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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:49
The Truth About Aristotle
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Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Let's take a tour.
Let's take a break from the trials and tribulations of the modern world.
Take a stroll down memory lane, about 2,500 years or so, and take a tour through the cerebellum of a man who's been called the smartest person who ever lived.
This would be one Aristotle, one of the great philosophers, one of the great three philosophers of Ancient Athens.
Socrates taught Plato.
Plato taught Aristotle.
Aristotle turned on Plato like a cornered wombat.
And history and philosophy have never been the same.
If you understand Aristotle, and we'll talk a little bit about Plato as well, but if you understand Aristotle, the modern world pops into focus and everything makes sense.
And you'll realize there's very little that is new under the sun or the moon.
So yeah, Strong arguments that Aristotle was the smartest person who ever lived.
He was considered so dominant in philosophy that for centuries in the Middle Ages, he was just referred to as the philosopher.
Not a philosopher, the philosopher.
In Arabic philosophy, he's called the first teacher.
He is also known as the master.
He invented logic.
Hey, what did you do today?
Well, I didn't fall down the stairs.
Aristotle, on one of the days of his life, could say, hey, I invented logic, and that's not a bad thing to do.
His scientific classifications, he was an obsessive classifier of organic material, of plants and of animals.
His scientific classifications are still more or less in use today, quite unlike a lot of other things from 2,500 years ago, like slavery.
And Aristotle's thinking, he is a rabid and rampant and foundational empiricist.
Empiricist, which means the senses rule.
In any conflict between concepts and the senses, Aristotle in general falls to the senses.
You can't just have imaginations in your mind and say that they're true when the evidence of the senses repudiates them.
So he is an empiricist, unlike Plato who was more of a mystic.
Aristotle's thinking has always been the strongest line of defense against creepy, irrational mysticism and subjectivism and collectivism as a whole, for reasons that we'll get into.
He promotes the authority of the individual.
You are fully competent to process reality, to think for yourself, to understand the universe.
With Aristotle, you don't need external authority to tell you what is true, what is right, what is moral, what is good.
You can reason it through in conversation with others, in conversation with yourself.
You can reason through and figure out for yourself the truths that are necessary for the basic equation identified by Nietzsche and promoted by Socrates.
Reason equals virtue, equals happiness.
And happiness for Aristotle was the ultimate goal of philosophy.
As he said, it's the one thing.
that we try to get, not for the sake of something else, but for its own sake.
You work out to look good, but your happiness is an end unto itself, and he is one of the greatest ways in which you can achieve that state.
So, a little bit about his life and times.
Aristotle was born 384 BC in Stagira, which is a small town in northern Greece that used to be a seaport.
Aristotle's father was the court physician to the Macedonian king and died, tragically, when Aristotle was a young boy.
And it's interesting.
When you look through history, the number of people who achieved greatness, who did so in the absence of parental overseeing, is really fascinating.
It's almost like if you take the lid off Parental overseeing?
Then there's no limit to what you can achieve.
Maybe parents are too cautious, maybe they remember you as a baby pooping himself or whatever, but if you want to achieve great things and you look in history, it has a lot to do with being free of parental constraints.
Because his mother is also believed to have died when Aristotle was young.
Now, Aristotle's father being a court physician, it's an interesting fact of history, until about the 19th century, You were worse off to go to a doctor than to just cross your fingers, pray to the gods, and let nature take its course.
Now, when Aristotle's father died, Aristotle's older sister's husband became his guardian.
When Aristotle turned 17, he was sent to Athens to pursue higher education.
I guess people realized he was young, he was pretty, and he was oh-so-smart.
Once he was there, he enrolled in Plato's Academy and was personally taught by Plato himself.
And Plato, of course, himself had been taught by Socrates and Plato had gone through the visceral and literal heartbreak of seeing the man he loved the most in all the world, Socrates, put to death by the mob for the two sins and the two crimes which philosophers throughout history are continually accused of by the muggles of the present.
Number one, Socrates was accused of not believing In the gods of the city.
Impiety.
And this didn't just mean towards gods, but to the most valued ideals of the time.
Which, you know, coincidentally happened to be subjugation to the authority of the state and of the priesthood.
So Socrates was charged with impiety, not believing in the gods of the city.
And Socrates was also charged with corrupting the young.
You see, teaching young people to think for themselves has been a great crime of philosophers throughout history.
It's in fact why we progress as a species but nonetheless it is not comfortable for people in authority at the time for reasons that I'm sure you can appreciate if not downright viscerally perceive.
Now Aristotle and Plato were close friends for 20 years until Plato's death.
Now, due to significant philosophical disagreements between them, Aristotle was not offered directorship of the Academy.
Now, it has been said, and I think with some accuracy, that every human being, fundamentally, is either Aristotelian or Platonic, and we'll get into why in a few minutes, but it is significant to me that Aristotle was able to disagree with Plato of their friendship.
Now, they didn't disagree on moral.
Morals, really, they disagreed on metaphysics and in particular concept formation, which sounds really dull, but it's really, really essential in human freedom.
So they stayed friends, although there was some friction.
And as Aristotle famously said, at least famously to me, he said, we love our friends, but we must love the truth even more.
So instead, Aristotle accepted the invitation of his friend Hermaeus.
He's the king of Artarnius, and he was going to stay in the king's court, and this is actually in modern Turkey.
And there Aristotle met and married his first wife, Pythias, niece of the king, and fathered his first daughter, also named Pythias.
And it was a pretty tragic, actually.
Aristotle Aristotle helped His king, his friend the king, negotiated an alliance with Macedonia which angered the Persian king who had Pythias treacherously arrested and put to death around 341 BC.
So this was the love of his life and she was caught up in political intrigue and she was unjustly of course arrested, kidnapped basically by agents of the state and put to death.
Aristotle wrote only one poem that has survived through the ages, and it was to his late wife's memory after she was brutally murdered, and it was called An Ode to Virtue.
And it's hard to understand ancient philosophy, and in fact modern philosophy as well, without understanding two things.
Number one, It's always been dangerous to be a philosopher.
You challenge the fundamental delusions of the time and there is deep gold in every gap between truth and delusion and philosophers close that gap which costs a lot of people a lot of money and power in their personal lives, in their familial lives, in their political lives, in their business lives.
So by guarding the virtues and freedoms of the future Philosophers necessarily, and as a statue casts a shadow, they necessarily harm the interests of immoral people in the present, who then react as immoral people who want to react with rage and condemnation, rather than with reason and acceptance.
So, it's very dangerous to be a philosopher, and that danger is something that philosophers have to live with.
And it was more dangerous, of course, 2,500 years ago, even than it is now.
Plato tried to get involved in politics, ended up in Syracuse being kidnapped and sold into slavery, barely escaped with his life.
Really dangerous time!
And Aristotle's wife?
Kidnapped and murdered by a political enemy.
That's number one.
And number two, of course, is that being an atheist was functionally impossible for most of the people in the ancient world, and impiety was a grave crime, and in many cases a capital crime, and you would be put to death for it.
So when we hear Philosophers talk about politics.
We don't actually know what they thought in their heart of hearts.
You know, like that old saying in Russia that the only truth you can tell is to your beloved wife under the covers because everyone else is listening and reporting under Soviet.
So we don't know what philosophers really thought about politics, but we do know what they would be punished for if they spoke out, which would be, you know, minimizing state power and so on.
And number two, since, of course, disobedience to the gods or impiety or skepticism or atheism, materialism, was a punishable offense, we don't really know what they thought about the gods.
You know, if a bunch of people in Soviet Russia are cheering Stalin, we don't really know If they're communists or love Stalin, we just know that they're in an environment where they'll be punished if they don't make such an outward show.
So that's important to remember.
So in 338 BC, Aristotle returned home to Macedonia and he became the official tutor to the son of King Philip II, a gestausel-haired thirteen-year-old boy who, as a man, would be called Alexander the Great.
And they taught him for a couple of years.
It is sort of the intersection of two great personages in history.
It doesn't seem to have left a huge effect or impact on either One of them.
We don't really know much about the content of what Aristotle taught to the future Alexander the Great, but it would be interesting to know what political advice Aristotle gave to his young protege.
There's a fragment of a letter in which the philosopher tells Alexander he ought to be the leader of the Greeks, but the master of the barbarians and There is indications that Alexander the Great, in his conquering of the known universe at the time, would collect scientific specimens to send them back to Aristotle, which does indicate a certain amount of affection between them.
And, of course, Aristotle said that the ideal city-states were 100,000 people or less.
He wasn't into the psychotic, mass, horrifying dictatorship that Plato was into, which I assume was the scar tissue of democracy plunging its knife or its hemlock into the heart and throat of Socrates' mentor.
But we don't know.
But Alexander the Great turned out to be a great conqueror, not necessarily a fantastically great ruler.
So the king and his son seemed to hold Aristotle and philosophy in very high esteem, paid the genius well for his instruction.
335 BC, Aristotle returns to Athens after Alexander had succeeded his father as king and conquered the city.
See, that's a pretty good way to come home is, you know, second behind the conquering hero.
Now, Plato's Academy, now run by Xenocrates, was still the leading influence on Greek thinking.
Alexander the Great gave Aristotle permission to start his own school in Athens, which was called the Lyceum.
And actually, as an alien, Aristotle couldn't own property in Athens, so he rented space in a place called the Lyceum, which was a former wrestling school outside the city.
And I always kind of like the idea of these guys wandering around talking about truth and virtue amid the aromatic sweat of physical combatants in the past.
Now I, of course, studied Aristotle for many years and I have followed his lead and his ideas and his habits as much as reasonably possible.
The Lyceum, Aristotle's academy, was not a private club.
Like the Academy, many of the lectures in Aristotle's school were open to the public and free of charge.
So he'd sort of spend half the day talking with paying students about very advanced topics and then he would open up the school for anybody who was interested in coming in and talking about philosophy and this idea that you can bring philosophy to people as a whole without charging them up front and you know you can donate if you want.
That's sort of been the model for what it is I've been doing for the past I guess 30 years as a whole and 10 years online.
So by 326 BC, Alexander had become master of an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indus and included Libya and Egypt.
The man had gotten around on quite bladed feet.
And as I mentioned during his campaigns, Alexander arranged for these specimens to be sent back from all parts of Greece and Asia Minor.
Now for the most part, Aristotle spent the remainder of his life working as a teacher, researcher, lecturer and writer at his Lyceum in Athens.
He taught his students while walking around the school gardens.
His students were nicknamed the Peripatetics, the people who traveled about.
It's philosophy on the move.
And people say to me, why do you stand or walk during your shows?
It's like, well, A, sitting is as bad for you as smoking, and B, I try to emulate the people who've done really well in my field as much as humanly possible.
People say, why are you so passionate in your speeches?
Because I've read my Aristotle, my friends.
So, what was he all about?
Well, the students at Aristotle's Lyceum researched and wrote about just about every conceivable human mental discipline at the time.
Science, math, philosophy, politics, oratory, with particular emphasis on the philosophy of aesthetics or art.
And actually, Aristotle wrote a manual on how to write stories that holds up under time and I've used in my own novelistic and playwriting endeavors.
So, the students wrote their arguments in manuscripts which were collected by the Lyceum, creating one of the first great libraries in history.
Now, Aristotle soon began a romance with a woman named Herpilus, who grew up in his hometown of Stagira.
Some reports claim that she was his slave who had been given to him by the Macedonian court.
If this is true, presumably he eventually freed and married her.
I know, I know.
It's shocking, of course, and appalling to realize and recognize that both Plato and Aristotle defended slavery, but if you spoke out against slavery, you would have been put to death.
And we all do have to find ways to get the truth out in the carved channels of coercion that we all must exist in if we are to survive and to speak to the world.
So if you pay your taxes, if you're against taxation and you pay your taxes, if you're against foreign wars but don't chain yourself to tanks, then you can understand why these guys did not oppose the foundational wealth of the aristocracy who ran the society at the time.
Of course, one of the great tragedies of Ancient Greece is because they ran slaves, they never had an Industrial Revolution.
Because labor-saving devices lower the value of slaves.
So if you've bought a whole bunch of slaves, you're not about to invent combine harvesters or spinning jennies or anything that is going to enhance the value.
of free labor and lower the value of slaves.
It's like buying a horse and carriage and then investing feverishly in the development of the car.
If the car wins, the horse and carriage kinda loses.
Now Aristotle had many children with her, including one son named Nicomachus, after Aristotle's own father, which does of course indicate some significant affection with Aristotle towards his own father.
Nicomachus ended up editing Aristotle's primary book on ethics, which again shows significant affection and respect.
One of Aristotle's most famous philosophical works is Nicomachean Ethics, believed to be a tribute to his son, and also edited by his son, which indicates some significant affection.
Aristotle's works as a whole are very systematic, very sequential, very logical.
Plato was a notorious rambler and wanderer.
Perhaps I've got his curse, I'm not sure.
But they're not as polished as Plato's.
But then Aristotle's works were lost, and most of his work that has come through is not from his own pen, it's just lecture notes from his students or lecture notes for himself.
So it's stuff, it's blueprints, it's stuff really in the process of being worked out.
You know, Plato's dialogues, they jump from topic to topic, they're not systemic.
And they move very easily between scientific and philosophical disciplines and so on.
Aristotle basically invented not just logic, but the concept of intellectual discipline, of making your argument progress forward step by step until you reach either your deductive or inductive goal of validity.
Now during Aristotle's time at the Lyceum, his relationship with Alexander the Great I guess you could say it cooled just a little bit.
Alexander, you know, power corrupts.
He became more and more narcissistic, megalomaniacal, and then eventually he said, I am divine!
And demanded that the Greeks prostrate themselves before him in adoration as a living man god.
And, well, some people felt this was not entirely empirical, to put it mildly.
Aristotle's nephew.
Calisthenes was, he'd been appointed historian of Alexander's Asiatic expedition after Aristotle recommended him to Alexander.
And he actually opposed this growing and dangerous I am God aspect of Alexander's fragmenting personality.
And not always a great idea to oppose the God-King of a thousand swords for his heroism in opposing Alexander.
Calisthenes was falsely implicated in some nefarious plot and executed.
And again, as a philosopher, you see that kind of stuff, smoking craters, where loved ones used to be because of state power.
That is going to affect how you talk about the state.
So in 323 BC, Alexander the Great died suddenly.
And as a result, the pro-Macedonian government was overthrown.
And in the resulting eruption of anti-Macedonian bigotry, Aristotle was formally charged with impiety, and history tried to repeat itself by doing to Aristotle what it had already done to Socrates.
Aristotle, of course knowing what had happened to Socrates, claimed that he refused to allow Athens to sin against philosophy twice, and he fled Now, I did a video years ago on the trial and death of Socrates.
It's a video series.
I highly recommend that you watch it.
It's very important.
I won't delve into it here, but it's part of the backdrop to what I'm talking about here.
And his will, actually, was preserved in the writing of Diogenes Laertes.
He provided for his daughter, Pythias, and his son, Nicomachus, as well as for his slaves.
So he made sure that his slaves were well taken care of.
He ended up in Chelsis on the island of Euboea.
He remained until his death in 322 BC, got a stomach ailment and keeled over.
Now, his works were hidden after his death because, of course, he was a persona non grata.
He'd been charged with impiety.
He was considered to be an enemy of the state and civilization and society and all that.
But interest was revived in the first century BC.
Theophracists had kept Aristotle's manuscripts after His master's death in 322.
But then when Theostrophus died, Aristotle's works were hidden away and not brought to light again until the beginning of the first century BC.
After the fall of Rome, Aristotle was still read in Byzantium and became well-known in the Islamic world, where thinkers like Avicenna, Averroes, and the Jewish scholar Maimonides revitalized Aristotle's logical and scientific methodology.
The Islamic world didn't always look exactly like it does right now.
It was, of course, without the Islamic world in the ancient world.
It's very doubtful that any of Aristotle's works would have survived the Dark Ages and remained the foundation of the revitalization of humanism and secularism to some degree, and empiricism, which marked the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, which led, of course, to wonderful things like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Modern Age, and all that we treasure from it.
In the 13th century, Aristotle was reintroduced to the West through the work of Albertus Magnus, and especially the theologian Thomas Aquinas, whose attempted synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought provided a foundation for late medieval Catholic philosophy, theology, and science.
It has been said, this sort of synthesis is where the friction between seemingly opposing ideals is where the great sparks of the future are lit in the mind of man.
One of the great things about Aristotle was the degree to which he tried to take the platonic idea of perfect forms, which we'll get to, it's kind of a drug trip, the platonic idea of perfect forms and tried to unite it with common sense.
And that created a lot of his great intellectual progress.
When Christian theology ran into Aristotle, the attempt, you couldn't just deny Aristotle, I mean, it would be ridiculous, right?
So the attempt to fuse it produced some significant advances in Western thought.
All serious thinkers have to wrestle with Aristotelian arguments, particularly with regards to his opposition to Platonic forms.
Aristotle was a prolific writer, but few of his manuscripts very tragically have survived into the modern age.
He modelled his early output after Plato's Socratic dialogues.
The titles are known, but most of the content was lost.
Now, for those who don't know, very briefly, Socratic Dialogues is something that Socrates was famous for.
Although, as I mentioned, Socrates didn't write anything down, but Plato wrote down Socratic Dialogues.
And Socratic Dialogues take the form of a humble man of wisdom confessing that he doesn't know what truth is, what justice is, what virtue is, what love is.
And then some overconfident, semi-buffoon sophist comes in and says, Well, I know what these things are!
No problem!
I can't believe you're so ignorant!
And then Socrates asks these pointed questions which quickly cause these sophist pseudo-arguments to unravel, collapse like a house of cards, and I guess eventually got so many of them so angry that they started pressing for his death because he was interfering with their capacity to teach people how to lie for good coin.
So, as I mentioned, the ostracists kept Aristotle's manuscripts after Aristotle's death.
When he died, Aristotle's works hidden away, beginning of the first century BCE, they were then taken to Rome and edited by a man named Andronicus.
The texts that survive today come from Andronicus's revisions and most likely do not represent works that Aristotle himself prepared for publication.
Aristotle's surviving works are about a million words, probably only about 20% of his total writing during the course of his life.
And this, to me, is like staggering burning of the Library of Alexandra kind of heartbreak.
So these books are his surviving works, mostly lecture notes organized by other people rather than the literature that he penned himself.
And his last writings were apparently of far better quality, and I would imagine much more systematically organized and revised and finalized.
The Roman philosopher Cicero said that, quote, if Plato's prose was silver, Aristotle's was a flowing river of gold.
It's sort of like having only the Coles notes instead of Shakespeare's play.
So much has been lost.
And from the time of his death until the rediscovery of these writings, Aristotle was best known for the works that today are known as the Lost Writings.
Why is this so agonizing for me?
Well, Plato was such an incredible writer, such a wonderful prose stylist.
that his influence was vastly out of proportion to his actual rationality.
Just because he was such a great read, he infected so many people with his mysticism.
If Aristotle, if his writings were of even higher quality than having his writings survive and be part of our consciousness, if Aristotle had been even easier and more fun and more comprehensible, than Plato's writings, then the dominance of Plato's mystical totalitarianism in Western history would have been far less, and the dominance of empirical, individualistic, rationalistic
Aristotelianism would have been far stronger, and the entire Dark Ages might have been avoided.
And that would have been a fantastic part of human history.
So the fact that his writings were lost is one of the great central tragedies of humanity.
Human History and just goes to show how you attack your philosophers and, boy, do they ever get their own back.
I mean, hey, are these writings too rational, too individualistic, too opposed to state power for you guys to read?
Great.
Then let's let people attack the philosophers.
Hey, here's the end of civilization and a thousand years of dark ages.
Good job, mob!
Aristotle's surviving works are generally grouped into four categories.
There is the Organon, a group of logical principles which can be used in any philosophical or scientific investigation.
There are the theoretical category of works, treatises on animals, cosmology, physics and metaphysics.
The practical works, Nicomachean ethics and politics, discussions on excellence on the individual, familial and societal levels.
And rhetoric and poetics.
How language can move and inspire individuals to clarity and passion, including philosophical, political speeches, as well as artistic tragedy.
Remember, a lot of the decisions made in Athens were made in a common area where various public speakers would get up and make their case.
So the ability to move the masses through rhetoric, through the passion of and clarity of your speech, and through humor, because as Aristotle said, people's attention spans are very short, so a couple of jokes are probably really, really helpful.
So, being good at public speaking was essential, not just for, you know, helping the political blah blah blah, but, you know, one of the things that Plato said was that you can avoid politics if you want, but all that means is you're going to be ruled by your inferiors.
And so, if you were interested in ideas, you had to get involved in politics as a self-defense measure to make sure that you weren't going to get charged with some trumped-up accusation of impiety or corrupting the young or whatever it was going to be.
Aristotle divided the sciences into the productive, the practical, and the theoretical sciences.
Now, the productive sciences were things like engineering and architecture, building bridges, building houses, and strategy and rhetoric, including goals such as victory on the battlefield, or victory in the courts, or victory in the public sphere of debate, and so on.
The practical sciences, ethics and politics, are those which guide behavior in your day-to-day life.
The theoretical scientists like physics, mathematics, theology, they have no product and no practical goal but information and understanding a sort for their own sake.
Now, Aristotle's scientific research is mind-blowing.
The scope was absolutely enormous.
He was kind of OCD, kind of obsessive-compulsive about the classification of animals into genus and species.
More than 500 species figure in his treatises, many of them described in detail.
Now, either Aristotle, or maybe one of his assistants, was gifted with unbelievably acute, like, Superman laser vision.
Because some of the features of the insects that Aristotle described accurately were not again observed until the invention of the microscope in the 17th century.
So he had, I don't know, he could read the fine print in a car contract from 40 feet.
I mean, the guy had just incredible vision, which is, you know, a nice analogy for the clarity of his thinking.
Aristotle classifies anatomy, diet, habitat, modes of copulation, and the reproductive systems of mammals, reptiles, fish, and insects he was obsessed with.
How does an egg become a chicken?
I mean, it's a pretty great question.
And a lot of people, I don't know, Aristotle, what were you smoking?
They said these stories about, you know, rare species of fish.
I don't believe it for a moment, but they actually found these same fish and his observations have proved accurate many centuries later.
Don't you just love reaching with the, I told you so, from beyond the grave by a couple of centuries.
That's my goal too.
Now, Aristotle also states clearly and fairly biological problems that took almost 2,000 years to solve, such as the nature of embryonic development.
And you know what they say, if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
Aristotle was excellent at asking the right questions, even though, of course, he didn't have a theory of atoms in the modern sense or an understanding of DNA or anything like that.
Aristotle was a great combination in thinking both curious and humble.
He strictly limited his conclusions to the available evidence.
Theories must always fall in the face of observation.
It doesn't matter what you think, it only matters what you observe.
And in any contradiction between theory and evidence, theory gives way and evidence rules.
And that is Well, the basis of any kind of civilized discourse, let alone science, medicine and the free market.
What's the value?
I don't know.
Let's people negotiate freely and we'll find the value when they conduct their transaction.
Okay.
Aristotle was an empiricist, as I mentioned.
All investigation begins with and conforms to sense data.
Now, again, we don't know exactly what Aristotle believed, because you could be put to death for not saying these things.
But, according to his writings, he believed in an immaterial God.
Although this God neither created nor controls the universe.
Although God can affect the universe, which you have to say, because otherwise the priests don't have a job.
You know, in the deist conception, which is very common among the founding fathers, and Christianity too.
But the deus conception, that God kind of wound up the universe and then just let it go and doesn't interfere, puts the priests out of a job.
Now, when priests are united with political power, you don't want to put priests out of a job.
That's like pissing off social justice warriors who then will try and get you fired, although with this, they could actually get you killed.
So, um, he didn't want to say any of that.
According to Aristotle, God is a perfect abstract reasoner.
That's a fascinating thing to think about.
Man's highest goal is to develop his own capacity to reason abstractly and so become closer to God.
Closer to God.
None of this, I believe because it is absurd, as Tertullian said, there's none of this faith.
Developing one's capacity to reason abstractly is the closest one can get to God himself.
What a wonderful religion, if you're going to have one, to have.
Because Aristotle classified matter in sort of three categories, right?
There were things which were present and fungible or decayable or they would self-destruct over time.
You know, plants and animals, they die.
And he thought that the stars were perfect, and so you could sense them, you could perceive them, but they didn't change.
Things you could perceive that did change, things you could perceive that didn't change, and things you couldn't perceive that didn't change, which would be God.
So true perfection for Aristotle is rational thinking.
That is the essence of both God and humanity.
And so improvements in reasoning represent closer proximity both to God and to one's own humanity.
Aristotle, man, was a rational animal.
And since reason is the essence of humanity, being better at reasoning is being better as a human being.
So Aristotle, this is something you see continually throughout intellectual history.
He provided a methodology, not answers.
Now, he applied his methodology particularly in his examination of biological classifications.
They were never intended to be any kind of final answer.
His conclusions were generally tentative.
You know, according to the available evidence at the current time, this is what it seems to indicate.
And again, he said, but always got to bow to evidence.
When new evidence comes along that contradicts what I'm saying, throw out what I'm saying and follow the new evidence.
Unfortunately, as is so often the case, when a humble thinker comes along that refuses to order people around or provide absolute conclusions, lesser thinkers follow him, grab all of the gold of his methodology, and then use it to stuff falsehoods down the throats of people by pretending that the conclusions were absolute rather than the methodology is what should be used.
During the later Roman Empire and the anti-scientific Christian Middle Ages, from 476 AD to 1453, give or take, The methodology of Aristotle was abandoned and Aristotle's conclusions were accepted as gospel.
In other words, what do you want to know about the world?
Let's not go out and observe it like Aristotle said.
Let's look up what Aristotle said and take his conclusions as facts.
That way we don't have to get a sunburn.
We can just stay in the library.
This is particularly annoying because he's an empiricist and he was an empiricist who said go observe nature rather than look up what I said and go from there.
Now Plato had a more direct influence on the development of great spiritual movements in late antiquity, years before the Middle Ages.
Aristotle had a greater effect on science and this war between subjectivism, mysticism and Objectivity and science is personified in Aristotle and Plato, at least to some degree.
Now, to be fair, Plato started off, in my opinion, and I'll make the case in a few minutes, really nutty, though understandably nutty, after seeing what happened to Socrates.
He started off really nutty.
After 20 years of discussions with Aristotle, he softened some of his nuttiness, Plato that is, towards the end of his life.
So, sometimes it takes a while, but water wears away the stone, right?
Let's have a look at metaphysics.
It's the nature of reality.
What is real?
Think of the Matrix.
People think it's real.
Turns out it's a computer program.
What is the nature of reality?
Are we the dream of a demon?
Is this a veil of tears through which we pass through regretfully in order to attain the true perfection and reality of an afterlife or heaven?
What is reality?
Are we a brain in a tank?
He has theorized, you know, that, you know, I think therefore I am.
His basic argument was, yeah, okay, I could be a brain in a tank and everything is being manipulated by a demon, but at least I exist to be fooled.
So the only thing I can say is that I exist.
So metaphysics is called first philosophy.
And if you, I've got a whole intro to 17 part introduction to philosophy series, which I did years ago, which you can run through.
I go through metaphysics in greater detail, of course, than I do here.
What is real?
What is real?
You ever have a look at those?
I remember when I was a kid looking at pictures of atoms and saying, whoa, man, that looks like a solar system.
What if our atom, what if our solar system is just an atom in a couch?
You know much?
Those are important.
It's not like late night dorm session, bong fueled bull repeating ideas.
This is actual important stuff.
What is the nature?
of reality.
And that's what you have to tackle first in philosophy, because everything kind of follows from that.
So Aristotle's metaphysics is considered one of the greatest works in philosophy, and it is an attempt to reconcile Platonic idealism with, I don't know, step over a ditch common sense.
So Aristotle talked about natural science and mathematics.
Now, Now, the first studies material objects which change.
Now, remember, everything, pretty much, in Aristotle's world, just as it is in yours and mine, everything, everything, everything changes.
You get old.
You get spotty.
Look, see?
Your parents die.
Your teeth.
get yellow and you get long in the tooth.
Your house windows start to fail and you, you know, people fax you forever free new windows.
Everything you buy wears out.
Your grass goes dormant over the winter.
Trees grow and like everything, everything, the clouds, everything is in a constant state of change and finding permanence.
What is true when all we are is surrounded by everything which changes all the time?
What is truth?
What can we actually sink our flag of truth into when we basically seem to be standing in metaphysical water, everything is changing.
I cannot plant my flag in water, it just falls down.
And finding eternal truths in philosophy is the great challenge, which has been tackled by all major philosophers.
Now, theologians and priests have an easier time, because they can say, oh yeah, all this stuff changes, but don't worry, God is permanent, eternal, and perfect, and all-knowing, and all-seeing, and so they can just Put their metaphysics out in the abstract realm of a deity, and that's their answer.
Philosophers?
Eh, not so easy, right?
Because that's why you know it's philosophy, not theology, in that they tackle what is real.
How can we get truths in a constantly fluctuating universe?
Well, that's how you know they're doing philosophy.
So, you know, natural science, get some wood, set fire to it, it goes to ash.
So these immaterial objects could change.
Mathematics, well, numbers don't change and are not separate from matter, right?
So you can eat four apples, but you haven't eaten the number four.
The number four remains.
The number four is comprehensible even though each one of those apples is different from each other.
They're slightly different sizes and colors.
One might have a worm in it, and you open up the apple and you see a worm.
You don't say, what is that?
It's an apple with a worm.
You can still figure it out.
Numbers are always fascinating to philosophers because they are derived for things in reality, because things are separate.
There's space between trees, therefore you know there's four trees.
But the numbers are eternal.
Mathematics has an eternal perfection to it that exists only in the mind, not in reality.
Right?
You say, Oh, I'm six feet tall.
Well, you're not exactly.
You might be a little bit more in the morning, a little bit less in the evening.
And you know, you can, you know, good posture, bad posture.
So, um, you say, this is like, give me a six foot long piece of wood.
It's never going to be exactly six foot.
Like, you know, the, the numbers are perfect.
What they represent is imperfect.
And that's the kind of stuff where there's great fertility and creativity and trying to figure this stuff out.
So the metaphysics.
Metaphysics is the study of what is eternal, unchanging, and independent of matter.
Because if you want something to be true, it cannot be based solely in matter.
On the other hand, it can't be solely in the mind, as an empiricist, because it has to be related to matter in some way.
Otherwise, philosophy is blindfolding yourself and going inward, going to your own mind.
Right?
like the way they looked up Aristotle rather than looked at the world that Aristotle told them to do.
So you have to find out what is eternal, unchanging, independent of matter, yet if you're an empiricist, it can't be divorced from matter completely.
And that's where Plato and Aristotle had their divisions.
So the scientific method versus the implementation, right?
So the implementation of the scientific method is one thing.
The scientific method itself is another thing.
And this is an important distinction.
So when you implement the scientific method, you go through, it's got to be stuff that is recordable, it's got to be stuff that's reproducible, it's got all these characteristics that are necessary for successful science.
And you can make mistakes, right?
Your theories, your hypotheses can be proven false.
Other people can be unable to reproduce your results.
We don't say the scientific method has failed because it has falsified particular hypotheses.
Of course not.
That's how we know it's working.
So there's the theory of how you acquire knowledge, and then there's the actual practical steps of acquiring knowledge.
And Aristotle talked about the problems that drive thinkers mad.
Do things exist beyond or outside of sense evidence.
I can't tell you how many hours I spent on that one.
Boy, that was a fun dinner date.
But do things exist beyond or outside of sense evidence?
Fantastic.
What a great question.
Just think of the word nation.
Nation.
What is a nation?
You can walk across the border, there's no Truman Show force field.
What is it?
It's something real, we know that, but does it exist in material reality?
No.
There's no such thing as the government.
There's buildings.
There's guys with guns.
There's, you know, there's no such thing as the law.
There are books and people with gavels and people with guns.
What actually exists?
And yet the things which, the things which make life most meaningful outside of bare existence are the things which can't really be easily said to exist.
You know, like love, virtue and all that.
Are concepts more important than individuals?
So when people say, well, you have to sacrifice yourself for the common good, well, that's saying that concepts, collectives, aggregates, groups are much more important than individuals.
But given that aggregates are nothing more, Then the sum of individuals, we have a contradiction in philosophy.
Like if I get five lizards together, they don't all become mammals.
When you aggregate individuals together, how is it possible philosophically to justify that each of those individuals within that grouping now have opposite characteristics?
You should not sacrifice yourself for a tree.
You should not sacrifice yourself for one other person or two other people or five other people.
But when it gets to be 100 or 5,000 or 5 million, boom!
Now it's worth it because Spock-based numbers?
It's hard to say, right?
So that's a challenge, right?
As soon as you get an aggregate which changes the properties of the individuals within that aggregate, you have a problem.
Because the concept is supposed to be derived from the characteristics of the individual entities.
If concepts are the most important, what levels of abstractions are the most important?
In other words, do you sacrifice your interests for your pet lizard?
Well, maybe a little bit.
It's got to live, right?
What about your family?
What about your street, your neighborhood, your town, your nation?
What about all of humanity?
What about the future?
How much of the future?
I mean, it's a really, really tough question.
Are there non-material causes?
Right?
What Aristotle called the first cause, right?
If we say that which exists has to be created, then saying God created what is doesn't help us, because if that which exists has to be created, God who exists must himself have to have been created, and you get this infinite regression of God spawning God spawning God.
Are there non-material causes?
Everything that happens in the universe outside of free will, everything that happens in the universe has domino, right?
Something happens beforehand that makes it happen.
Ah, but those are all material causes.
What is the difference between the death of a thing and the end of a principle?
People die.
Humanity doesn't die.
The dinosaurs are dead, but the concepts of dinosaurs exist.
It is a very challenging thing.
What is the relationship between concepts and entities?
I mean, this all sounds very abstract, but it is absolutely foundational.
As to how we live our life and how we make decisions on the grandest and most minute schemes in society.
All the way from, how do I spend my next five minutes?
To when should we go to war?
These are all derived from how we approach these questions.
So for instance, thou shalt not steal.
Okay.
I've got a book on ethics, UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
You can get it at freedomainradio.com slash free.
And so I prove that theft is immoral.
Okay, theft is immoral and theft is the taking of property by force against the other person's will.
How is taxation not theft and how is therefore taxation not immoral?
Well, you can create a special category of people in the government, but then what you've said is the concept of government overrides the individual characteristics of every human being in that category, or at least some of them.
You know, we're going to take all these human beings, thou shalt not steal, we're going to carve off, put these people in a blue costume, or a nice suit, or an upside down toilet bowl shaped building, and then they can steal, and it's good.
Everyone else stealing bad.
These people stealing good.
It's really bad to murder, unless you get a uniform and some guy in a funny hat tells you to go kill this guy, Then it's virtuous and you get, not a prison sentence, but you get a medal and a pension.
And these were concepts, while you're in the army now, as opposed to the mafia and the armies, these concepts vastly overriding the characteristics of individuals is a very, very tough and thorny problem.
And I certainly take my swings at it, which I hope that you will check out.
So, Aristotle said, the hardest, most perplexing question of all, do concepts exist?
Are concepts in the thing itself or do they exist in some other realm?
Think about this.
You're a kid.
I had the incredible good fortune to be at home with my daughter watching concept formation.
It's fantastic.
It's like watching 20 sunrises an hour.
And when you're a kid, When you first figure out what a chair is, it's incredible how quickly that knowledge spreads within your mind.
It's incredible how quickly that knowledge actually spreads in your mind.
Because you then don't just recognize your chair, or this chair, or that chair.
You don't just recognize the chairs you know.
You can see new chairs and know that they're chairs.
You've got the concept, the idea of chair in your brain.
And you're not confused.
If somebody sits on a box, you don't say, that's a chair.
You say, somebody's sitting on a box.
However, if somebody stands on a chair to change a light bulb, you don't say, I don't know what they're standing on.
You say, well, they're standing on a chair.
They're using a chair not for its intended purpose, but to, you know, gain extra height to change the light bulb.
And if you see a chair in the garbage, you say, that's garbage, and you don't expect anyone to sit on it.
I mean, when you start to really think about that stuff, how is it possible for us to know every single chair?
And you can say, well, there's a stool, and there's the other things that you can sit on, and all that kind of stuff.
But how is it that we know a chair when we see a new chair, even when we're toddlers?
Does the concept of chairness, or the essence of chairness, does it exist in the chair?
No, because if you destroy all chairs, we still retain the concept of chair.
All the dinosaurs are dead, but we still have the concept of dinosaur.
So it can't be in the thing itself.
Do they exist in some other realm?
Now, Plagio's answer was yes.
Yes, they do.
Aristotle had to struggle with it more.
So Aristotle, in his typical fashion when he starts a work, he presents both or even more sides.
It goes over the history of the case.
He doesn't always come to a resolution and he brings these issues up again.
But remember, these books are jumbled.
They're notes.
They're not his photo final worked out syllogisms.
So for philosophy to exist or have value, he says it's got to have foundational principles or axioms.
And Aristotle developed a logistical logic, which we'll get into in a sec, but the principle of non-contradiction, or the PNC, quote, the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.
Something cannot be both true and false at the same time.
If you drop a ball to the ground, just from your own perspective, it cannot be both falling down and falling up at the same time.
Just think of an alibi, right?
If you're accused of a crime, and the crime happened in some forest, but there's video of you at a sports bar cheering on a team, and everyone's there, and you've got the bill, and they all remember you, well, that's the PNC.
You can't be in the forest and in the bar at the same time.
If you're in the bar, you're not in the forest, and if you're in the forest, you're not in the bar, and you can't be both.
You can't be neither, but you can't be both.
And this principle of non-contradiction is foundational.
And, you know, if you... There's this old saying from Walt Whitman that drives me crazy, where he says, You say I contradict myself.
Very well, I contradict myself, you shaggy, Dan Haggerty, beard, fruity, hippy, dippy, hipster, poet, jerk!
Because a poet can say that, but philosophers can't say that.
I mean, if you can prove that the philosopher has contradicted himself, or the argument has contradicted itself, false, throw mama from the drain.
That cannot stand, as they say.
Now, this is the most certain of all principles.
It's not just a hypothesis.
But it also cannot be proved, because it is required for proof, but it cannot be disproved either.
Because it is required for disproof.
And I have, you know, it's funny because I made this argument of self-detonating statements, right?
If I say language is meaningless while I'm using, I'm relying on the fact that language has meaning to, right?
Self-detonates itself.
So it is the most certain of all principles because no one can stand against it.
Nobody can disprove it because it is required to.
At the moment you try and disprove the PNC, you've validated it because You're using proof, which is the non-contradiction principle of non-contradiction is essential for that.
And so I've used this in my book, and some people, not everyone, some people rail against it, it's completely invalid, and I think, well, go talk to Aristotle, you know, I guess people feel very courageous taking me on if they might quail before Aristotle, but you know, I'm just, don't shoot the messenger, this is one of the foundational principles of philosophy.
So, what does the foundation matter?
of a thing.
What is a man?
Well, I guess as King Lear said, a bare forked animal.
What is a man?
A man is cold!
Man is cold!
Well, it could mean he's got a cold.
It could mean that he's feeling chilled.
It could mean that he's completely frozen.
What is the essence even of that statement?
You can pull this stuff apart and go nutty Wittgenstein all over the place.
So Aristotle wrote, a substance, one of the same in number, can receive contraries.
An individual man, for example, being one of the same, becomes now pale, and now dark, now hot, and now cold, now bad, and now good.
So man cannot be defined by complexion, or temperature, or virtue, because the same man can go from, you know, like those things they do, what is it, up in Sweden, where they do these giant hot saunas and then jump into glacier water?
Okay, well, so the temperature.
What is a man?
What is the essence as opposed to the accidental or inconsequential aspects?
I am still myself, though with less hair than when I was 20.
I am still myself.
I will still be myself, hopefully in my 90s or past that, on my deathbed.
I will still have been myself after I am dead and cloned for a giant army of chatterboxes.
So, even though I can look back at a picture of myself seven years ago, I am still myself.
And I can say, well, that's me seven years ago.
You can see the videos here on YouTube.
But do you know, go back about seven years, there's not one single atom now in my body that was in my body seven years ago.
All the cells have been replaced, all the atoms have been replaced, but I'm still me.
Riddle me that, Batman.
Ooh, that can be exciting.
I love that stuff.
So, essence.
Aristotle said, by form I mean the essence of each thing and its primary substance.
Once you get to the essence, you get to the concept.
Once you know what a man is, once you know what a chair is, you have the concept.
Then you've got to figure out where is it.
Is it in the chair?
No.
Because otherwise you destroy a chair, you destroy part of the concept, which is not how it works.
So, he says, when I speak of substance without matter, I mean the essence.
Right?
What is the definition of a chair?
Can't be based on matter.
That's the essence.
A definition is an account, and every account has parts, and the part of the account stands to the part of the thing in just the same way that the whole account stands to the whole thing.
So man is a rational animal, according to, well, lots of people, but Aristotle in particular.
But since matter is part of the definition, Is it substance?
Since matter may not be a substance.
A circle may be divided into semicircles, right?
But the semicircle is defined by the circle, not the other way around.
So you can't say a circle is defined by two semicircles.
You can say two semicircles is half of a circle.
Because otherwise, if you say a circle is defined by two semicircles, then Two semicircles are defined by two quarter circles, two eighths, sixteenths, you know, you go on and on, right?
So that's infinite regression.
Once you're in the infinite regression, pull up, pull up!
Danger of Will Robinson!
It's not where you want to be.
So he wrote with regards to bronze, right?
Think of a statue that's made of bronze.
He said, the bronze is part of the compound statue, but not of the statue spoken of as form.
The statue could be composed of other things.
Similarly, the line when divided passes away into its halves, and the man into bones and muscle and flesh, but it does not follow that they are composed of these as parts of their essence.
Rather, it is not the substance but the compound that is divided into the body and its parts, as into matter.
You can pull someone apart Hannibal Lecter style.
You can find all their bits.
That's not the person.
My kidney is pretty indistinguishable from someone else's kidney.
I guess my liver would be somewhat distinguishable from, say, Gary Oldman's liver or Charlie Sheen's liver.
But for the most part, we are not merely an assemblage of atoms.
That can't be our essence.
And think of this challenge.
What is pornography?
This is something endless.
You know it when you see it.
You know it when you see it.
But how do you define what is pornography?
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H.
Lawrence was banned as pornographic at its time.
It's not exactly spank material in the here and now in the way that Fifty Shades of Grey could theoretically be.
What is pornography?
What is the essence?
What is rape?
Is another.
Big question that is occurring.
Is rape regret?
Or is rape violence?
These are very, very challenging questions.
And so when we're working on how to define things, we are sharpening our minds to literally draw the line between good, neutral and evil.
Good, neutral, and evil.
Clearly, if you jump a woman in an alley, hold a knife to her throat, and rape her, that's rape by any reasonable definition.
And Aristotle had this great thing where, I've used this a lot in my own thinking, where he said, look, your ethics have to conform at least to some common sense and accepted values in society.
Like, if you've got some ethical system which somehow says rape is good, I don't care what you've done.
You've made a mistake somewhere.
It just doesn't make any sense at all.
For me, my ethical system had to at least justify and explain the four major moral bans of mankind.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not assault.
Thou shalt not rape.
If I ever went down a road where theft is great, murder is great, well, we've got a problem there somewhere.
Think of all of these Problems.
When you think of a statue, think of Rodin's Thinker, right?
I mean, I don't know what the heck it's made of, bronze or whatever, right?
But you can make a plaster copy, you can make a copy in plasticine, if you want, or play-doh.
You still know that it's a statue.
And you know which statue it is.
You know it's not the original, but you know which statue it represents.
So what is the essence?
It can't be the bronze, because you could also use another alloy.
Bronze is what?
Copper and tin.
But you could use another alloy and then paint it to look like copper or put copper coating on it.
So what is the thing itself?
That is the great challenge.
And when it comes to law and science, particularly biology, knowing what the thing is itself is absolutely essential.
This action, is it moral, immoral or neutral?
Running for a bus, neutral.
Strangling a guy, immoral.
And respecting property and being courageous in the world could be considered virtuous.
So what is the thing itself?
We start with chairs, we need to end up with virtue so that we can clearly think.
And the more society agrees on the definitions of what is good and bad, the more peace there is in society, the smaller government you need, the fewer police you need because more people agree.
So the degree to which we can get people to agree On what is good and bad?
What is the essence of virtue and good and evil?
Virtue and vice?
Well, that's the degree to which we can have a peaceful, small government, few people in prison, civilized society.
And in the postmodern world, this is highly and ridiculously and insanely fragmented.
Some people say, oh, this is rape.
And other people say, there's just no way that is rape.
That is ridiculous.
And the degree to which we're not philosophically attacking these problems is the degree to which society fragments.
As society fragments, you need a bigger and bigger state to attempt to backfill all of the conflicts occurring from a lack of common definitions and what really in its essence is culture, but commonly accepted definitions of good and evil.
The soul.
Now, this challenge, if you drill into, because he couldn't get to atoms, right?
I mean, there's De Rerum Naturae on the nature of things, Lucretius and Democritus and so on have talked about atoms.
Theoretical, right?
So he didn't have atomic theory, so he drilled down into stuff to find the concepts, what defines something as itself.
He couldn't get to the atoms because, you know, don't have electron microscopes and don't have Planck's theory.
So he couldn't get to atoms.
So he had to drill down far, far, far, and then he got to soul.
He said, the soul of animals, for this is the substance of living things, is their substance.
Just cheating, right?
It's not cheating because he didn't have anything else to work with, but, and he was of course, if he said there's no soul, he's going to get charged with impiety and disassembled for parts and sold all over Asia Minor.
But he drilled down as far as he could and then he said, okay, so, you know, that's not a great answer.
It's a necessary politically correct answer and life-sustaining answer, so to speak.
But he said, this is soul.
Now, the great thing with the soul is that if you kill a man or a man dies, let's take the moral element, a man trips, falls, dies.
Well, his personage still exists.
But his personality is gone.
It's like if you turn off the radio, right?
All the voices stop and, where did the voices go?
And so he gets to a soul and he says, that's the essence.
And the great thing is then he has a concept that is dependent on matter because the soul is in the body, but it is not matter.
The soul is immaterial.
So he's kind of solved, he squared that circle.
He said, it is clear that the soul is the primary substance and the body is matter.
So just to sort of Understand this and this comes from I had this this great teacher when I was an undergraduate who I did a full year on Aristotle This is great teacher this woman who was just he was ferocious and great.
She I remember her tearing apart a moral relativist in a very Passionate and and enthusiastic manner and she didn't but I guess she has to be fair I used to write all these bonus essays like just trying to puzzle all this stuff and figure all this stuff out and I'd go and sit down with her and she was really Helpful and a great teacher.
But I still remember very vividly the example that she gave.
She said this, OK, think of a baby.
You look at it, you say, hey, that's a baby.
OK, let's make the baby blue.
What do you look?
You say, I don't know, there's a blue baby, let's give it CPR, you know, make it whatever.
And then if you make the baby twice its size, you say, well, that's a giant blue baby, right?
And then if you take the baby and you make it float, you say, wow, that's a really big blue floating baby.
And then if you give it tentacles coming out of its belly, you say, well, that's a big floating blue baby with tentacles.
And you keep adding more and more freaky things to it.
At some point, at some point, you're going to say, What the hell is that?
I don't even know what that is.
It's got horns by the eye.
It's nothing.
It's nothing that I can understand or comprehend.
And that last thing you change?
Well, that's got something to do with the essence.
So Aristotle said, look, there's a method of division to figure out what the essence of something is.
If we used to differentiate footed to differentiate the genus animal, One then uses a differentiator such as cloven-footed for the next division.
If one divides in this way, clearly the last or compelling tilataya differentiator will be the substance of the thing and its definition.
Because obviously you could keep dividing things until you get to a definition of a particular individual.
But that's not a concept anymore.
The concept has to cross a bunch of different entities.
A forest can't just be one tree.
It's not a forest.
A forest has to be a whole bunch of stuff together.
You just keep dividing it until there's no point dividing it anymore.
That's got to be the substance and essence of the thing.
Mammal, warm-blooded, with the exception of the platypus or something.
They always tell me it lays its eggs, gives birth to life, babies and so on.
It suckles its young.
But with cats, you can have classifications.
They're still in the cat species, right?
Lights are dark, or short-tailed, or long-tailed, or whatever.
Bald.
So a substantial form is the essence of a substance which corresponds to a species.
Once you've divided to the point where there's no point dividing anymore, you've got your classifications.
Now some argue that Aristotle is inconsistent because he argues substance is form.
Form is universal, but no universal is a substance.
So, you know, you can go crazy trying to puzzle out Aristotle and take his sort of word as gospel and try and reconcile it theologically.
That's not the point.
The point is Aristotle is going to ask tough questions, he's going to give you a framework for thinking about stuff, and then you damn well go out and think for yourself, right?
I'm not a big one for, like, I'm going to keep rereading Aristotle, although there was a, what's it, a theologian in the Middle Ages who said he read, he read metaphysics 40 times, still didn't understand it.
So we don't know what Aristotle's final arguments were because we only have notes of his students and notes and preparatory stuff and so on.
So, oh, Aristotle is inconsistent.
Who cares?
Who cares?
I hate to say that.
But the point is, have a methodology called reason and evidence.
Pursue these ideas.
It is essential for a civilized society for us to share Rational definitions of what things are and in particular what good and evil is.
So yeah, I mean, oh Aristotle, he's just a starting point.
He asks the questions, he gives you the syllogistical methodology, reason and evidence to pursue these questions.
Who cares what he thought?
He's long dead.
His troubles are over.
Ours, unless we can find more common definitions for things, are only just beginning.
So in the interest of time and gauging your interest in this topic, I'm going to stop here.
I have a whole other section on Plato versus Aristotle and what this means for how you can organize your thinking and how you can live a good life.
I've got a whole section on what Aristotle means by virtue of the golden mean.
Courage is good.
An excess of courage is foolhardiness and being too much of a daredevil.
A deficiency of courage makes you a cowardice.
Having good humor is good.
Being too dour means that you're really not going to enjoy life.
Being a complete buffoon means that you're never going to take anything seriously.
So I've got a whole other series of sections on this but I want to know what you think of what it is that I'm doing.
Do you find this valuable?
Do you find this interesting?
I want to keep going and we're going to start off if your interest is high enough with inductive versus deductive reasoning because these are the two big differentiators between Aristotle and Plato and why they fought So hard.
And why we continue to fight so hard about what it means to be real, what it means to be virtuous, how we can tell the difference between mere subjective opinion and empirical and virtuous facts.
But I want to know what you think.
Please let me know.
In the comments below, if you find this a useful project.
I love it, but you know, it may not be universal.
So please, please let me know what you think.
I'll be happy to continue with part two.
And thank you so much for watching.
If you find this information valuable and helpful, I go by Socrates, you know, he would, uh, speak a philosophy for free, but he'd be very happy if you bought him lunch.
Hey, big brains got to eat.
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So thank you everyone.
I really, really look forward to knowing what you think.
If you find this helpful, interesting, useful and valuable, let me know in the comments below and if there's enough,
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