https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/Recent content in 1. Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) on The Duane Berquist LecturesHugoenhttps://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/001-aristotles-proemium-i-the-natural-desire-to-know-and-wisdom/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/001-aristotles-proemium-i-the-natural-desire-to-know-and-wisdom/Berquist works through the opening line of Aristotle’s proemium to the Metaphysics, asking what it means to say all men by nature desire to know. He traces the natural progression from sensation through memory and experience up to art or science, unpacking along the way the etymology of “philosophy” and “proemium.” Weighing Aristotle’s humility against Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato, he uses examples—doctors versus pharmacists, chief artists versus mere craftsmen, teachers who grasp causes—to show that wisdom is not knowledge of singular facts but knowledge of universals and first causes, setting up the fuller argument to come.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/002-the-six-marks-of-the-wise-man-wisdom-as-knowledge-of-all/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/002-the-six-marks-of-the-wise-man-wisdom-as-knowledge-of-all/Berquist opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics by asking what people actually mean when they call someone wise, sifting popular marks of the wise man down to a core claim: wisdom is knowledge of the universal, and more strictly, knowledge of first causes. Following Aquinas’s commentary, he distinguishes being universal “in predication” from being universal “in causing.” He then takes up the proemium’s further claims—that wisdom is sought for its own sake out of wonder rather than need, that it is the most liberal and most divine of the sciences, and that no man possesses it fully. Examples from Shakespeare, Euclid, Democritus, and Plato’s Theaetetus illustrate certitude, causality, and wonder along the way.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/003-wonder-liberal-knowledge-the-divine-science-and-how-the-philosopher/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/003-wonder-liberal-knowledge-the-divine-science-and-how-the-philosopher/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics Book I that wisdom is the most divine of the sciences, since it concerns God as first cause and is the knowledge God himself would possess most fully—honorable rather than merely necessary. From there he turns to what it means to be a philosopher in the strict sense: one who loves wisdom for its own sake, as life’s highest end and a common good, not the truncated “philosophers” of Bacon, Adam Smith, Hegel, or Nietzsche, who really pursue power, wealth, or freedom. He closes on wonder as the root of philosophical inquiry, setting up the next class’s treatment of philosophy’s nature and divisions through Aristotle, Aquinas’s proemium to the Ethics, and Shakespeare.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/004-natural-beginnings-of-philosophy-wonder-the-natural-road/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/004-natural-beginnings-of-philosophy-wonder-the-natural-road/Berquist takes up the fourth of his four guiding questions—how one should enter into philosophy—after reviewing its division into theoretical, practical, and logical parts. He argues that philosophy begins naturally in wonder and in the desire to live well, and that the mind travels a natural road from sense to reason, arriving at self-evident axioms it grasps without proof. Working through the handout “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge” and Friar Laurence’s remarks on stumbling, he explains why we know sensible, material, composed, and effect-related things before the immaterial, simple, and causal, and why understanding moves from confused, outward, singular grasp toward distinct, inward, universal grasp.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/005-why-begin-from-nature-beginnings-order-and-heraclitus-on/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/005-why-begin-from-nature-beginnings-order-and-heraclitus-on/Berquist takes up the question of why inquiry must begin from natural starting points—the desire to know causes, the wish to live well, the movement from sense to reason, and grasp of axioms like non-contradiction—rather than from private opinion. He works through Heraclitus’s fragments contrasting waking and sleeping and insisting we follow what is common, reading from the handout on natural fragments and the one on the “before and after” in acts of reason. Examples from Euclid’s geometry and Plato’s Theaetetus and Meno illustrate how teacher and student, or equals in discussion, can only advance together from shared, commonly known premises. The lecture draws throughout on Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, and Poetics to show why order in beginning is not optional but necessary.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/006-coming-into-philosophy-through-reason-shakespeares-exhortation/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/006-coming-into-philosophy-through-reason-shakespeares-exhortation/Berquist begins from the handout “Beginnings of Philosophy in the Senses and Reason,” asking what dispositions—wonder, the desire to live well, hope, humility, fear of error, freedom from anger—must precede the use of reason. He then works through Shakespeare’s exhortation (“What is a man…”), scanning its unrhymed iambic pentameter to draw out a working definition: reason as “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after,” set against sense and imagination by its power to reach the unknown through the known. Plato’s Phaedo and Boethius’s account of self-evident truths help place this account of reason within Aristotelian psychology and human nature.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/007-reason-as-ability-for-large-discourse-looking-before-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/007-reason-as-ability-for-large-discourse-looking-before-and/Berquist treats Shakespeare’s phrase “large discourse, looking before and after” as if it were a proper logical definition of reason, examining it piece by piece: genus and difference, “discourse” as knowing one thing through another, “large” as scope or extent, and “looking” as reason’s aim toward understanding. He offers the wise man’s discourse as the fullest case of this ability, and draws on Euclid, Aristotle, Boethius, and a passage from Romeo and Juliet to trace the causal sense buried in words like “understand” and “ground”—showing how ordinary language still carries the logic of before and under.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/008-the-senses-of-before-and-after-order-and-the-exhortations/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/008-the-senses-of-before-and-after-order-and-the-exhortations/Starting from Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “large discourse, looking before and after,” Berquist asks what “before” actually means, and finds it is said in several ways: before in time, before in being, before in the order of reasoning, and before in goodness or rank, with a further “crowning” causal sense drawn from Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics and Aquinas’s commentary. He tests these distinctions against examples from geometry, chemistry, theology, and Shakespeare himself, including Two Gentlemen of Verona and Hamlet. The class closes by tying reason’s power to order time, being, knowledge, and cause to the exhortation to use reason well—reason as what makes man like God and true to himself, rather than governed by passion alone.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/009-why-philosophy-requires-reason-review-error-and-mistake-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/009-why-philosophy-requires-reason-review-error-and-mistake-and/Berquist takes Shakespeare’s short exhortation contrasting man’s chief good with that of the beast and shows its argument works by denial of the consequent, then uses it to distinguish several senses of “before” and “after”—especially priority in being, where something can exist without another but not conversely, versus priority in goodness. Breathing and philosophizing, faith and charity, illustrate that what is more necessary need not be better. Along the way he turns to Scriptural and Thomistic passages on error, wandering, and the road of wisdom, and briefly likens the crisscross division at work to the Trinitarian relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/010-thomass-proemia-logic-as-the-art-of-arts-and-its-division/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/010-thomass-proemia-logic-as-the-art-of-arts-and-its-division/Why does Aquinas call logic an art, and an art of arts at that? Berquist works through the proemium to the Peri Hermeneias and the longer proemium to the Posterior Analytics, showing how Aquinas grounds the division of the logical works in reason’s three acts—simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning—matching them to the Categories, the Peri Hermeneias, and the treatises on syllogism. He also draws out the further split among demonstrative, dialectical, and rhetorical or poetic argument by their degrees of certitude, illustrating the reflexivity of reason with examples from Plato’s Timaeus and Phaedo.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/011-logic-as-tool-and-liberal-art-ordering-thoughts-through-words/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/011-logic-as-tool-and-liberal-art-ordering-thoughts-through-words/Berquist asks what logic actually is, distinguishing its proper subject—definition, statement, and syllogism, matching the three acts of reason—from its end, which is to perfect and order those acts. Working through the commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, alongside the proemium to the Ethics commentary and comparisons to Boethius on the liberal arts and Augustine on signs, he draws out a harder point: reason can order its own thinking only by means of sensible, spoken words, since thoughts themselves cannot be sensed or imagined the way images can. He illustrates this with examples ranging from perfect numbers and blank verse to Euclidean geometry, prayer, and Hamlet, treating logic’s tools as a kind of telescope for the mind.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/012-name-and-speech-and-aristotle-on-learning-from-pre-existing/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/012-name-and-speech-and-aristotle-on-learning-from-pre-existing/Berquist opens by defining “name” and “speech” according to whether their component parts carry meaning independently, locating this within logic’s threefold task of definition, statement, and syllogism. He then takes up Aristotle’s claim that all learning proceeds from pre-existing knowledge, illustrating demonstration through Euclidean geometry and drawing on Plato’s Theaetetus and Phaedo to set demonstrative reasoning against dialectical syllogism and induction, and against rhetorical enthymeme and example. He closes by weighing Albert the Great’s twofold division of logic against Aquinas’s threefold one, tracing both back to the structure of Plato’s Meno.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/013-why-names-come-before-definition-equivocal-words-parts-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/013-why-names-come-before-definition-equivocal-words-parts-and/Berquist begins Thomas’s division of logic into the arts of definition, statement, and argument, asking why names come first: we name things before defining them, we use names to ask what a thing is, and definitions themselves are made of names. Drawing on Porphyry’s fivefold distinction of names, Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics V, and Boethius, he works out the definition of “name” itself and distinguishes the logician’s use of words from the grammarian’s and the poet’s. He then takes up the puzzle of defining a thing by its own name rather than another’s, and the equivocal senses of “part,” “whole,” and “one’s own,” closing with their bearing on demonstration, division, and reasoning about common goods.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/014-defining-by-names-common-to-many-things-univocal-and-equivocal/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/014-defining-by-names-common-to-many-things-univocal-and-equivocal/Berquist asks what it means to define a thing by a name “common” to it—shared rather than exclusive—likening this to how latitude and longitude together pinpoint a single location. He first separates calling something by its own proper name from calling it by another’s, covering figurative uses like metaphor, irony, and synecdoche, and insists definitions must stick to proper names, illustrated with examples from Romeo and Juliet and Aristotle’s Poetics. This sets up the distinction between univocal and equivocal naming, which Porphyry uses to introduce genus, species, and difference as the elements definitions are built from, moving the mind from confused to distinct knowledge of a thing’s nature.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/015-porphyrys-five-predicables-property-accident-and-genus-vs/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/015-porphyrys-five-predicables-property-accident-and-genus-vs/Berquist takes up Porphyry’s Isagoge and its division of names into genus, species, difference, property, and accident—asking why this fivefold scheme matters for definition, division, and demonstration. He illustrates property and accident with examples drawn from geometry, arithmetic, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, showing how each attaches to a thing without belonging to its essence. He then turns to the difference between relative and absolute distinctions, contrasting genus and species with pairs like whole and part, or father and son, and uses this to press the question, drawn from Aristotle’s Categories and Physics, of whether a lowest species or a highest genus can be found.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/016-genus-difference-and-lowest-species-reviewed-why-the-division/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/016-genus-difference-and-lowest-species-reviewed-why-the-division/Berquist continues through Porphyry’s Isagoge, tracing the five predicables—genus, difference, species, property, accident—and asking precisely what genus, difference, and lowest species have in common and where their definitions part ways. He turns to Aristotle’s Poetics for how differences order the definition of tragedy and comedy, then to the Posterior Analytics with Aquinas’s commentary to explain why our confused, outward way of knowing forces definitions built from combinations of non-convertible differences. Brief detours through Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles on univocal predication of God and creatures, and Plato’s Meno on defining versus reasoning, set up a close of the class applying “before and after” to genus-species order and to causality and the eternity of the world.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/017-dividing-the-categories-substance-quality-relation-and-habitus/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/017-dividing-the-categories-substance-quality-relation-and-habitus/Berquist traces Aristotle’s ten categories as a schema built from successive divisions: what is said of an individual substance—Socrates, a horse—either names the substance itself or an accident, and accidents split into those said absolutely (quantity, quality), those said relatively, and six said through something extrinsic, among them habitus, the category of “outfit” peculiar to man. Working from Aristotle’s Categories, Topics, and Metaphysics, and Aquinas’s scattered commentary remarks, he shows Thomas’s habit of dividing genera by twos and threes, pausing over quantity against Descartes, the Greek pros ti behind relation, and man’s need for tools and clothing.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/018-lowest-species-and-highest-genera-why-being-is-not-a-genus/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/018-lowest-species-and-highest-genera-why-being-is-not-a-genus/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s logic of genus and species, drawing on examples from geometry, drama, zoology, and politics to show that division doesn’t always terminate in a clean “lowest species,” and that a genus need not always have a further genus above it—an infinite regress of definitions would make knowledge impossible. He then examines words like “being,” “thing,” and “something,” arguing these are equivocal rather than univocal, using the substance/accident distinction and Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” as illustrations. This leads into Aristotle’s Categories and its division of the highest genera, chiefly substance versus accident and universal versus individual.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/019-aristotles-ten-categories-and-porphyrys-isagoge-quantity/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/019-aristotles-ten-categories-and-porphyrys-isagoge-quantity/Berquist traces the division of substance from material to immaterial, living to non-living, down through genus and species to an individual like Socrates, then examines quantity as discrete or continuous (number, line, surface, body) and quality (habit, natural ability, sensible qualities, shape). He draws out the discrete character of thought against the continuous character of bodily reality as a mark of reason’s immateriality. Turning to Porphyry’s Isagoge, he explains its role as an introduction to the Categories and works through the five predicables—genus, species, difference, property, and accident—as the tools definition, division, and demonstration depend on.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/020-figurative-naming-and-names-equivocal-by-reason-synecdoche/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/020-figurative-naming-and-names-equivocal-by-reason-synecdoche/Berquist asks how a single name comes to cover things that aren’t strictly the same, working through five figures of speech in turn: synecdoche (whole for part, as finger for thumb), antonomasia, metonymy (cause for effect), metaphor (likeness), and irony (opposition), drawing examples from Scripture and from Aquinas’s commentaries on the Psalms and on St. Paul. He then turns to names “equivocal by reason,” showing two ways a common name divides: one thing keeps it properly while another gets a new name, either by adding something notable or by possessing the meaning only imperfectly—illustrated with animal and man, understanding and reason.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/021-names-carried-over-dropping-meaning-and-ratios-analogy-metaphor/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/021-names-carried-over-dropping-meaning-and-ratios-analogy-metaphor/Berquist asks how a single word comes to carry more than one related meaning. He distinguishes two paths: dropping part of an original sense, as “passion” or “suffering” loosens from mere undergoing toward the perfection found in sensing and understanding; and naming by ratio or proportional likeness, as “healthy,” “before,” and “philosophy” get applied beyond their first, strict use. He then separates this analogical naming, where something is added to a common meaning, from metaphor proper, working through examples from Aristotle and Aquinas alongside illustrations drawn from Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer, and touching on Ammonius and the Summa Contra Gentiles.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/022-the-art-of-definition-i-definition-of-a-thing-vs-a-name-full/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/022-the-art-of-definition-i-definition-of-a-thing-vs-a-name-full/Berquist asks what makes a definition full rather than merely approximate, contrasting definition of a name with definition of a thing, and full definition through genus and species-making difference with “encircling” definitions that work instead through a thing’s property or effect. He works out the order between these kinds of definition and extends the same distinction to definition by cause versus definition by effect, using examples such as Socrates’ questioning in the Euthyphro, Augustine’s account of the good, and Aristotle’s treatment of happiness to show why grasping a cause matters for real understanding. He closes by pointing toward division as the tool that complements definition in moving thought from confused to distinct knowledge.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/023-the-art-of-definition-ii-substance-and-accident-and-how-to/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/023-the-art-of-definition-ii-substance-and-accident-and-how-to/Berquist works out a third distinction in the logic of definition: some things, substances, are defined by themselves, while others, accidents such as health, wisdom, and love, can only be defined in relation to a subject—body, reason, heart. Turning to Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics, he then asks a practical question: how does one actually find a definition? He answers with a military image—attacking a fortress from above, below, or the side—corresponding to three starting points, genus, examples, and convertible properties, each calling for its own reasoning: division, induction, and syllogism, illustrated through the Shakespearean sonnet, Euclid, and Aristotle’s account of wisdom and moral virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/024-the-art-of-division-integral-and-universal-wholes-distinction/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/024-the-art-of-division-integral-and-universal-wholes-distinction/Berquist opens by distinguishing two senses of “whole” that division can cut: the integral whole, made of physical parts, and the universal whole, made of subordinate kinds, drawing examples from grammar, geometry, chemistry, and biology to keep the two straight. He then asks what governs a proper division, proposing a “rule of two or three” and setting Plato’s habitual dichotomies against Hegel’s trichotomies. He applies this to Aquinas’s derivation of the seven sacraments through nested twofold and threefold cuts. He closes with a question about rank: why judging a lower science against a higher one—philosophy against theology, sense against reason—always falls to the higher, wisdom-bearing discipline.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/025-logic-of-the-second-act-distinctions-division-and-the-statement/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/025-logic-of-the-second-act-distinctions-division-and-the-statement/Berquist closes out the logic of the first act by reviewing the division of composed and universal wholes and three governing distinctions—equivocal senses of words, per se versus per accidens, and simple versus qualified predication—before turning to the logic of the second act. Opening Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, he works through the definition of statement as speech signifying true or false, distinguishes simple statements from compound ones joined by if-then or either-or, and divides the simple statement into noun and verb, or subject, predicate, and copula, ending with affirmation and negation. He draws on Aquinas and Ammonius alongside examples from Plato’s Meno, Shakespeare, and ordinary speech.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/026-true-and-false-in-the-simple-statement-saying-more-or-less/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/026-true-and-false-in-the-simple-statement-saying-more-or-less/Berquist takes up truth and falsity in the simple statement, defined as the mind saying of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not. Falsity, he shows, comes in two forms: saying what is not, is (adding to the truth), or saying what is, is not (subtracting from it). He illustrates both errors with courtroom oath language, lines from King Lear and Othello, and the Christological and Trinitarian heresies—Arianism, Patripassianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism—as historical cases of overshooting or falling short of a “modest” middle truth. He closes by defining contradictory statements and the three ways—sense, definition, reasoning—by which one determines which of a pair is true.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/027-compound-statements-and-the-square-of-opposition/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/027-compound-statements-and-the-square-of-opposition/Berquist asks what makes an if-then or an either-or statement true, and shows that a conditional’s truth turns not on whether its parts are true but on whether the connection between them is necessary—illustrated with the sixth theorem of Euclid’s Book I, a line from Shakespeare, and an example from Aquinas. He then takes up the square of opposition, sorting which pairs of universal and particular affirmatives and negatives sharing a subject are genuine contradictories rather than mere contraries. The class closes by tying this back to Aristotle’s distinction between demonstrative and dialectical reasoning, read alongside Aquinas’s commentary on the Posterior Analytics and a page of the handout “The Art About Statement.”https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/028-logic-of-the-second-act-wrap-up-mr-anti-statement-and-what/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/028-logic-of-the-second-act-wrap-up-mr-anti-statement-and-what/Berquist ties together the three acts of the mind, showing why reasoning presupposes judgment, which presupposes simple apprehension. He revisits the second act through “Mr. Anti-Statement,” a figure who contradicts every statement made to him, using the square of opposition to sharpen what contradiction and truth-value actually require. He then asks what reasoning itself is: a movement from statements already known or accepted to a new statement, illustrated with Socrates in the Meno, Heraclitus, and Einstein, and set apart from mere reasonable or wild guessing. He closes by naming the four kinds of argument—example, induction, enthymeme, and syllogism—to be taken up next.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/029-example-induction-and-enthymeme-arguments-near-the-senses/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/029-example-induction-and-enthymeme-arguments-near-the-senses/Berquist takes up a handout on the four kinds of argument to ask what separates example, induction, and enthymeme from the strict syllogism. He shows that example argues from one particular to a similar particular, induction climbs from many singulars to a universal claim, and enthymeme reasons from likelihood or sign rather than necessity. Along the way he traces the etymologies linking sample to example and induction to introduction and inducement, drawing illustrations from Henry V, Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Cicero as well as homely cases like picking a restaurant or a car. The recurring point: none of these arguments produces a necessary conclusion, only a probability that varies with how close the likeness or sign really is.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/030-the-syllogism-its-likeness-to-calculation-and-dividing-the/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/030-the-syllogism-its-likeness-to-calculation-and-dividing-the/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s definition of the syllogism as speech in which stated premises necessarily yield a conclusion, and asks how this differs from mere calculation, which looks similar but belongs to a different art. He then divides the four kinds of argument two ways: by resemblance, pairing syllogism with enthymeme and induction with example, and by practical use, setting syllogism and induction toward universal, dialectical conclusions against enthymeme and example’s work persuading about particulars in rhetoric. He tests these distinctions against Othello, Aesop’s fables, and courtroom and political speech, showing how imagination can mislead where reasoning from premises would not.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/031-three-kinds-of-syllogism-the-four-forms-of-if-then-speech/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/031-three-kinds-of-syllogism-the-four-forms-of-if-then-speech/Berquist distinguishes the three forms of syllogism: simple categorical, hypothetical (if-then), and disjunctive (either-or). He works through the four possible moves in a conditional argument, showing why affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent are valid while affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are not, drawing examples from Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Poetics. He then turns to Euclid’s Book I, Proposition 6, and to Plato’s Meno, where Socrates builds rival hypothetical syllogisms over whether virtue can be taught. He closes by noting how modern scientific hypothesis-testing repeats the classic error of affirming the consequent.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/032-form-and-matter-of-the-syllogism-either-or-and-if-then-syllogisms/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/032-form-and-matter-of-the-syllogism-either-or-and-if-then-syllogisms/Berquist opens by separating formal logic—whether a conclusion necessarily follows—from material logic—whether the premises are true—citing Albert the Great’s claim that the syllogism is logic’s central act. He then works through either-or (disjunctive) syllogisms before turning at length to the four forms of if-then speech, showing that affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent are valid while the other two forms are fallacious, drawing examples from Euclid, Aquinas’s Summa and Summa Contra Gentiles, and Socrates’ reasoning in Plato. He closes by tracing how chained conditional syllogisms operate and how this reasoning appears implicitly in Socrates and Melissus before Aristotle gave it formal shape.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/033-the-syllogism-set-of-all-set-of-none-and-the-sixteen-moods/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/033-the-syllogism-set-of-all-set-of-none-and-the-sixteen-moods/Berquist takes up the categorical syllogism from the handout on the form of the simple syllogism, asking why the middle term’s position in the first figure lets some of the sixteen possible premise-pairs yield a necessary conclusion while others fail. He grounds the answer in two principles: the “dictum de omni,” what is said of every member of a set, and the “dictum de nullo,” what is said of none. Working through combinations with examples like animals, plants, dogs, cats, and stones, he shows concretely how invalid moods break down. He closes by touching on conversion of universal statements and a passage from Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles that uses a disjunctive syllogism about God’s relation to creatures.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/034-second-figure-syllogisms-the-power-of-the-figures-and-why/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/034-second-figure-syllogisms-the-power-of-the-figures-and-why/Berquist tests the second figure of the syllogism systematically, running every combination of universal, particular, affirmative, and negative premises to see which convert back to the first figure and actually necessitate a conclusion. Where the pattern fails, he builds counterexamples—animal, dog, cat, stone—showing true premises compatible with both a universal affirmative and a universal negative conclusion, so nothing follows of necessity. He illustrates the stakes with Socrates’ argument against the soul-as-harmony thesis in the Phaedo and with reasoning about God’s unchangeability, then closes comparing the three figures, noting that only the first can conclude to all four categorical forms.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/035-conversion-and-the-second-figure-mixed-cases-then-nature/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/035-conversion-and-the-second-figure-mixed-cases-then-nature/Berquist continues his reading of the Prior Analytics, first proving that universal negative statements convert, then moving systematically through the second figure of the syllogism. He sorts valid mixed forms from invalid ones by building counterexamples with terms like animal, dog, and stone, showing why this figure yields only negative conclusions, unlike the broader first figure. He then draws the logic outward, using Plato’s Phaedo, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and Aquinas’s account of faith and belief to illustrate reasoning about opposites and about natural kinds.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/036-demonstration-cause-necessity-and-through-itself/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/036-demonstration-cause-necessity-and-through-itself/Berquist traces how cause, necessity, and “through itself” bear on definition and certitude, drawing on the Posterior Analytics alongside Metaphysics Book V, the Prior Analytics, and Plato’s Meno and Phaedo. He distinguishes demonstration propter quid, which gives the reasoned cause, from demonstration quia, which shows only that something is so, and sets demonstrative reasoning against dialectical reasoning. He closes with the four questions of inquiry from Book II of the Posterior Analytics—whether, what, that, and why—as the culmination of Aristotle’s logic of wonder, after opening with a short reading from a handout titled “Shakespeare on Error” and personal reminiscences of deceased acquaintances.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/037-dialectic-and-sophistical-refutations-fallacies-of-language/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/037-dialectic-and-sophistical-refutations-fallacies-of-language/Berquist picks up dialectic where he left off, first recalling its threefold usefulness from the Topics—as mental exercise, as a way of meeting others on their own ground, and as an aid to philosophy—before asking what makes a sophistical refutation false rather than a genuine exposure of self-contradiction. He then works through Aristotle’s division of the thirteen fallacies into those arising from language and those from things, dwelling especially on equivocation and on composition and division. Examples come from Feuerbach, Scripture, everyday speech, Plato’s Phaedo and Republic, St. Paul as glossed by Aquinas, and Shakespeare, all used to show why distinguishing the senses of key terms matters.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/038-fallacies-outside-language-accident-secundum-quid-and-the/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/038-fallacies-outside-language-accident-secundum-quid-and-the/Berquist takes up two fallacies from Aristotle that don’t depend on tricks of language: mistaking what belongs to a thing through itself for what merely happens to accompany it, and confusing what is true without qualification with what is only true in some respect. He works the distinctions through examples ranging from malaria’s supposed cause in marsh air to Berkeley’s idealism and Shakespeare’s sonnets, showing how the same confusion corrupts moral reasoning. He then turns to Plato’s Meno, examining Meno’s paradox about the possibility of inquiry and Socrates’ slave-boy demonstration, and flags that Plato himself will later be caught committing the fallacy of accident.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/039-syllogism-figures-wisely-and-slow-and-the-eight-recurring/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/039-syllogism-figures-wisely-and-slow-and-the-eight-recurring/Berquist takes up the third figure of the syllogism, showing which valid moods follow from universal premises and how conversion proves validity in the second and third figures. He then turns to eight recurring forms of argument—categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive—tracing how a chief syllogism is propped up by subordinate “backup” syllogisms defending its major and minor premises, worked out through Euclid’s first proposition and Aquinas’s question on the causes of love. Along the way he digresses through Shakespeare and Plato’s Phaedo, dwelling on what it means for reasoning to be wise and slow rather than quick.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/040-analyzing-arguments-in-euclid-and-aquinas-main-syllogisms/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/040-analyzing-arguments-in-euclid-and-aquinas-main-syllogisms/Berquist asks what kind of reasoning actually underlies a geometric proof, and finds in Euclid’s Elements, Book VII, Propositions 6 and 29, arguments that are not simple categorical syllogisms but continuous chains combining categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive forms. He traces the same nested pattern in Plato’s Meno and in Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, arguing that mathematics, philosophy, and theology share one underlying logical structure. He closes by distinguishing the “matter” of a syllogism—whether its premises are necessary, merely probable, or false—and previews coming treatment of equivocal terms and fallacies.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/041-demonstration-versus-dialectic-necessity-per-se-properties/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/041-demonstration-versus-dialectic-necessity-per-se-properties/Berquist asks what separates a proof from a mere argument. Turning to the Posterior Analytics and the Topics, he distinguishes demonstration, which proceeds from necessarily true premises as in Euclid’s geometric proofs, from dialectic, which reasons from probable opinions held by everyone, by most, or by the wisest, toward conclusions that could go either way. He explains the “per se” (through itself) relation—properties like a triangle’s angles or a number’s oddness following necessarily from a thing’s definition—as the key to necessity. Plato’s Theaetetus and Meno illustrate dialectical inquiry into knowledge and contrary conclusions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/042-the-dialecticians-tools-probable-premises-senses-of-words/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/042-the-dialecticians-tools-probable-premises-senses-of-words/Berquist continues his study of Aristotle’s Topics, asking what distinguishes the dialectician’s arguments—dialectical syllogism and induction—from rhetoric’s enthymeme and example. He then turns to the four tools of dialectic laid out in Topics I, spending most of the class on the first two: selecting and ordering probable opinions by subject matter, from general to particular, using examples from ethics and politics; and distinguishing the several senses of equivocal words, worked through with terms like “dry,” “liberal,” “number,” and “healthy.” The class ends with an exercise applying this second tool to a list of paired terms, judging in each case whether the use is univocal or equivocal and why.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/043-seeing-likeness-and-proportion-then-q-a-on-places-and-comedy/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/043-seeing-likeness-and-proportion-then-q-a-on-places-and-comedy/How do you argue from things that seem to have nothing in common? Berquist takes up the fourth dialectical tool, proportional likeness across wide distances, setting it against the third tool’s search for differences among near things. He tests it on Plato’s Meno, Euclid’s definitions, Aristotle on reason governing emotion, the inverse square law, Homer, Shakespeare, and biblical images of God as father and shepherd. The class then moves to the “places” of argument, focusing on a fortiori reasoning as Socrates uses it in the Phaedo, weighing the soul’s fitness to survive death against the body’s.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/044-equivocation-as-such-versus-accident-and-being-simply-or/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/1-philosophy-1999/044-equivocation-as-such-versus-accident-and-being-simply-or/Berquist takes up three distinctions whose neglect breeds bad reasoning: equivocation in the meaning of words, what pertains to a thing “as such” against what is merely accidental to it, and being “simply” or without qualification against being “in a certain respect.” He works through potency and act with the examples of lumber becoming a house and marble becoming Michelangelo’s Pietà, then turns to moral cases, including abortion and the pursuit of an apparent good, to show how conflating these distinctions corrupts judgment. He closes over the opening lines of a text of Aquinas, in the manner of Charles De Koninck’s teaching, urging slow, wondering re-reading of a short passage over rapid coverage of many pages.