Distinctions and Likeness Among the Tools; Why Aristotle's Metaphysics Book III Begins with Doubting Well

Orientation #

He opens mid-discourse (“So I got into that discourse there”) on why the second tool of dialectic comes right after the first, continuing the four tools (prev. lecture). Verified sources: he reads from his handout on Categories ch. 12 (“before”) for about six minutes. The previous class worked through the four tools of the Topics and Thomas on God’s attributes; the next turns to error and the Sophistical Refutations.

The class, in order #

1. Why the senses of words come right after probable premises (“reason looks before and after”) #

Point: the second tool serves the first in two ways.

1. Thomas in the De Veritate constantly quotes Augustine or Damascene; to argue from them as probable opinions you must know exactly what they mean, which needs the distinction of senses.
2. Distinguishing senses multiplies probable statements: if “reason looks before and after” is probable and “before” has four or five senses, then reason looks before and after in each sense may also be probable. Example: act is before ability in being, in causality, in knowledge (the ability to see is distinguished from the ability to hear by the acts each is for), in goodness; “maybe not in time, but perhaps in duration” (“before Abraham was”).

2. Which tool is more like the second, and the fourth tool as engine of discovery (“a likeness of what ratios”) #

Point: the third tool (differences of things) is closer to the second (a student says the fourth; he corrects himself to the third, since “you might see a distinction in words but not of things”); the fourth, likeness, is left in fourth place but is “very important for discovering things”.

• Einstein: three-dimensional creatures coming to see they live in a four-dimensional world compared to a two-dimensional creature discovering a third dimension; likeness of ratios makes it easier to talk about.
• Water wave to sound wave to light wave (a student adds gravity waves): understanding the earlier prepares for the later; the scientist-historians he read call this “probably the most fertile thing” for discovery.
• Aristotle argues often from likeness of ratios: genus is to difference as matter is to form (animal able to be dog, cat, horse; wood able to be chair, desk, crucifix).

3. Genus and species: like form and matter, like part and whole; the eight senses of “in” (“Remember the order of the senses of in”) #

Point: the likeness must be considered (Aristotle’s word), not overextended.

• Order of the senses of in: (1) we in this room, (2) tooth in mouth, (3) genus in species: all actual. (4) species in genus: only potential; (5) form in matter. So species is to genus somewhat as form to matter.
• Limits: the genus is said of the species (a dog is an animal), but matter is not said of form (the shape of the table is not “a kind of wood”). Triangle able to be scalene, isosceles, equilateral; the difference must be added, as form to wood. Euclid’s five quadrilaterals, four of them parallelograms, trapezium “to cover the oddballs”.
• Student: is genus/species a real distinction or of reason? He: “could be both”; but form and matter are really not the same thing, so the likeness has limits.
• Third and fourth senses: a tooth is in the mouth, but you don’t say a tooth is a mouth; you do say a dog is an animal. So genus/species is in one way like form/matter, in another like part/whole; and one must ask whether form in matter is like whole/part, species/genus, or both (matter considered in relation to form is “kind of like part and whole”).
• Grouping: first three senses, actually in; next three, in by passive ability; the seventh, active ability (“I got you in my power”). Which of the first two is more like genus in species? The tooth in the mouth, being a part in a whole; he in the room is not a part (“that was when you had your feet on the floor”).
• “Very, very subtle”: genus is to species as part to whole, but species is to genus as form to matter.
• Thomas ordered the eight senses Aristotle gave in Book IV of Natural Hearing by their likeness; Aristotle started from being in this room as easiest for us, Book IV being about place and time. So the second tool is connected to the fourth.
• Aside: North Korean parades, soldiers goose-stepping past the “fearless leader”, “you better obey me”.

4. “Where”, place, and the predicaments (“Where would you put grace”) #

Point: “where” first suggests place, then category.

• Waking in the hospital, “where am I?”; his lost book-weights and letter openers found by searching; “put things where they belong”.
• Thomas in the De Veritate puts grace in the first species of quality, though different from habit.
• Body is in the genus of substance and in the genus of quantity, so “body” must have two senses, which most people cannot distinguish. Descartes makes the substance of material things length, width and depth; his joke: “Descartes never grew up”, since if size were substance you would not be the same person when taller; size is accidental though closest to material substance. (He wrote his doctoral thesis comparing Descartes and Aristotle on the three ways of going forward.)
• De Koninck liked “predicament” (Latin for category): once in one predicament you cannot wander into another.

5. The senses of “before”: second and third alike (“something can be without something else”) #

Point (defending “Shakespeare’s definition of reason” via the post-predicaments): the second sense, being without but not vice versa, is like the third, known without but not the reverse.

• Marble can be without Michelangelo’s Pietà, not the Pietà without marble.
• One can know number without perfect number, not the reverse (his students for years).
• Letters C, A, T can be without the word “cat” (in “act”, “TAC”); WPI without “wimp”, not the reverse.
• Quadrilateral known without trapezium, rhombus (“square that’s been jerked”, ends in S), rhomboid (“oblong jerked”), parallelogram, not the reverse; parallelogram roughly “a quadrilateral whose opposite sides and angles are equal”.
• Aside: parallel lines never meet, “unless you’re Muslim” (a student’s joke, laughter). Conclusion: all four tools are very closely related.

6. Aside: de Broglie, Gamow, the French (“you can find this as a proportion”) #

Einstein on de Broglie’s wave mechanics: a proportion can be a mere plaything, but seeing a real one is major science; Gamow could not get de Broglie to speak English in Paris, though he lectured in perfect English in England; his friend Rodney’s travels, a Spanish bar demanding “service”, an inheritance of Haydn records and money.

7. The third book of wisdom is entirely dialectical (“the affinity between dialectic and what wisdom”) #

Point: he goes to Metaphysics III, first lectio, where Aristotle gives four reasons for proceeding dialectically; Thomas says these reasons explain dialectic also in the Physics and Ethics, but here the whole book is dialectical.

• Reason: affinity of dialectic and wisdom (Averroes too), Aristotle comparing wisdom to both dialectic and sophistic in their universality. The sophist would rather appear wise than be wise; the philosopher, the reverse. The sophist must appear to know it all, so fallacies like equivocation work in any part of philosophy: “universal sophistication”. The four tools likewise apply anywhere; the wise man knows all things in some way (from the proemium).
• Book V of wisdom is wholly about distinguishing senses of words used in wisdom and the axioms, unlike Physics IV which only distinguishes senses of in in passing; again the affinity with dialectic.

8. First reason: to doubt well; discovery is the untying of a knot (“For those wishing to what to discover”) #

He reads the Greek: anankē; proteron epizetoumen episteme; diaporesai kalos; euporesai; lusis.

1. For the proposed science it is necessary first to go through what ought first to be doubted, the things others have spoken differently about, each with some reason.
2. For those wishing to discover, it is necessary first to doubt well; the later discovery (euporia) is an untying (lusis) of what was doubted before.
3. One who does not know the knot cannot untie it; insofar as the mind doubts it is like one whose feet are chained, unable to go forward.

• Moderns are full of doubts but do not doubt well; to doubt well is to give arguments on both sides.
• De Veritate: 29 questions, articles with ten, fifteen, twenty arguments each side; the Summa abbreviates this. His brother Mark and he would lock professors in a room to stew in objections on both sides before the body of the article (the untying) and the replies (to one side, or both if both defective).
• “The game is all tied up”, untied by a ninth-inning home run. A seeming contradiction shows something you don’t see; Bohr untied the knot of the atom by applying the quantum.

9. Second and third reasons: knowing where you go and when you arrive (“those who don’t know where they’re going”) #

• Second: those who seek without first doubting do not know where they are going, since the direction is the untying of the knot. His own experience opening an unfamiliar article of Thomas: tied in a knot, then realizing something hidden.
• Third, “the other side of the coin”: they will not know when they have found it; once the knot is untied, the contradiction disappears and the end is clear.
• Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen near despair (“can nature really be as absurd?”); Bohr went skiing, each worked a solution, found them compatible; Heisenberg’s calculations came out “perfect one number after another”: he knew he had arrived.

10. Fourth reason: hearing both sides, like a courtroom (“in a better position towards judging”) #

• One judges better having heard the arguments of those disagreeing, as hearing both lawyers rather than one; a student adds hearing both sides of a marriage dispute and advocacy putting a “spin” on fixed facts. Likeness of dialectic and rhetorical reasoning.
• Thomas in his commentary: for these reasons Aristotle uses dialectic not only in Book III but in many parts of philosophy; only geometry and mathematics, being so certain, hardly need it.

His words #

• tools of dialectic: probable premises; senses of words; differences; likenesses (prev. lecture ordering)
• act before ability [ed.: act before potency]: in being, causality, knowledge, goodness, duration
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics], Book Four: place, time, empty [ed.: void]; eight senses of in
• consideration: Aristotle’s word for weighing in what way things are alike
• predicament: De Koninck’s word for category, a situation you can’t get out of
• books of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]; third book entirely dialectical; fifth distinguishes senses
• proemium: attribute of the wise man, knows all things in some way
• anankē: necessary; episteme: science; diaporesai kalos: to doubt well; euporia: discovery; lusis: untying
• questions disputati [ed.: quaestiones disputatae]: arguments on both sides, then the body, then replies

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Categories ch. 12 (senses of before), from his handout
• Aristotle, Metaphysics Book III, ch. 1 (first lectio), Greek read and translated Mentioned
• Aristotle, Physics Book IV (eight senses of in, place and time)
• Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate (29 questions; grace in first species of quality)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics Book V (senses of words); proemium of the Metaphysics
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Metaphysics III (inferred)
• Averroes on dialectic and wisdom; Euclid on quadrilaterals; Descartes; Heisenberg’s book on Bohr

His questions #

• Which is more like the second tool, the third or the fourth? The third: differences of things is closer to distinctions in words.
• Species is to genus a bit like what? Form is to matter, but the likeness must not be overextended.
• Is the distinction of genus and species real or of reason? “Could be both”; form and matter are not the same thing.
• Which is more like genus in species: tooth in mouth, or me in this room? Tooth in mouth, as part in whole.
• Where would you put grace? Thomas: in the first species of quality, distinct from habit.
• If body is in two genera, what follows? “Body” must have two different senses.
• How does one doubt well? By giving the arguments on both sides.
• How do you know you’ve arrived if you didn’t know where you were going? You don’t; only one who saw the knot knows when it is untied.