https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/Recent content in 2. Logic (2016) on The Duane Berquist LecturesHugoenThu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/001-the-equivocity-of-logos-from-johns-gospel-to-thomass-division/Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/001-the-equivocity-of-logos-from-johns-gospel-to-thomass-division/Berquist starts from the equivocity of “logos” — word, thought, reason, the naming of a thing — as it appears at the opening of John’s Gospel, where the Word is the Father’s own perfect self-thought and a Person. He then follows Thomas Aquinas into the prologues to the logical commentaries, especially on the Posterior Analytics and Peri Hermeneias, using Aristotle’s De Anima to work out the difference between a name and speech. Comparing Thomas’s threefold division of logic — simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning, matched to the Categories, De Interpretatione, and the Analytics and Topics — against Albert the Great’s simpler twofold division of defining and reasoning, he closes by setting logic’s method of predication against natural philosophy’s method of motion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/002-logics-three-acts-of-reason-univocal-and-equivocal-names/Thu, 13 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/002-logics-three-acts-of-reason-univocal-and-equivocal-names/Berquist lays out Aquinas’s threefold division of reason’s acts — grasping what something is, judging truth or falsity by composition and division, and reasoning — and matches each to its logical treatment: definition, statement, argument, drawn from Aristotle’s Categories, Peri Hermeneias, and the works on syllogism and demonstration. He contrasts this with Albert the Great’s rival twofold division of logic. Turning to Porphyry’s Isagoge, he distinguishes names used univocally from those used equivocally, either by chance or by reason (analogously), then begins working through the five predicables with genus, illustrating the abstractions with examples ranging from Shakespeare to geometry.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/003-porphyrys-five-predicables-difference-species-property-and/Thu, 13 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/003-porphyrys-five-predicables-difference-species-property-and/Berquist takes up Porphyry’s account of the five predicables, asking how difference both completes a definition begun by genus and divides that genus into species—illustrated with squares and quadrilaterals. He then separates property, which follows necessarily from a thing’s nature (as two right angles follow from being a triangle), from accident, which does not (as color). Along the way he traces how words like “property,” “undergoing,” and “road” slide into equivocation by losing part of their original sense, drawing on Aristotle’s Categories and De Anima. He closes by asking why Porphyry defines species differently from genus and difference, noting how terms like virtue, habit, and comedy shift between genus and species depending on relation, and pointing ahead to the categories.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/004-ante-predicaments-i-highest-genera-being-as-a-name-for-everything/Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/004-ante-predicaments-i-highest-genera-being-as-a-name-for-everything/Berquist begins with Aristotle’s Categories, asking why things named “beings” are not named univocally the way animals sharing a genus are. He walks through the opening distinctions of equivocal, univocal, and denominative (paronymous) naming, then uses these to argue that being cannot be a single highest genus, since a genus requires univocal predication of its species. He places this within the larger plan of the Categories—ante-predicaments, predicaments, post-predicaments—and draws on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and Aquinas on divine simplicity for comparison. Homely examples—family relations, geometrical figures, grammar—illustrate genus, species, and the whole/part relation throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/005-ante-predicaments-ii-said-of-and-in-a-subject-individual/Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/005-ante-predicaments-ii-said-of-and-in-a-subject-individual/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s Categories, starting from chapter one’s split between simple terms and intertwined statements, then the fourfold division of beings by whether they are said of a subject and/or in a subject — sorting out universal substance, individual substance, universal accident, and individual accident. He turns to chapter three, where predication carries transitively down a genus-species line, but differences belonging to unrelated genera, like animal and science, do not transfer across them. Along the way he works out equivocal terms such as “knowing” versus “thinking” and the several senses of “accident,” setting up the later treatment of the ten categories.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/006-the-ten-categories-in-aristotles-text-and-thomas-on-being/Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/006-the-ten-categories-in-aristotles-text-and-thomas-on-being/Berquist finishes the antepredicaments in Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 4, reading closely through his handout to lay out the ten highest genera — substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, having, action, passion — with attention to Aristotle’s Greek terms and his choice of examples, and to how affirmation and negation depend on the “intertwining” of terms. He then sets this beside Aquinas’s parallel treatments in the commentaries on the Physics and Metaphysics, asking why being splits non-univocally into these genera rather than one, with digressions on translation problems and on how analogical and equivocal naming bear on the relation of logic to natural philosophy and wisdom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/007-deriving-the-ten-categories-substance-inherent-accidents/Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/007-deriving-the-ten-categories-substance-inherent-accidents/Berquist follows Aquinas’s exposition of Categories, chapter 4, asking how ten distinct predicaments arise from a single threefold division of predication. Substance is predicated by essence; quantity, quality, and relation are predicated by an accident inhering in the subject; the remaining six—action, passion, place, time, position, and habitus—are predicated by extrinsic denomination from a cause (matter, form, agent, end) or from a measure. He clarifies the property/accident and intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions with examples like kicking, heating water, sitting, and wearing clothes, and notes that Aristotle’s Metaphysics will take up the same causal distinctions again.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/008-being-divided-into-the-ten-categories-thomass-exposition/Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/008-being-divided-into-the-ten-categories-thomass-exposition/Berquist takes up Thomas’s commentary on Metaphysics V to ask why “being” cannot serve as a genus for its categories, tracing instead how it divides analogically into substance, quantity, quality, relation, and the other predicaments according to how a predicate relates to its subject. He distinguishes per se from accidental being, being in the mind from being outside it, and act from potency, illustrating each with everyday examples. A student’s question sends him briefly into Aquinas’s teaching on how soul fits body differently across species and between man and woman before he returns to the main line. Throughout, he stresses treating “being” as a word equivocal by reason, ordering its senses carefully, against modern philosophy’s looser handling of terms like “opposite.”https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/009-crossing-two-divisions-how-words-become-equivocal-by-reason/Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/009-crossing-two-divisions-how-words-become-equivocal-by-reason/Berquist opens by showing how crisscrossing two two-part divisions yields real distinctions, using Aristotle’s account of plot—beginning, middle, end—in the Poetics and the Trinitarian processions as illustrations, before applying the technique to substance and accident, universal and singular. He then spends the bulk of the class on how a term becomes “equivocal by reason,” distinguishing several ways this happens: keeping or dropping a common name, losing part of a word’s original meaning, and transferring a term by ratio or likeness of ratios, drawing examples from the Physics, Topics, On the Soul, and Metaphysics. He closes by turning to Categories, ch. 5, working from his handout on substance and Aquinas’s commentary on the division of substance into first and second substance.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/010-first-and-second-substance-and-how-words-take-on-related/Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/010-first-and-second-substance-and-how-words-take-on-related/Berquist reads the chapter on substance in Aristotle’s Categories, distinguishing first substance (the singular thing) from second substance (the universal) and showing how this reorders the earlier division of singular and universal. He extends the inquiry into St. Thomas’s varied uses of “substance” across the Summa theologiae, Summa contra Gentiles, and the definition of faith in Hebrews, then turns to how analogy differs from equivocation by reason, using “healthy,” “disposition,” and “understanding” as test cases. A digression on the beautiful as an object of cognition rather than will, drawn from Augustine’s Confessions, rounds out the session, with everyday examples like elections and sunsets keeping the distinctions concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/011-the-properties-of-substance-the-hypostasis-of-christ-and/Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/011-the-properties-of-substance-the-hypostasis-of-christ-and/Berquist continues through Aristotle’s Categories chapter 5, listing the properties of substance: not being in a subject, being said univocally, being a “this something,” admitting no contrary, admitting no degree, and being able to receive contraries while staying numerically one. He illustrates each with ordinary examples before turning to Aquinas, asking how these Aristotelian terms bear on the naming of God, divine simplicity, and the puzzle of how “substance,” “hypostasis,” and “person” apply—or fail to apply—to the Trinity and to Christ’s human nature. He closes by flagging that the next class turns to Aristotle’s treatment of quantity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/012-the-beauty-of-order-numbers-in-the-treatise-on-the-trinity/Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/012-the-beauty-of-order-numbers-in-the-treatise-on-the-trinity/Berquist opens with the Trinity’s ordered numbers—three persons, two processions, four relations—and the beauty that lies in such order, symmetry, and limit, drawing illustrations from Shakespeare, Mozart, and Sherlock Holmes. He then turns to Aristotle, asking why the genera of being are not simply the first division of things, working from the Categories around chapter five into chapter six. Using a handout titled “Quantity,” he traces quantity’s split into discrete kinds like number and continuous kinds like line, surface, and time, checking the text closely against Aristotle’s own wording.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/013-quantity-by-its-parts-and-measures-two-definitions-of-the/Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/013-quantity-by-its-parts-and-measures-two-definitions-of-the/Reading from his handout on chapter six, Berquist asks what it means to call something continuous, and why the logician’s account of quantity differs from the wise man’s fuller treatment of number, magnitude, time, and place. He works the line-versus-number case to show how divisibility separates the species of quantity, then digresses through Heisenberg’s unacknowledged debt to Aristotelian potency before settling the question of whether music or painting ranks higher among the arts. Throughout, he ties these finer distinctions back to what he calls the “goodness of the doctrine,” the reason for going beyond the bare text.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/014-divisions-of-five-the-one-convertible-with-being-and-the/Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/014-divisions-of-five-the-one-convertible-with-being-and-the/Reading closely from the handout on Categories, chapter 6, Berquist takes up Aristotle’s division of quantity into discrete kinds like number and continuous kinds like line, surface, and body, asking why number counts as a “quasi-genus” rather than a genus proper. He sets this alongside the recurring pattern of five-fold divisions found elsewhere in the tradition—five ways, five external senses, five kinds of continuous quantity—and turns to the kinds of composition Aquinas excludes in arguing for divine simplicity. Personal recollections of his own teachers punctuate the technical exposition.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/015-quantity-time-and-reason-individuation-the-properties-of/Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/015-quantity-time-and-reason-individuation-the-properties-of/Berquist reads closely through the Categories’ account of continuous quantity, asking why its species—line, surface, body, place, time, number, speech—divide as they do depending on whether their parts share a common boundary and whether those parts have positional order. Time gets special attention as the strange case of order without position. Drawing on Aquinas, he presses quantity’s odd nearness to substance: it individuates itself and even individuates other accidents like color, and lacks contraries. He ties this to the Eucharistic accidents, the distinction between numbering and numbered number, and the verb’s signification of time as it bears on the Peri Hermeneias.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/016-categories-chapter-6-on-quantity-intentions-of-the-mind-number/Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/016-categories-chapter-6-on-quantity-intentions-of-the-mind-number/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 6, on quantity, reading closely from his own handout while drawing in Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences, the Proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics commentary, De Potentia, and Metaphysics VII. He distinguishes concepts like “man,” grounded directly in things, from second intentions like “genus,” which depend on how the mind understands rather than on the thing itself, then asks what this means for number—including whether it applies properly to the divine persons—and for unity, contrasting something one simply (like a man) with something one only in a qualified sense (a mere pile, per Democritus’s atomism), using examples from Shakespeare’s sonnets and campaign rhetoric.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/017-from-quantity-to-towards-something-categories-chapter-7-on/Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/017-from-quantity-to-towards-something-categories-chapter-7-on/Berquist closes out chapter six of Aristotle’s Categories, working through quantity’s division into discrete and continuous, ordered and unordered species, the difference between quantity per se and per accidens, and quantity’s peculiar properties: it admits no contrary and no more-or-less, only equal and unequal. He then turns to chapter seven and the category of relation, asking why Aristotle treats it before quality even though he enumerates quality first. Using Plato’s original definition of relatives and its later revision—meant to keep substance from dissolving into a bundle of relations—he distinguishes things relative by their whole nature, like double and half, from things only relative in a qualified sense, like knowledge or love, which are really qualities that a relation follows upon. Family relationships and units of measure serve as running examples.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/018-predication-and-the-category-of-towards-something-cajetan/Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/018-predication-and-the-category-of-towards-something-cajetan/Berquist takes up Cajetan’s treatment of the category of relation in Aristotle’s Categories, asking what makes something genuinely relative rather than merely spoken of in relation to another. He lays out the two definitions: Plato’s relativa secundum dici, things simply said toward another, against Aristotle’s stricter relativa secundum esse, things whose very nature consists in being toward another—illustrated through double and half, knowledge, and paternity. From there he distinguishes senses of “being” in Aristotle and Aquinas—quiddity, act of existence, and truth of a proposition—and uses that distinction to read Aquinas’s account of relation applied to the Trinity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/019-real-relations-and-relations-of-reason-knowledge-gods-unchanging/Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/019-real-relations-and-relations-of-reason-knowledge-gods-unchanging/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s category of relation and Aquinas’s sharpening of it in a text from the Disputed Questions on the Power of God, which separates relatives secundum esse from relatives secundum dici, and real relations from mere relations of reason. He works through examples—knower and known, the two sides of a pillar, creature and God—to show when a relation is grounded in reality on both sides and when only in thought. From there he moves to how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each possess the one divine nature differently, and closes with the Prima Pars and Thomas’s commentary on Job on providence: why God’s letting creatures share in causing good opens the possibility of evil and error.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/020-relation-part-1-relatives-secundum-esse-and-secundum-dici/Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/020-relation-part-1-relatives-secundum-esse-and-secundum-dici/Berquist works through Aristotle’s account of relation in chapter 7 of the Categories, drawing the key distinction between relativa secundum esse—things like double and half, whose entire being consists in being toward something else—and relativa secundum dici, things fundamentally absolute in themselves, such as knowledge or power, which only imply a relation without being constituted by it. He extends this distinction to Trinitarian theology, considering how the one divine nature is communicated among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through real relations, then contrasts real relations with mere relations of reason, such as that between genus and species, situating the whole discussion within Aristotle’s broader treatment of being in the Metaphysics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/021-relation-part-2-thomas-on-real-relations-and-relations-of/Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/021-relation-part-2-thomas-on-real-relations-and-relations-of/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of relation as the weakest of the categories of being, weaker in its hold on reality than substance, quantity, or quality. He works through the distinction between relatives spoken of “secundum esse,” whose whole being consists in referring to another, and those “secundum dici,” where the relation is only named, and asks what makes a relation real versus a mere relation of reason. Familiar cases—one thing being taller than another, a teacher’s knowledge of a student, ties of family—illustrate the ordinary run of real relations, while the puzzling case of Father, Son, and Creator in God tests how far the category can be stretched. Aristotle and Boethius stand behind Aquinas throughout as the authorities he is interpreting and correcting.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/022-relation-ad-aliquid-real-relations-their-causes-and-the-knower/Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/022-relation-ad-aliquid-real-relations-their-causes-and-the-knower/Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of relation as its own category of being, asking what a real relation is founded on. Working from Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics alongside Thomas’s Sentences commentary, Summa Theologiae, and De Potentia, he shows that real relations depend on a founding cause—quantity, or action and passion—rather than on their terms, using paternity, sonship, and equality as running examples. He then turns to the harder case of the Trinity, and uses Aristotle’s example of knowledge and the knowable, against the mutual relation of lover and beloved, to distinguish real relations from mere relations of reason.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/023-relations-of-reason-in-de-potentia-and-aristotles-chapter/Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/023-relations-of-reason-in-de-potentia-and-aristotles-chapter/Berquist opens with Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on the Power of God, sorting relations of reason into distinct kinds: purely logical ones like genus and species, and those arising from the mind’s need to order things not yet distinct in reality, such as the future. He applies this to explain how “Lord” and “Creator” name God truly even though God bears no real relation to what he creates. The class then shifts to Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 8, working from a handout on quality, covering its four species—habit, natural capacity, affection, and shape—and the traits proper to quality, including admitting contraries and grounding likeness.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/024-relations-of-reason-and-the-four-species-of-quality-dividing/Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/024-relations-of-reason-and-the-four-species-of-quality-dividing/Berquist opens with a short aside on Aquinas’s De Potentia and Contra Errores Graecorum, touching the Filioque dispute with the Orthodox, before turning to Categories ch. 8. There he takes up Aristotle’s four species of quality—habits and dispositions, natural capacities, affective qualities, and shape or form—asking why Aristotle orders them as he does and whether they can also be grouped into two or three kinds. He shows how Aquinas uses this same division in the Prima Secundae’s treatment of virtue, drawing comparisons along the way to Plato, Avicenna, and Augustine’s Enchiridion, with attention to how examples are ordered in both texts.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/025-quality-said-in-many-ways-qualis-and-how-why-habit-comes/Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/025-quality-said-in-many-ways-qualis-and-how-why-habit-comes/Berquist reads closely through Categories, ch. 8, tracking how “quality” answers the question “what sort?” (qualis, “how”) across its several kinds: figure and shape, natural capacity and incapacity, affective qualities and passions, and finally habit and disposition. He asks why habit is treated first among these in Aquinas’s ordering, drawing out the sense of quality bound up with a thing’s good or bad orientation toward its nature. He then turns to Aristotle’s four senses of “end” (terminus), probing how each might be said of God as beginning and end. Along the way he brings in square and cube numbers and poetic meter to show how far a single word like “how” or “end” can stretch across genuinely different senses.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/026-quality-in-theology-powers-grace-sacramental-character-and/Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/026-quality-in-theology-powers-grace-sacramental-character-and/Berquist takes up the treatise on quality in Categories, chapter 8, asking why relation comes third among the genera and why power and knowledge count as qualities rather than relations. He walks through the four species—habit and disposition, natural power and inability, sensible and passible qualities, figure and shape—noting that alteration properly belongs only to the third. Turning to theology, he uses texts from the Summa Theologiae, De Spiritualibus Creaturis, and a disputed question on sacramental character to show how grace and sacramental character get “reduced” to the first and second species even though neither fits Aristotle’s categories exactly. He closes by tracing how words like procession, “in,” “before,” and reason itself borrow their meaning analogically from continuous quantity, place, motion, and time.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/027-the-last-six-categories-gods-eternity-and-a-review-of-the/Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/027-the-last-six-categories-gods-eternity-and-a-review-of-the/Berquist takes up the six categories left untreated so far—where, when, position, having, action, and passion—showing, from the Antepredicamenta of Aristotle’s Categories, how each names a subject denominatively, from something outside it, unlike substance, quantity, quality, and relation. He reviews the traditional threefold structure of the work into Antepredicaments, Predicaments, and Postpredicaments, working through equivocal, univocal, and denominative naming and the ordering of universal and particular substance and accident. He also covers the Postpredicaments—opposition, priority, simultaneity, motion, and having—with digressions on divine eternity, Boethius, and the modern misuse of dialectical opposition in Marxist thought, illustrated throughout with examples drawn from clothing, posture, and wine measures.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/028-the-post-predicaments-i-opposites-distinction-and-speaking/Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/028-the-post-predicaments-i-opposites-distinction-and-speaking/Berquist takes up the Categories’ account of opposition—relatives, contraries, privation and possession, and contradictories—along with priority and simultaneity, following Aquinas’s commentary closely. He shows the reach of this logical apparatus by tracing it into Trinitarian theology, where the persons are distinguished by relation, into the Physics’ treatment of place and time, and into the soul’s causal relation to the body, pausing along the way over illustrations from Shakespeare and Mozart. The class closes on chapter ten’s further remarks on opposition, setting up the next session’s turn to truth and falsity in disjunctive statements.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/029-the-post-predicaments-ii-before-together-motion-and-having/Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/029-the-post-predicaments-ii-before-together-motion-and-having/Berquist continues through Aristotle’s post-predicaments, distinguishing the several senses of “prior”—in time, in an irreversible order of being, in knowledge, and in worth—before turning to “simultaneous,” a brief pass through the six kinds of motion, and an extended treatment of the seven senses of “having.” He keeps returning to Aquinas, asking how these logical distinctions let us speak rightly of the Father and Son, and of divine attributes like wisdom and goodness, without implying real priority or division in God. Examples drawn from music history, ordinary speech, and personal anecdote illustrate how each sense of the terms is analogically rooted in more basic notions of quantity, place, and motion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/030-kinds-of-opposites-and-the-trinity-heavens-praise-evil-as/Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/030-kinds-of-opposites-and-the-trinity-heavens-praise-evil-as/Berquist opens by linking the beatific vision’s seeing, loving, and praising to the three theological virtues and Aristotle’s remark that three is the “perfect” number. He then turns to Aristotle’s four kinds of opposition—contradiction, privation, contraries, and relatives—drawing on Aquinas’s brief remarks on the Categories, the Scriptum super Sententiis, and De Malo. This doctrine is put to work on two problems: how evil is rightly understood as privation, and how the divine Persons are distinguished by relative opposition. The class closes with Aquinas on “before” (prius) in the Sentences commentary, using opposition and simultaneity to show, negatively, that the Father is in no way prior to the Son.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/031-relations-of-reason-eternity-as-whole-at-once-motion-among/Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/031-relations-of-reason-eternity-as-whole-at-once-motion-among/Berquist takes up a text of Aquinas, drawn from Aristotle, Avicenna, and Boethius, on whether God’s priority to the world names a real relation or merely a relation of reason, running through the four Avicennian cases where reason alone grounds such relations. He then dwells on Boethius’s definition of eternity from the Consolation of Philosophy—“the whole and perfect possession of unending life at once”—drawing out how eternity’s simultaneity differs from time’s before-and-after. He turns next to the categories of motion and habit, touching place, alteration, and growth, and closes by introducing the mind’s three acts—simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning—and their corresponding kinds of speech, name, statement, and argument, as the foundation for the divisions of logic.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/032-senses-of-before-and-after-and-the-eight-senses-of-in-as/Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/032-senses-of-before-and-after-and-the-eight-senses-of-in-as/Berquist opens with prayer and moves into a cluster of Aristotelian distinctions: the several senses of “before and after,” a further causal sense among them, and the difference between confused and distinct knowledge. He argues for “ability” over “power” or “potency” to name active and passive capacities, then takes up the eight senses of “in” from Book IV of the Physics, pairing each with a way of reasoning things out—through parts, wholes, genus, species, form and matter, conclusions, and word-meanings. Illustrations range from wine-tasting and teeth in the mouth to Marxist dialectics and Shakespeare, with the discussion circling back to angelic mediation of prophecy, the word “intelligere,” and how these distinctions bear on the Trinity and divine wisdom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/033-the-order-of-thinking-out-definition-understanding-what-a/Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/033-the-order-of-thinking-out-definition-understanding-what-a/Berquist works out the sequence by which reason moves from grasping what a thing is to saying something true or false about it. He distinguishes name from speech, and definition—speech signifying what a thing is—from statement, which signifies truth or falsity, using even, odd, and perfect numbers and Euclid’s Elements as test cases, alongside Aristotle’s Categories, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and Aquinas’s proemium to logic on the first two acts of understanding and the third act of reasoning. He closes by turning these tools on a live question: whether one can rightly call something true or false about sex and gender before first understanding what the thing itself is.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/034-truth-and-falsity-in-statements-either-or-and-if-then-statements/Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/034-truth-and-falsity-in-statements-either-or-and-if-then-statements/Berquist asks why a bare name like “goat-stag” is neither true nor false while a statement can be, tracing the simple statement’s division into noun, verb, and copula and the peculiar role of the verb in signifying time. He then turns to compound statements, working out the logic of either-or claims and, at greater length, if-then statements: which patterns of affirming or denying the antecedent or consequent give necessary conclusions and which give only probability. Examples come from Aristotle, Aquinas on the Trinity, Euclid, and Shakespeare, all in service of his running method of “thinking out” a subject’s parts, order, and definition.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/035-if-then-arguments-conversion-of-statements-and-the-first/Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/035-if-then-arguments-conversion-of-statements-and-the-first/Berquist opens by reviewing compound statements—especially either-or and if-then forms—and walks through all four possible combinations of if-then syllogisms, showing by counterexample and by insight into necessity which two combinations force a true conclusion and which two do not. He then turns to the “Form of the Simple Syllogism” handout to lay out the dictum de omni et nullo and the three figures of the syllogism, distinguished by where the middle term falls. Working through the rules for converting universal and particular affirmative and negative statements, he tests valid and invalid moods of the first figure against concrete cases—animals, dogs, stones, trees—and closes with a brief aside via Boethius, as read by Aquinas, on logic’s kinship to wisdom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/036-reason-knowing-itself-the-second-and-third-figures-of-the/Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/036-reason-knowing-itself-the-second-and-third-figures-of-the/Berquist takes up the second and third figures of the categorical syllogism from “The Form of the Simple Syllogism,” testing combinations of universal premises through conversion and counterexample—dog, animal, stone, cat—to determine which yield a necessary conclusion and which fail. He then turns to “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument” and “Know Thyself,” asking what it means for logic to be self-reflexive: how equivocal terms work, what a definition of definition would be, and how distinction itself gets distinguished. He ties these questions back to the Delphic command “know thyself” and previews how the same syllogistic forms bear on statements made about God in the Summa.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/037-compound-statements-the-definition-of-syllogism-and-the-kinds/Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/037-compound-statements-the-definition-of-syllogism-and-the-kinds/Berquist works through the logical theory of statements, showing how truth functions differently in disjunctive, conjunctive, and hypothetical (“if-then”) compounds, illustrated with conjunctive examples from John’s Gospel, the Apocalypse, and Augustine’s Confessions, plus a look at how Aquinas structures the Summa Contra Gentiles. He then takes up Aristotle’s definition of syllogism as speech in which a conclusion follows of necessity from premises, setting it and induction against the rhetorical forms of enthymeme and example, with Boethius invoked on whether these arguments proceed from the singular or the universal. Scripture, Shakespeare, and contemporary anecdotes serve as running illustrations throughout.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/038-two-senses-of-induction-gods-simplicity-the-senses-of-body/Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/038-two-senses-of-induction-gods-simplicity-the-senses-of-body/Berquist opens by separating two senses of induction: arguing from many singular cases to a universal, and arguing from less universal truths up to a most universal one. He traces the second sense through Aquinas’s treatment of divine simplicity in Question 3 of the Summa, where the seventh article runs through six kinds of composition found in creatures before concluding, by induction and syllogism together, that God admits no composition at all. Along the way he takes up the equivocal uses of words like “body” and “seeing,” touches Aristotle’s dialectic in the Metaphysics, and asks how self-evident axioms such as “the whole is greater than the part” are first grasped through induction yet confirmed by understanding their terms. He closes by working through the handout on the simple syllogism, testing which figures and moods yield valid universal conclusions.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/039-richard-nixons-memoirs-how-we-know-a-statement-is-true-dividing/Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/039-richard-nixons-memoirs-how-we-know-a-statement-is-true-dividing/Berquist begins with a personal, almost meditative reading of Richard Nixon’s memoirs: the family’s hard early years in California, the death of his brother Arthur, and a note from his mother at the 1953 inauguration, drawn out as instances of faith and humility. He then turns to logic, following Aquinas and Albert the Great in dividing it according to the three acts of reason, distinguishing definition from statement and asking how we actually come to know a statement is true—through sense, grasp of terms, or reasoning. He works through the classification of names as univocal, equivocal, or analogous, and of compound statements as conditional, disjunctive, or conjunctive, with asides on Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras tying the logic back to the opening theme of intellectual humility.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/040-if-then-and-either-or-syllogisms-the-three-figures-prior/Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/040-if-then-and-either-or-syllogisms-the-three-figures-prior/Berquist asks what makes an if-then argument valid, showing that affirming the antecedent or denying the consequent secures the conclusion, while denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent does not—formal validity apart from whether the premises happen to be true. Examples drawn from students in the room, a man named Perkis dropping dead, and mistaken identity between twins fix the point. He then turns to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, arguing that formal logic must come before the material logic of the Posterior Analytics, and works out why the position of the middle term yields exactly three figures of the categorical syllogism, not four.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/041-aquinass-order-of-gods-attributes-in-the-two-summas-testing/Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/041-aquinass-order-of-gods-attributes-in-the-two-summas-testing/Berquist asks why Aquinas always pairs simplicity with perfection yet orders the remaining divine attributes differently in the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, tying the question to the fivefold proof of God’s existence and to Trinitarian concerns in the Prima Pars. He then turns to the handout on the simple syllogism, working through the dictum de omni and dictum de nullo to determine which universal premise-combinations in the first and second figures necessarily conclude, using examples like animals, dogs, cats, stones, and trees, plus conversion rules. He closes by asking how these logical principles bear on singular and divine predications.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/042-demonstration-and-dialectic-form-and-matter-of-the-syllogism/Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/042-demonstration-and-dialectic-form-and-matter-of-the-syllogism/Berquist asks what actually separates a demonstrative syllogism from a dialectical one, and argues it’s not form but matter: demonstration proceeds from necessarily true premises, dialectic from premises that are merely probable, graded by how many or how authoritative their holders are. He then distinguishes propter quid demonstration, reasoning from cause to effect, from quia demonstration, reasoning from effect to cause, using Aquinas’s five ways as the working example, and lays out the “four questions”—does it exist, what is it, is this that, why is this that. He contrasts Albert the Great’s twofold division of logic with Aquinas’s threefold one, touching along the way on Summa Theologiae q. 23 and on modern examples like Einstein and wave-particle debates.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/043-definition-as-demonstration-the-rule-of-two-or-three-gods/Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/043-definition-as-demonstration-the-rule-of-two-or-three-gods/Berquist opens with the Posterior Analytics, showing how a perfect definition by genus and difference mirrors a demonstration argued “propter quid” from causes, working the example of a knife against the nature of definition itself. He reads ten minutes from his handout, “Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen,” tied to Aquinas’s commentary on Physics I, tracing Aristotle’s habit of dividing things into twos and threes—categories, senses of “in,” causes, opposites. Turning to the Topics, he sets out the dialectician’s four tools: selecting probable opinions, distinguishing senses of words, discerning differences, and weighing likenesses, the last drawn out through mathematical proportion and prime matter’s likeness to substance.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/044-the-four-tools-of-dialectic-how-aquinas-orders-gods-attributes/Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/044-the-four-tools-of-dialectic-how-aquinas-orders-gods-attributes/Berquist lays out Aristotle’s four dialectical tools from the Topics: probable premises, verbal distinctions, differences among things, and likenesses among things, defining each and asking why they come in this order, with examples drawn from Shakespeare, Mozart, politics, and mathematics. He then turns to Aquinas, tracking how the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles differ in the sequence they take up simplicity, perfection, infinity, unity, and immutability, and in how many arguments each work gives for a given attribute. He closes by returning to Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX on potency and act, showing how God as pure act underlies Aquinas’s arguments for divine unity and unchangeableness in both Summas.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/045-distinctions-and-likeness-among-the-tools-why-aristotles/Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/045-distinctions-and-likeness-among-the-tools-why-aristotles/Berquist finishes chapter 12 of Aristotle’s Categories, reading closely from his own handout to show that the senses of “before,” “after,” and “in,” along with the topical tool of likeness, are ordered by mutual resemblance rather than arbitrarily—illustrating with genus and species, matter and form, and even modern physics. He then turns to the opening of Book III of the Metaphysics, working through Aristotle’s reasons, with Aquinas’s commentary in hand, for first raising and working through doubts (aporiai) before attempting solutions, comparing this dialectical procedure to the pro-and-con structure of disputed questions such as those in the De Veritate.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/046-gods-simplicity-macbeths-fair-is-foul-and-the-two-roots-of/Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/046-gods-simplicity-macbeths-fair-is-foul-and-the-two-roots-of/Berquist opens on God’s simplicity, where knowledge and love, distinct acts in us, are one with the divine essence itself. He then asks where error comes from, distinguishing defects of intellect from defects of will, and tests the distinction against Shakespeare: the witches’ paradox in Macbeth, passages from Twelfth Night, The Tempest, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, and a contemporary case of abortion rhetoric. Turning to Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, read with Alexander of Aphrodisias, Albert the Great, and the De Fallaciis attributed to Aquinas, he works through the classification of fallacies “from speech” and “from things,” tying it back to distinction, division, definition, and order as safeguards against deception.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/047-actual-potential-and-imaginary-double-meanings-equivocation/Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/047-actual-potential-and-imaginary-double-meanings-equivocation/Berquist distinguishes fallacies arising from actual multiplicity of meaning—equivocation and amphiboly, treated “in dictione”—from those arising from potential multiplicity, such as composition, division, and accent, and from a third, imaginative kind where grammatical likeness falsely suggests things belong to the same category. He tests equivocation’s ordered versus chance senses through examples: “Word of God” in Dei Verbum, “wisdom of nature” against “wisdom of reason,” and Aristotle’s several senses of “before.” Drawing on page six of the handout “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument,” he closes by defining equivocation as diverse signification under one name, illustrated through Aristotle’s causal categories and Shakespeare’s line on being “true to thine own self.”https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/048-who-is-sylvia-shakespeare-the-wisdom-of-reason-and-the-fallacy/Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/048-who-is-sylvia-shakespeare-the-wisdom-of-reason-and-the-fallacy/Berquist works closely through “An Excellent Play,” Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” drawing out the song to Sylvia, the talk of angelic “principalities,” and the closing line “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness” as a figure for heaven, with a glance at “The Comedy of Errors.” He then takes up Aristotle’s fallacy of figura dictionis—why grammar can mislead us into treating “understanding” as an activity like “kicking”—moving through the categories of place, quality, and relation, and into Aquinas’s commentary on the De Anima and De Veritate on why understanding is immaterial and knower differs from agent.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/049-figure-of-speech-in-aquinas-the-trinity-as-one-principle/Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/049-figure-of-speech-in-aquinas-the-trinity-as-one-principle/Berquist works through texts of Aquinas—the Scriptum on the Sentences, Quaestiones de Potentia, and De Trinitate, along with De Virtutibus in Communi—to expose a recurring logical mistake: mistaking discrete or relational terms for continuous or substantial ones. He tests the fallacy against examples like drunkenness and homicide before turning to the Father and Son as “one beginning” of the Holy Spirit, and to how equality and inequality among forms get misread. That same confusion, he argues, makes people imagine forms as hidden quasi-substances, feeding errors like innatism. He closes by drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima and Augustine’s De Trinitate to locate the mistake within a broader account of reasoning and human versus angelic cognition.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/050-shakespeares-definition-of-reason-words-equivocal-by-reason/Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/050-shakespeares-definition-of-reason-words-equivocal-by-reason/Berquist opens by dwelling on Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after,” using its equivocal terms—ability, discourse, before—to ask how such words operate in definitions and axioms, and how this bears on Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s account of wisdom as reason’s highest perfection. He then turns at length to the fallacy of the accident, reading it through Albert the Great’s commentary and Aquinas’s Metaphysics Book XI, and tests it against a series of examples: Socrates and species, cats and dogs, squares, and butter turning hard, showing how necessity can hide an illegitimate slide from accidental to essential predication. He closes with related cases, including David of Dinant’s confusion of God with prime matter and a brief look at Aquinas’s treatment of the instant of justification in the De Veritate.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/051-the-fallacy-of-the-accident-continued-porphyrys-predicables/Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/051-the-fallacy-of-the-accident-continued-porphyrys-predicables/Berquist continues his treatment of the fallacy of accident, comparing how Porphyry orders genus, species, and difference in the Isagoge’s proemium against his fuller treatment later in the same work. He tests the per se/per accidens distinction against familiar cases—Socrates as a species, man as a definition—before turning to the four causes and the related fallacy of simpliciter and secundum quid. Examples range from Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX to present-day cultural commentary. He presses on the care needed to keep essential predication distinct from accidental predication, and warns against the carelessness with which modern philosophy handles that line.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/052-reason-knowing-itself-the-distinction-of-distinction-and/Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/052-reason-knowing-itself-the-distinction-of-distinction-and/Berquist asks what it means to say something is known simply versus known only somewhat, and shows how confusing the two senses produces a real fallacy. He traces the distinction through Aristotle—what is more known “to us” against what is more known “by nature,” and the different footing of enthymeme and example in rhetorical argument—and shows Aquinas using the same distinction to think about the Trinity. Descartes’ preference for the merely “distinct,” and the common habit of ranking mathematical certainty above knowledge of the soul, serve as cautionary examples of what happens when the distinction is dropped. Reading from “Foreword to Logic” and “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument,” he treats the session as reason coming to know its own workings.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/053-act-before-ability-the-best-laws-and-the-best-life-and-feuerbachs/Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/2-logic-2016/053-act-before-ability-the-best-laws-and-the-best-life-and-feuerbachs/Berquist traces Aristotle’s argument in Book Nine of the Metaphysics that act is unqualifiedly prior to potency, and follows Aquinas to the theological consequence that the first principle of all things must be pure act. He then shows how confusing “simply” with “somewhat” underlies a whole family of errors: materialist accounts of the world’s origin, Descartes’s stretching of mathematical certitude beyond its proper domain, and questions in Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics about the best laws, the best life, and one’s vocation. He closes with Feuerbach’s claim that the infinity of the human mind is itself God, set against Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae account of divine simplicity and infinity.