way to fit them together.
00:23:02
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So here is what Aristotle calls the four causes of a substance. And if I could explain what he means by this is basically, if you want to understand a thing, if you want to understand a substance, there's at least four ways in which you have to understand it four ways of looking at that thing that all together constitute a complete understanding of that thing.
00:23:28
Speaker
So let's get into it. Let me do this. I'll tell you what they are first and where they came from, which intellectual predecessors Aristotle got them from. And then at the end, I'll give you an example of these. I'll give you two examples. Why not? So let's just look at them at a sort of high level in the abstract.
00:23:49
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The first cause of a substance is the material cause. That's the matter that a thing is composed of. In other words, the stuff that makes up a substance, that's the material cause.
00:24:03
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This emphasis on the stuff that things are made out of comes from the Milesians. Remember the Milesians were arguing about what is the primordial substance, the one thing out of which everything else comes out of? And they were debating, is it water? Is it air? Is it the Apeiron, the indefinite?
00:24:24
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Well, Aristotle picks up from these debates that it clearly matters what a thing is made out of. And so that's one of the things that you have to understand if you want to really understand a substance.
00:24:36
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So that's the material cause. Second is the efficient cause. The efficient cause is that which causes the movement or state of a thing.
00:24:49
Speaker
So what got the substance that you're looking at to the way it is right now? This way of looking at the world comes from quite a few people, but let's talk about Anaxagoras.
00:25:00
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Anaxagoras, if you recall, wanted to explain the cosmos, and he had this idea of the original mixture and mind with a capital M.
00:25:11
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And he thought that mind was the rational organizing principle of the cosmos. And I asked you to think about this sort of as an early theory about laws of nature.
00:25:22
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Anaxagoras was basically saying, I think that there are laws of nature that affect everything that we see around us. And so for Anaxagoras,
00:25:33
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we can say that the way the universe is right now is a product of the original mixture plus the laws of nature acting on the elements in that original mixture.
00:25:46
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In other words, the original mixture plus the laws of nature are the efficient cause of the universe as we see it today. They're what got the universe to be the way it is right now.
00:25:59
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And so that's what an efficient cause is, what got something to be in its current state. too Third, the formal cause. We're talking about forms now. That must be Plato.
00:26:12
Speaker
Plato, of course, believed that if you see, for example, a beautiful horse, well, there must be some kind of hoarseness that that horse is based off of. And there must be an objective beauty with a capital B that is the cause of the beauty in the horse.
00:26:30
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And so he believed that there's another realm, another plane of existence where a horse-ness and beauty and blueness and all the mathematical objects, they're hanging out over there.
00:26:43
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Some ultimate realm of being with a capital B. Aristotle, being Plato's student for 20 years, clearly gathered that this notion of form is an important idea. However, Aristotle did not like this idea of a separate dimension where the forms exist independent of human minds and independent of physical objects. right so For Plato, forms are not physical and not mental. they're not
00:27:14
Speaker
They're not dependent on human minds. They're not just ideas that we came up with. The forms are real for Plato. Well, Aristotle says form is real, but it's physical.
00:27:24
Speaker
Or maybe a better way to put it is that the form is not separate from the matter, but form and matter are joined. The form of a thing is in the thing itself.
00:27:36
Speaker
So this view, as opposed to Plato's view, which is called Platonism, Aristotle's view is called hilomorphism. And inside the you know the the Greek terms inside that word, basically the suggestion is that form and matter are together.
00:27:52
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So if you want to think about Aristotle's hilomorphism as Plato's doctrine of the forms, but taking off that part about you know the extra dimension that's not too far from what it really is just think about the form is inside the matter itself so the form of hoarseness is in the horse itself no need to posit some extra realm of existence so that's the third cause the formal cause finally Aristotle believes that if you really want to understand a thing you have to know its final cause
00:28:25
Speaker
what the thing is for what is its purpose what is its function This is very Aristotelian. As a matter of fact, if I can just say so right now, this is Aristotelian thinking.
00:28:41
Speaker
If you ever hear someone say, oh, that's an Aristotelian argument. Well, basically what they're saying is that's an argument about function, about what a thing is for. And so more on this later, but this is Aristotle's contribution to metaphysics.
00:28:57
Speaker
There's all these ideas from people that came before him, but then he adds this notion right here. So let's look at some examples so you can kind of sink your teeth into these ah metaphysical notions.
00:29:09
Speaker
Let's start with the example of a statue, Michelangelo's David. The material cause of Michelangelo's David is the marble that it is made out of, right? The stuff it's made out of.
00:29:21
Speaker
The efficient cause is the skill of the sculptor. So that would be Michelangelo. That is to say, what got the statue to be the way it is right now is all the chiseling that Michelangelo engaged in, right? All his skill.
00:29:36
Speaker
The formal cause of Michelangelo's David is, of course, the design of the statue. which I suppose was in Michelangelo's head. And its final cause may be, actually, i don't really know.
00:29:50
Speaker
I take it that Michelangelo's David probably started as a project that was supposed to adorn a church. And now it's mostly to, you know, be admired by by people.
00:30:03
Speaker
But basically its final cause is to be admired by people, whether it be at a church or a museum, right? So it's to be admired. That's what it's for. Here is the second example I promised you.
00:30:14
Speaker
In a human, The material cause is, well, I guess the flesh, bone, blood, cartilage, whatever, all the stuff that we're made out of. The efficient cause, well, this is a little tricky because lots of things led to a person being the way that they are right now.
00:30:33
Speaker
But let's say that this is, you know, a baby, a to keep it simple. And so what caused the baby to be in its current state? Well, that would be the parents. The parents engaged in some activities, you know what I'm talking about.
00:30:47
Speaker
And that led to the existence of the baby as it currently is. The formal cause is the DNA of the baby. DNA is a sort of a template for building a human person, ah basically from the ground up, from amino acids.
00:31:02
Speaker
And so that would be the form, the design. The final cause is the reason or purpose for that human being's existence. We will get into more of that later.
00:31:14
Speaker
But whatever their purpose is, that's what the final cause is. And every natural object has a purpose. For humans, it's to live rationally.
00:31:24
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So we'll get into that little bit later. I mentioned earlier that Aristotle gave us a systematic way of looking at the world, and I called it Aristotelian thinking or the Aristotelian worldview.
00:31:41
Speaker
Let's flesh that out now. I'm going to give you two examples of a domain of inquiry where Aristotle kind of guided our ways of thinking about it.
00:31:53
Speaker
And I should mention right now that They won't be up to date, scientifically speaking, right? So I'm going to talk about biology and physics. And Aristotle's biology is not Darwinian biology.
00:32:07
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And Aristotle's physics is not, you know, modern day, i guess, Newtonian physics with a little bit of quantum mechanics in there. It's not those things. But of course, this is over 2000 years ago.
00:32:21
Speaker
And so what Aristotle was doing is what the best he could do given the observations of the time period and the state of sophistication of science at the time.
00:32:33
Speaker
So i sort of want to preempt any objections you might have by saying that this was a useful and rational way of looking at the world for lots and lots of people for a very long time.
00:32:47
Speaker
And I'm guessing, by the way, that if you were around in the ancient world and you were an intellectual, you might have believed in these things too, right? and No one was having any better ideas, let's just say that much.
00:33:02
Speaker
there are many observations for the beliefs that Aristotle had. And again, Aristotle's way of looking at the world was very popular across most of the West for 2000 years.
00:33:17
Speaker
So even though what I'm going to chat about right now is probably in many cases, especially the physics, factually wrong, I want you to get a flavor for how it is that Aristotle thought.
00:33:29
Speaker
And that's sort of the goal of all this. So Let's talk about his biology. If Aristotle were around today, he would have likely been a biologist.
00:33:40
Speaker
Over half of his writings that we have are on biology. And you see a whole lot of categorization that seems to be what he liked to do, right? To organize what we know.
00:33:53
Speaker
But you can see, of course, this Aristotelian thinking at play all the time throughout his biological writings. And so the word that I want to introduce to you now, the term that we will be using to describe Aristotelian thinking, is called teleology.
00:34:10
Speaker
So what is teleological thinking or what is teleology? Well, if you're engaging in teleological thinking, you're basically trying to explain something in terms of its purpose or its function or its final cause.
00:34:27
Speaker
So of course, to understand a substance, you need to know the you know the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause. But more than anything, Aristotle saw the final cause as really constituting a comprehensive understanding of a thing.
00:34:43
Speaker
And so let me give you some examples of teleological thinking in biology. So you're looking at ah and a nature scene, right? And there's a lion, or I guess a lioness, and a gazelle.
00:34:57
Speaker
Now you want to understand the lion. Well, of course, you need to know what it's made out of. And you need to know you know how it got there, the efficient cause. And you need to know about the design of a lion.
00:35:10
Speaker
But ultimately, if you want to understand the lion and all its different parts, you have to know what they're for. A lion's jaws are for eating flesh.
00:35:22
Speaker
A lion's claws are for, you know, sinking them into prey and helping them hunt. What about exile? What about their... You know, they have long legs and a light frame. Why? Well, that's for running away from predators like lions.
00:35:40
Speaker
And so there's a lot of like, what is this for talk in Aristotle? And that would be teleological thinking. You are trying to understand a thing in terms of its purposes and its functions.
00:35:56
Speaker
And so that's Aristotelian thinking. That's teleological thinking. Sidebar before I end this little bit on biology, we hear stories that Alexander the Great, when he was off on campaign conquering the known world, whenever he would run into some biological specimen that he thought Aristotle might like to have, he would send it back to him.
00:36:21
Speaker
Now, I've read from some scholars that maybe this isn't true. Maybe this is just part of the you know Alexander propaganda machine. But I like to think that it's true. Why not, you know?
00:36:33
Speaker
Sounds kind of sweet to me. In any case, let's move into Aristotle's physics where we can really get a feel for his teleological way of looking at the world.
00:36:45
Speaker
Now again, this is so not the deterministic way of looking at the world of Kepler and Newton. Kepler and Newton, they sort of saw the world as clockwork, a bunch of gears moving and everything is very deterministic.
00:37:03
Speaker
That is is not how Aristotle saw the world. Aristotle once more saw the world as being explicable. through its purpose right all the little elements in the world have a purpose and a function and they're performing this purpose and function is what explains why the world is the way it is and so let me give you this aristotelian world view and just so you know i'm going to be taking this from ah book by richard dewitt called world views
00:37:35
Speaker
And this is an excellent introduction to the history and philosophy of science. And so let me just begin with a couple of beliefs that the ancients had that are, you know, quite obviously not true. But we're going to go with them for now.
00:37:54
Speaker
And just remember that if you were an ancient, you would probably believe these things too. And let me just say one more thing. They had good reasons for believing in this these things. Maybe I'll get into some of those as we go.
00:38:09
Speaker
But here's a couple of beliefs that the ancients held.
Aristotle's Cosmology and Physics
00:38:13
Speaker
The Earth is located at the center of the universe. This is otherwise known as geocentrism.
00:38:22
Speaker
It's just, you know, if you want to think about the universe, right smack in the middle is planet Earth. Two, the Earth is stationary. The Earth is not moving. Let me pause right here and mention why they believe this.
00:38:37
Speaker
We know, of course, that the Earth is not stationary, but it's actually spinning around on its axis and orbiting around the sun. Well, just think about this for a second.
00:38:49
Speaker
It's spinning about a thousand miles per hour. Does it feel like it's spinning ah thousand miles per hour right now? Do you feel like you're moving ah thousand miles an hour?
00:39:04
Speaker
Think about this for a second. When was the last time you were in ah and a ride share service, right? You were in an Uber ride and the Uber driver was going way too fast. They were just driving like they wanted to die right now.
00:39:20
Speaker
Let's say they were going 90, 100 miles an hour. and you were just gripping to the side of the seat hoping that your car ride ends soon in in a safe way obviously that was only a hundred miles an hour that you were riding and you felt that why can't you feel the earth which is moving ah thousand miles an hour orders of magnitude faster Well, that's exactly the observation that the ancients made. It feels like the earth is stationary.
00:39:51
Speaker
If it were moving, it would be very fast and we would feel it and we don't feel it. That means the earth isn't moving. Now, there's a story that you can tell in physics as to why it is that we don't feel the earth moving.
00:40:05
Speaker
But let me just ask you this. Do you know what that story is? All I'm getting at here is that the ancients had good reasons for believing in what they believed in. They had actual arguments for them, right? So the fact that it's all factually wrong doesn't make it irrational in their context.
00:40:24
Speaker
But okay, let's continue here. Third belief, the moon, the planets, and the sun revolve around the earth in roughly 24-hour cycles. Okay, well if you believe the Earth is stationary and at the center of the universe, obviously everything else moves around it. So, sure. 4. The region below the Moon, the sublunar region, contains the four basic elements, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire.
00:40:51
Speaker
Belief number five, the region above the moon, the super lunar region, contains the fifth element, ether. We haven't talked about the fifth element yet. um Let me just say this.
00:41:04
Speaker
lot of people believed in its existence for a very long time. In fact, until the 1800s, people believed in ether. It's kind of a cool little factoid there. Belief number six, each of the elements has an essential nature which explains their behavior.
00:41:22
Speaker
Okay, now we're getting into teleological thinking. Remember, Aristotle believes that natural objects have an inner force that gets them to do what they're supposed to do.
00:41:35
Speaker
So the elements all have this inner source of change and robustness, this inner force that makes them do what they're supposed to do. This takes us to belief number seven. The essential nature of the elements is reflected in the way the elements move.
00:41:52
Speaker
So now we're going to get an explanation as to why the elements do what they do. And the way that Aristotle learns this is by looking at what they do. Let's start with Earth.
00:42:03
Speaker
The element Earth has a tendency to move towards the center of the universe. In other words, if you were to pick up some dirt and let it drop, where is it going to go? Well, it's going to go right to the ground because the ground is the planet and the planet is the center of the universe.
00:42:22
Speaker
Earth wants to go down towards the center of the universe. And so that explains why, say, rock or some dirt that you pick up always falls to the ground.
00:42:36
Speaker
Because that's where the Earth wants to go. That's where its inner power is taking it. The element of water also has a tendency to move toward the center of the universe.
00:42:48
Speaker
But this tendency is not as strong as that of Earth. So Earth and water want to go towards the center of the universe. They want to go down. But Earth wants it a little bit more.
00:43:01
Speaker
And so you can actually see this. You can do an experiment. Grab a cup of water, mix in some dirt, spin it around, and just wait a couple of minutes. What happens?
00:43:12
Speaker
The Earth sinks and the water is on top. The Earth is closer the center of the universe, the planet, than the water because the Earth has an inner force that draws it down that's stronger than that of water.
00:43:30
Speaker
And so every element does what it's supposed to do And all you have to do to see this is look at its behavior. The element air naturally moves away from the center of the universe, right? So air wants to move up.
00:43:45
Speaker
You can also experiment with this, grab that cup of water, get a clean one, don't get the one with dirt in it. And get a straw and put the straw into the water and blow. You make bubbles. Where do the bubbles go?
00:43:59
Speaker
Up. Because air wants to move away from the center of the universe. fire also tends to naturally move away from the center of the universe.
00:44:10
Speaker
This one we're not going to experiment with, just take my word for it or watch a video on YouTube, but fire rises. Ether tends to move in circles. You can also observe this according to the ancients because they believed that the planets were composed of ether.
00:44:29
Speaker
And what do the planets do? Well, They seem to move in a circular motion, and that is because they're made out of ether, which naturally moves in circles.
00:44:41
Speaker
That's Aristotle's physics. And let me just reiterate one point and then stress a second point. Let me reiterate to that these beliefs, sure, they're basically all factually incorrect.
00:44:56
Speaker
However, they are interconnected. They are internally consistent, right? They don't contradict each other. And in their own way, they're rational. There's arguments for them.
00:45:07
Speaker
This was simply the science of the ancients. And it's not in any way naive. It really is, you know, exceptional for the time. There was all sorts of ingenious arguments for various positions in physics.
00:45:22
Speaker
So that's one thing, right? Don't don't think it's naive. And now let me stress the the important fact here. um This is a way of looking at the universe that focuses on the inner force within elements.
00:45:38
Speaker
It focuses on, in other words, the final cause behind the elements. Every single natural substance in the universe has a purpose or function, and it does it naturally. It goes in that direction naturally.
00:45:54
Speaker
And we can see this, again, in every substance in the universe. The elements are easy though. They just, you know, do what they're supposed to do. Humans are a little bit more complicated.
00:46:06
Speaker
And so when we talk about the function of humans, we'll have to get more nuanced. But there is Aristotle's physics, a way of looking at the world in purpose-oriented way.
00:46:19
Speaker
That's teleological thinking.
Aristotle's Theology and Metaphysics
00:46:53
Speaker
While we're on the subject of Aristotle's physics, let's talk about God for a second. For Aristotle, God was kind of like a force of nature.
00:47:04
Speaker
So Aristotle was a kind of monotheist. But I want to tell you about Aristotle's views on God because it is so very unlike the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity and Islam.
00:47:20
Speaker
So let's talk about this for a second. And I think I want to begin with Aristotle's argument for God's existence. Aristotle believes that God is the efficient cause of the universe.
00:47:33
Speaker
In other words, if you want to know why the universe is the way it is right now, Well, it's because of God. So let me give you the details here. Here is the first observation that Aristotle makes.
00:47:46
Speaker
We see a world of processes and changes. Everything is always in flux, right? Not only in biology with the cycle of life and all that, but even in physics.
00:47:58
Speaker
Earth is always moving towards the center of the universe. So is water, air and fire always moving up. Ether always in circles.
00:48:08
Speaker
Something must keep all those things moving the way that they're moving. Something is keeping everything in play. And that something...
00:48:20
Speaker
isn't something that is itself constantly moving around and changing? Because if it were, a skeptic would just come around and ask, oh, so what keeps that moving in the way that it does?
00:48:33
Speaker
And you were to say, oh, that's that's X. Okay, well, what keeps X moving the way that it does? Or that's Y. Okay, what keeps going Y the way that it does? and on and on.
00:48:43
Speaker
So Aristotle sees that if something is going to be the source of all the change and process in the universe, it itself cannot be subject to process and change.
00:48:55
Speaker
In other words, there must be a prime mover that is itself not moving. And this eternal substance, this eternal thing, this God, is what sustains all the causal activity of the universe. In other words, this God keeps earth and water moving down and air and fire moving up, ether moving in circles, every natural object doing what it does.
00:49:26
Speaker
That's God. See, for Aristotle, God is like a force of nature, not a person. So that's Aristotle's reasoning as to why there must be a God.
00:49:38
Speaker
And let me give you some more details here because I really want to convince you that this is so not Judaism or Christianity or Islam. So according to Aristotle, it is the contemplation of the divine intellect that inspires the movement of the elements.
00:49:56
Speaker
In other words, the thoughts of God, the thoughts of the mind of the universe, That is what keeps everything in play.
00:50:07
Speaker
And so why does God do this? Why does God sustain the universe? Well, according to Aristotle, that is the final cause of the cosmos as a whole.
00:50:19
Speaker
It's for this. That's what God is for. That's what the universe is for. So it just must be this way. Otherwise, it wouldn't exist.
00:50:30
Speaker
And what does God think about? According to Aristotle, the object of thought of the mind of God is thought itself. In other words, God is thinking about intellect all day long.
00:50:45
Speaker
And that's what keeps everything in play. All the elements moving the way that they're moving. And the reason for this is that God cannot be thinking about anything other than thought.
00:50:59
Speaker
If he's thinking about an object or a person or something like that, the thoughts would be imperfect. So let me give you an example of what Aristotle might mean by this. Think about the Mona Lisa.
00:51:11
Speaker
Try to picture it in your head. There is simply no way that you are representing the Mona Lisa in your head perfectly. It's just not possible. Most of us don't have photographic memories, so we just can't reproduce it in a faithful way.
00:51:29
Speaker
That goes for essentially any object. Any thought of that object would be imperfect. It wouldn't be a perfect recreation of that object. Of course, God would not have imperfect thoughts, which means God wouldn't be thinking about objects and people and paintings and all that.
00:51:49
Speaker
The only thing, according to Aristotle, that God could be thinking about is thought itself. And so the divine only engages in thinking about intellect.
00:52:02
Speaker
All right, so you can see there that is totally not the Judeo-Christian Islamic God. Aristotle's God doesn't care about you.
00:52:14
Speaker
He doesn't listen to your prayers. He doesn't even think about you, right? It is not a person. If you read the Old Testament, Yahweh is a person with desires and he gets mad sometimes because his chosen people won't worship him in the right way.
00:52:31
Speaker
None of that is true of Aristotle's God. Aristotle's God is not even a person. It is more like a force of nature. So I just wanted to give you that that image of Aristotle's God as a very distinct form of monotheism.
Aristotle's Political Philosophy
00:52:48
Speaker
Let's chat for a little bit about Aristotle's politics very briefly, too briefly, Aristotle, just like in every other domain of inquiry, he sought to systematize thinking about politics.
00:53:01
Speaker
He basically went and studied all the different constitutions that were around him. And he basically decided there seems to be six categories of government or six forms of government.
00:53:15
Speaker
And then he later subdivides these even further, but basically just six categories of governance. I won't get into those categories just now and I'll explain why a little bit later.
00:53:29
Speaker
i will say though that he has some similarities with his teacher Plato. Aristotle believes that there is a need for wisdom in the ruling class. And that's no matter what kind of government it is. If it's a tyranny with with one ruler, or if it's some kind of republic with a legislative body, the people that are running things need to know what they're doing. They need to be wise.
00:53:54
Speaker
In fact, Aristotle says, the more challenging a position, the more wisdom required. So we should have some kind of process in place so that we would give the most difficult positions to the most competent people.
00:54:11
Speaker
That is roughly all that I want to say about Aristotle's politics and let me explain why very briefly. Basically Aristotle's way of looking at politics, it's not easy to adapt to our modern nation states and the main reason for this is that, well basically because of citizenship.
00:54:33
Speaker
In the ancient Greek city-states, citizenship was a very restricted kind of thing. Basically, if you were a citizen, it's virtually guaranteed that you are wealthy and educated. That's just what it took to be a citizen.
00:54:49
Speaker
But today we have birthright citizenship. Basically, for most people, if you're just born in a particular patch of dirt on the ground, you are a citizen of that patch of dirt on the ground.
00:55:02
Speaker
And so citizenship is just very different nowadays than it was in Aristotle's day. So we can't just take his ideas and and sort of, you know, implement them quite easily without changing them and in the process distorting them.
00:55:16
Speaker
I can say, however, that Aristotle has some very interesting ideas and it is worthwhile to get into his politics. And some scholars and some politically minded pundits sometimes take not all of Aristotle, but some of Aristotle.
00:55:36
Speaker
In other words, sometimes Aristotle is looked at in sort of piecemeal. And some people can really get some good talking points from this. So let me just... mention that briefly, liberals, for example, I've heard sometimes invoke Aristotle because Aristotle had this notion of a maximum proportion of inequality.
00:55:58
Speaker
In other words, out of all the citizens, the richest citizen should only be about five times richer than the poorest citizen. And so from a modern viewpoint, now, you know, maybe a liberal political philosopher or a liberal pundit sees this as justification for some sort of, you know, maybe a wealth tax or maybe a maximum wage, right? We have a minimum wage. What about a maximum wage?
00:56:29
Speaker
Some way. to limit the degree of inequality that is possible in the nation. So that is a liberal theme that you can kind of find in Aristotle, right? So, you know, based off something that Aristotle says, you can sort of get to a liberal policy. And some liberals do talk about Aristotle in that way.
00:56:51
Speaker
They use part of what he thought to defend some liberal position. Conservatives can play the very same game, by the way. Aristotle thought that private property is very important, essential, and we need to protect it.
00:57:05
Speaker
And that, of course, is a standard conservative talking point. So all that to say that both liberals and conservatives do tend to get at Aristotle in a piecemeal kind of fashion.
00:57:18
Speaker
But once again, his systematic way of looking at politics, not terribly adaptable to our modern situation. So I won't get into it any further. This would be well suited for a political philosophy class. And if and when I do end up teaching that, I will definitely, of course, cover Aristotle's politics.
Aristotle's Contributions to Logic and Ethics
00:57:39
Speaker
What I do want to move into here is finally his logic.
00:57:46
Speaker
Aristotle conceived of the study of validity, it is sometimes said, ex nihilo. That means out of nothing. Aristotle was the first to systematically inquire into the nature of validity.
00:58:02
Speaker
What is validity? Basically, an argument is valid when, if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. That is the premises sort of force the conclusion on you.
00:58:18
Speaker
And so that's what validity is. And although you wouldn't guess it maybe from hearing the definition, once you try to unpack this, you know, idea, you get a can of worms that's basically its own field of inquiry.
00:58:35
Speaker
In other words, you can spend an entire career focusing just on logic. And in fact, it is one of the classes that I teach most regularly, symbolic logic, which has a little bit of Aristotle in there.
00:58:48
Speaker
But logic as a field begins with Aristotle. And let me just say two more things here about logic and Aristotle. One is this.
00:58:59
Speaker
You can draw a straight-ish line from Aristotle's logic to the computing revolution in the 20th century. In other words, if you want to know the history of computation, some small but essential part of that begins with Aristotle.
00:59:20
Speaker
That's why, by the way, computer science programs to this very day, many of them require of their students that they take a course in symbolic logic, which is why i get the pleasure of teaching many computer science students in my classes.
00:59:35
Speaker
The second thing that I want to say is that logic is, I think, very much worth your time. It is a very challenging field of inquiry, but there is some benefit to it in sort of organizing your thoughts.
00:59:50
Speaker
And we will see this later um when we come to the Stoics. So we'll talk about that when we get to them. But logic is important. Again, challenging, but a worthwhile endeavor if you ever want to take a deep dive into it.
01:00:45
Speaker
In the time that we have left, I want to talk about Aristotle's systematization of the field of ethics. So just as with logic, Aristotle provided a framework to guide the inquiry into ethics.
01:01:01
Speaker
In other words, ethics after Aristotle was roughly what Aristotle thought it should be. I think this is a good opportunity for us to review some key terms in the field of ethics, ancient ethics.
01:01:17
Speaker
And this will structure how we talk about the different schools of philosophy that are coming up. So let me remind you here of the way that the ancients thought about ethics.
01:01:28
Speaker
The starting point for them is the question, how should I live? Maybe a better way to phrase that is, what should my life be like?
01:01:42
Speaker
So they were clearly in pursuit of the good life. And let me... just go ahead and mention this point just so that it's very clear in your head they were conceiving of their life as a whole sometimes i hear people talk about you know wanting a good life but they seem to be stressing just some temporary time slice of their life in other words they say well my life would be perfect if I become the CEO of this company, or if I get this degree, or if I marry this woman or man,
01:02:20
Speaker
Well, that's just one event in your life. That's not your life as a whole. But that's not what the ancients want. That's not what Aristotle wants. The goal for Aristotle is for us to be able to consider our life as a whole, wall to wall, and be pleased with it.
01:02:40
Speaker
That's the good life. You want to life where you can be proud of every single moment in it. Even the bad ones, as long as it took you towards something positive.
01:02:51
Speaker
As long as in the end, you fulfilled your function, you did your purpose, right? Maybe one good way to put it is, as long as in the end, you reach your potential.
01:03:04
Speaker
Okay, so let's talk about some ethical concepts that Aristotle went ahead and clarified for us. Let's talk about goods. Lots of things are good, right? you know Pizza, vacation, all these things are good.
01:03:17
Speaker
But clearly, if we want the good life, we're looking for the highest good. And so what is the highest good? According to Aristotle, the highest good has two different elements.
01:03:30
Speaker
It's a final good and it's a complete good. Okay, so what do these mean? Well, a final good is a good that is held securely once it is acquired.
01:03:43
Speaker
So in other words, it's something that you can achieve and maintain for yourself. So let me give you an example of what is not a final good. Hopefully that will help.
01:03:57
Speaker
But let's think about honor. Sure, you can do a bunch of things that will lead people to honor you. That's correct. But being honored still needs someone else, right? It's not just you. You still need someone else for that.
01:04:12
Speaker
In other words, it depends on having people around that can honor you. But what Aristotle means by final good is that you don't need someone else to maintain it.
01:04:23
Speaker
You can achieve this good and maintain it all by yourself. right So that's what a final good is. And so the highest good would be this kind of final good. Now let's talk about complete goods.
01:04:37
Speaker
There's another label for this in contemporary ethics, intrinsic goods. I also have heard it called, what, non-instrumentally good goods.
01:04:48
Speaker
That's way too clunky for me. I'll call these complete goods or intrinsic goods. Basically, these kinds of goods are the goods that are pursued for their own sake, right? Not for the sake of something else.
01:05:02
Speaker
So let me give you an example of something that is not a complete good or not an intrinsic good. Money. For most people, money is obviously a good, but it's not a complete good because you don't want the money for the sake of the money.
01:05:19
Speaker
Like no one collects money and just kind of stares at it and says, oh I like it. You know, i just wanted this money to have it. Most of us, I think, want money so that we can spend it.
01:05:32
Speaker
It's for the purpose of something else, right? Maybe it's for the purpose of more money. But even in that case, right, the money is only instrumentally good. Most of us, though, we want to go on vacations and buy pizza and buy clothes or whatever.
01:05:47
Speaker
So money is an extrinsic good or a non-complete good. You want it for the sake of what it can get you. But a complete good is good for its own sake. You want it for its own sake.
01:06:00
Speaker
And that's what Aristotle thinks the highest good would be. The highest good is a final good and a complete good. Okay, so what is the highest good? Well, it's not pleasure.
01:06:14
Speaker
Pleasure has a lack of finality to it, right? you You enjoy something and it's nice, but then it goes away, right? That's not something you can achieve and maintain for yourself. Remember, it's got to be a final good. You have to be able to keep it somehow.
01:06:29
Speaker
You can hold it securely in some sense. But pleasure, you know, it comes in and it goes. it's like It's not very permanent, right? Is it honor? No, we already talked about honor. Is it wealth? No, we already talked about money.
01:06:41
Speaker
Is it the immortality of the soul? Well, actually, Aristotle didn't think of souls that the way that we do today. Many people today, if they believe in a soul, they believe it will exist after you die.
01:06:55
Speaker
Aristotle didn't think that. So it's not the immortality of the soul either. That's the highest good. It's not Plato's conception of the good where the good is in some other dimension.
01:07:07
Speaker
None of these are the highest good for Aristotle. What is the highest good? Eudaimonia. Of course, we've been using this term throughout the course.
01:07:18
Speaker
It is typically translated as happiness or thriving or flourishing and sometimes even well-being. So many translations here, but you sort of get the idea, right? Some sort of good state of existence, right? So some kind of flourishing state.
01:07:38
Speaker
You are being your best, right? Aristotle points out that most schools of philosophy, most other thinkers agree that eudaimonia is the highest good.
01:07:52
Speaker
That is our final cause, in other words, to use terminology we learned earlier. But Aristotle notices that all the different schools and many different thinkers They mostly just disagree on what happiness is.
01:08:06
Speaker
So they agree that happiness is the highest good, but they don't agree on what happiness is. And to just take two examples, Plato, maybe he seems to have thought that happiness is contemplating the forms.
01:08:20
Speaker
If you remember what we talked about on the lessons on Plato, Well, maybe that's not your idea of happiness, and maybe you don't agree with Plato. We also talked about the cynics. Maybe they think that self-sufficiency is happiness, taking care of everything that you need all by yourself.
01:08:37
Speaker
But a lot of people hear what the cynic life is like, and they think to themselves, no, thank you. So what is happiness then for Aristotle? What's another account of happiness that maybe we might like a little bit more?
01:08:49
Speaker
Well, let me give you a couple of the elements here for Aristotle, so we can kind of piece together what eudaimonia is for him. First of all, happiness involves fulfilling your purpose, right? It's got to be tied to the notion of a final cause. It's got to be performing your function.
01:09:09
Speaker
Okay, so what is our function? Well, given that we are naturally political animals with the capacity for reasoning, Fulfilling our function entails couple of different things. Let's start with the capacity for reasoning.
01:09:23
Speaker
We're all born with an ability for reasoning, but it isn't fully developed. Aristotle thinks we need to really hone in our rational capacity, foster rational attitude, and that takes time and training.
01:09:40
Speaker
So that's the first thing. We have to do that. And then now let's go back to the political animal portion of it. We have to get competent in our communities. We have to be competent on social matters.
01:09:55
Speaker
We need to, in other words, be able to flourish within our community. And so let me kind of put these together. We have to develop practical wisdom, right? That rational attitude so that we can be competent within our communities so that we can flourish in our communities.
01:10:16
Speaker
Let me put this one other way. We need to get our mind in an orderly state. We need to clean up our mind and get ourselves to our highest potential so that once we fix ourselves within, right? Once we fix our minds, we can go out and really flourish in our community.
01:10:37
Speaker
That's happiness for Aristotle. It's building yourself up. so that you can reach your potential so that you can then be aware that you've reached your potential and then you feel happiness that's eudaimonia in a nutshell maybe i can say this in even more down-to-earth terms eudaimonia is using your practical reasoning to reach your potential within your social world.
Aristotle's Views on Practical Reasoning and Virtue
01:11:07
Speaker
And then by the way, delighting in the awareness that you've reached your potential. Maybe the pithiest way I can say it is like this. You gotta be your best self.
01:11:20
Speaker
That's eudaimonia.
01:11:38
Speaker
Okay, so let's say that you have heard the Aristotelian pitch and you are sold. You want to buy the Aristotle package for Eudaimonia.
01:11:49
Speaker
Okay, cool. You place your order, you wait four to five business days, you get a big old box at home and you open it up. You're ready for the Aristotle system. What's in this system?
01:12:02
Speaker
Well, you open up the box and the very first thing that you get is more boxes. So one box labeled number one says practical reasoning. So the very first thing you're going have to do as Aristotelian is to develop your capacity for practical reasoning.
01:12:22
Speaker
What is practical reasoning? Well, basically, you have to figure out what the right thing to do is in social matters. Let me give you an example of ah of a social matter. And you can actually come up with many, many of these. But I have a neighbor and they're not very clean.
01:12:42
Speaker
And sometimes their trash ends up on my property. And so here's an example of me not being very good at practical reasoning.
01:12:55
Speaker
I went up to him, i was a little heated, i didn't think about what I was going to say, and it totally came out wrong, and it didn't help my cause, right? and There's still trash on my side of that of the fence.
01:13:09
Speaker
So that was me not being very good at practical reasoning. If you are going to be good at it, you need to think about what to say. Think about how to say it.
01:13:21
Speaker
Think about when to say it. Think about how to feel about it so that it comes out right. Think about who to say it to. Think about all the different things that might affect how it is that the situation turns out.
01:13:36
Speaker
If you do that and and then engage in the right actions, now you're good at practical reasoning. So this ability of ours is natural. We all are born with this capacity to think about what it is that we should do in social situations.
01:13:52
Speaker
What should I do at work? What should I do with this bully at school? What should I do with XYZ, right? All of us have this capacity, but we have to hone it in and we have to develop it. And unfortunately, there is no formula. There's no set of rules that can just, you know, list off. Okay, do this, do this.
01:14:09
Speaker
There's no algorithm. you just have to develop the ability to think well about social matters you have to just foster that skill and just so you can see the degree of complexity here virtuous behavior right behavior that moves you towards eudaimonia that's going to vary between people because our social roles are different So given our different aims and our different goals, given our different abilities, given our different situations, given our different natural talents in this positions, given all these things, there is no recipe that you can just, you know, follow to a t You need a flexible, sharp mind, one that is tuned towards being good in social situations.
01:15:03
Speaker
Practice is key. Aristotle thinks you should engage in practical reasoning repeatedly every day. Make it a habit. And that way, when the situation arises that requires practical thinking, you jump right into it, right?
01:15:19
Speaker
Most of us sometimes act automatically without thinking. But Aristotle says you have to train yourself not to act automatically, but to automatically put yourself into practical reasoning mode.
01:15:32
Speaker
As soon as you see a social dilemma arising, put yourself in a situation okay what's going on what do i got to do how should i do it how should i feel that is the goal and just so you can see what arizona means by this this is not only in your daily life that you should engage in this in her book arizona's way edith hall says that if arizona were around today he would likely watch you know quality movies and television series all the time Because, well, for many reasons, for starters, you can reference them when you're teaching ethics, so that'd be very useful.
01:16:10
Speaker
But here's the real gold behind many movies and television series. They're great practice in practical reasoning, right? So think about whatever your favorite movie is where there's lots of social dilemmas or your favorite series.
01:16:26
Speaker
I, for example, love The Walking Dead and you should count your lucky stars. And this is the first time that I mentioned The Walking Dead. Otherwise, this whole course would just be The Walking Dead.
01:16:38
Speaker
But in that show, the characters are constantly put into situations where it's not clear what it is that they should do. And that's a good opportunity to, you know, pause the show, think about what is it that they should do and how should they do it?
01:16:54
Speaker
And how should the characters feel about it? And when should they do it? And all these different things that Aristotle asks us to think about. So not only then are you engaging in practical reasoning throughout your day, but when you get home and you're going to enjoy some leisurely activities, even your leisurely activities like watching The Walking Dead would have a little bit of practice in practical reasoning.
01:17:20
Speaker
That's the way to get really good at practical reasoning and gaining practical wisdom.
01:17:27
Speaker
All right, so what else is in the box? There's another box labeled intellectual development. For Aristotle, living well, living virtuously, reaching eudaimonia, simply requires intellectual development.
01:17:41
Speaker
And just think about it this way. no matter what it is that your goal is your function is knowing more about the world knowing more things is obviously going to help you it can only be a leg up to understand more about the world because you can use those lessons to help you get to your goals
01:18:05
Speaker
What else is in the Aristotelian package? Well, there's a little box called training of the passions. So virtue has an effective component. Let me pause right here.
01:18:18
Speaker
I sometimes use the word affect or affective. because that's the word that's usually used in the neuroscientific literature to mean something like emotions, mood, feeling, right? So when I say affect, just think to yourself, emotions, mood, feeling, right? So When I say virtue has an effective component, what I mean by that is that to be a good person, to be a virtuous person, to live the good life, according to Aristotle, means to a certain extent, training your passions in the right way.
01:18:54
Speaker
Let me give you an example of what Aristotle means by this. Think of two people. One of them is actually virtuous, right? One of them is is living their best life. And the other is just, i don't know, decent, right?
01:19:06
Speaker
And they both, for the time at least, have the same aim. They're both trying to resist a delicious, rich chocolate cake that's standing right in front of them. Well, the virtuous person, according to Aristotle, is one that has trained their affect, right? Their emotions, their mood, their feelings.
01:19:24
Speaker
So they're going to say no to the chocolate cake and they're going to not feel bad about it. They're going to be proud of themselves, actually, for having said no and being able to resist.
01:19:35
Speaker
But the other person, they're not virtuous, right? They're not actually living their best life. Their emotions, in other words, are completely untrained. And so they also say no to the rich chocolate cake, but they're kind of beating themselves up about it the whole time.
01:19:53
Speaker
They're regretting it. And so that really encapsulates what Aristotle means. The virtuous person, the one that's living the good life, has their feelings trained too. It's not just their behavior.
01:20:06
Speaker
It's not just their practical wisdom, but also their feelings, right? So that's a part of it.
01:20:13
Speaker
the next box inside the aristotelian package is labeled community because as we've already mentioned aristotle believes that humans are by nature political animals we naturally tend to group up which means that happiness is only possible within a properly suited political community notice by the way that this is what the pythagoreans were saying there is that uh inheritance of wisdom from the past In any case, Aristotle's ethics is going to include a discussion about how it is that we should act within the context of our society.
01:20:52
Speaker
You don't flourish in a vacuum. You flourish in your community. And so you have to develop the right qualities so that you can flourish within your specific community.
01:21:06
Speaker
The next item in the package is labeled telos. Telos, a Greek term, of course, means an agent's aiming at something.
01:21:18
Speaker
So let me give you an example here. Remember that sort of at heart, our function is to live rationally, to live virtuously, live in a way that's going to get us to reach our goals.
01:21:34
Speaker
But of course, nature only gives you the aptitude for living virtuously, right? You have to actually cultivate your rational attitude and your intellect and your emotional training for yourself. You have to work on that yourself.
01:21:49
Speaker
Moreover, you have to figure out how it is that you're going to thrive within your community. Because as I mentioned earlier, living virtuously takes different forms for different people.
01:22:01
Speaker
And so we actually have to discover for ourselves what our role to play is, our vocation, our aim. And then you have to learn how to excel in that.
01:22:14
Speaker
You have to figure out what your goal is and then work towards it. So once you have your goal, that's your telos. Now you're aiming at something. So you need to figure out that too.
01:22:28
Speaker
So those are the items in the Aristotelian package. We do have, oh, what's this? One more thing. There is a index card here. That's interesting. And it says on one side, nice to have.
01:22:41
Speaker
And you flip it over and it says external goods. So what does Aristotle mean by this? Well, Aristotle has a preoccupation with talking about external goods. And external goods are some things that we've already mentioned, but it's basically things like wealth and being well-born, right? You're born kind of to a wealthy family.
01:23:04
Speaker
What does Aristotle mean by external goods are nice to have? Well, unlike other thinkers that we have covered and will cover, for Aristotle, if you want to achieve virtue, if you want to live the good life and be happy, it's going to be a huge leg up. It's going to be very, very helpful to have a couple of external goods.
01:23:31
Speaker
For example, you know it would be nice? Being wealthy, being born to a wealthy family. You know what else would be nice? Having political connections. You know what else would be nice?
01:23:42
Speaker
Being attractive. All of these things, whether we like it or not, help us thrive in our society. And Aristotle just sees it as obvious that if you are, for example, from a low socioeconomic household, or you don't have any family or friends, or maybe even if you're you know very ugly, you're going have a harder time flourishing.
01:24:06
Speaker
Maybe it's even unlikely that you'll flourish. And so here, Aristotle is going against Socrates and Plato and the Cynics and the Stoics. We haven't covered them yet, but we will.
01:24:19
Speaker
All of these thinkers think that virtue is sufficient for happiness, right? If you just live well in the way that they've recommended that you live, you will be happy.
01:24:32
Speaker
Aristotle says, i don't know about that. You should live well, of course, but clearly being wealthy and being politically connected and being attractive, these things are going to help too And so Aristotle here is at odds with many other thinkers.
01:24:49
Speaker
But think about it for yourself. Doesn't it seem like being wealthy and being good looking will be advantages for you? Something to think about.
01:25:00
Speaker
So that's what's in the Aristotelian package. And what we'll do in the next lesson is we'll unpack each of these boxes so we can see what's inside and figure out how to live like an Aristotelian.
01:25:14
Speaker
So that was, let's consider this lesson a bit of a preface. And now we're ready to move into Aristotle's ethics proper, which is, by the way, an account of, well...
01:25:29
Speaker
How to make yourself excellent. That's what's next.