3. Natural Hearing on The Duane Berquist Lectures

1. Aristotle's Physics: Proemium and the Confused Before the Distinct (Three Kinds of Examples)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the proemium of Aristotle’s Physics—the “book of natural hearing”—asking why the study of nature must begin from beginnings, causes, and elements taken generally rather than particular things themselves. Working through the first lectio of Aquinas’s commentary alongside his own handout, he defends Aristotle’s claim that confused knowledge of a whole precedes distinct knowledge of its parts. He tests this with examples from taste, music, painting, and geometry, showing in each case how recognition of something as a whole comes before the ability to distinguish what composes it, and uses this pattern to explain Aristotle’s movement from general principles toward the specific matter of natural philosophy.

2. Why the Confused Is Known First: Imperfect Before Perfect, and Descartes Versus Aristotle

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, from the opening of the Physics with Aquinas’s commentary, that we know things confusedly before we know them distinctly—the whole grasped before its parts, as in tasting wine or seeing an effect before its cause. He reads Descartes’ Discourse on Method against this: Descartes ties certitude to clarity and distinctness on the model of mathematics, while Aristotle’s syllogism, Berquist argues, secures knowledge more rigorously. He closes by following the same tension—precision traded against certainty—into Duhem’s Aim and Structure of Physical Theory and de Broglie’s remarks on idealization in physics.

3. Levels of Universality, the Via Negativa in Theology, and Particular vs. General Equivocation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening chapter of Aristotle’s Physics, where knowledge proceeds from what is more known to us toward what is more known by nature. Using triangles, sonnets, and syllogisms, he distinguishes a “horizontal” movement, from a general grasp to a definition at the same level of universality, from a “vertical” movement, from genus down to species, arguing the first must come before the second. He then carries this distinction into natural theology, asking why negating something general of God, such as “unchanging” or “without parts,” brings us closer to him than negating something particular, and touches on Descartes’s error, Heisenberg’s return to Greek thought, and Scripture’s reliance on common rather than private experience.

4. Natural Road, Common vs. Private Experience, and Experimental Science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Aquinas’s commentary on 1 Corinthians, using the mystical body’s eyes, ears, hands, feet, and nose to distinguish contemplative from active life and their degrees of spiritual understanding. He then works through Aristotle’s Physics I on how natural knowledge moves from confused to distinct, reading from two handout notes and setting this beside Boethius’s De Trinitate on how natural philosophy, mathematics, and wisdom each proceed differently toward matter, from simple to composed, and toward the immaterial. He closes by distinguishing common from private experience to mark off philosophy of nature from experimental science, illustrating the empirical-theoretical split with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

5. Paul VI, Via Negativa, and the Meanings of the Word 'Nature'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Paul VI’s encyclical Mysterium Fidei and its case for why dogmatic formulas hold across time, using this to draw out the difference between common and private experience and between the via negativa and via affirmativa in theology. He then turns to Aristotle’s Physics, the “books of Natural Hearing,” and works through the etymology of “nature” from physis, meaning birth, through the sense of a source within a mother, to the general sense Aristotle needs: any internal principle of change. Examples from Shakespeare, Aquinas, and Boethius illustrate each stage. The class closes by setting up Book II of the Physics, where nature gets defined in this third, operative sense.

6. Aristotle Defines Nature: Five Parts, Nature vs. Art, and Experimental Science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of Book II of Aristotle’s Physics, where nature is distinguished from art as two different sources of coming-to-be. He walks through Aristotle’s five-clause definition of nature—a source and cause of motion and rest, residing in the thing itself, and belonging to it primarily and per se rather than incidentally—testing each clause against examples: wood burning versus stone in fire, trees versus rocks, a log cabin reverting to nature, and the doctor who cures himself. He closes by asking why the Greeks made natural philosophy the road to wisdom, and how modern experimental science mixes natural knowledge with technical, artificial control.

7. Nature vs. Art, Rhetoric, Experimental Science, and Mathematics vs. Natural Science (Physics II, Readings 2–3)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by asking why the philosopher must follow the “natural road” of knowledge, and where rhetoric belongs as an offshoot of dialectic and ethics. He then turns to close commentary on Physics II, sorting out Aristotle’s distinctions among “nature,” “having a nature,” and “being by nature,” illustrated through a tree’s growth as opposed to the tree itself. He warns against two opposite errors—trying to prove what is self-evident, or denying what is actually known—and faults Kant, Berkeley, and Marx for blurring natural and artificial knowledge. He closes by previewing the next reading’s question of how natural philosophy relates to mathematics, using astronomy as the test case, and the role of the pre-Socratic “natural fragments” as reasoned guesses before Aristotle’s systematic science.

8. The Central Question of Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, and Whether the Way We Know Is the Way Things Are

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist poses what he calls the central question of philosophy: must knowing match the mode of being it knows, or can truth survive when mind and thing differ in order or separation? Working from a passage in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, particularly the critique of Plato’s separated mathematicals and forms, he shows thinkers from Plato through Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Marx answering yes or no and arriving at sharply divergent systems. Aristotle’s own answer—that we can know things truly even when we know them apart from, or in a different order than, how they exist—is defended as the coherent alternative. Berquist traces this position forward into Boethius’s account, in the Consolation of Philosophy, of God’s eternal knowledge of temporal things.

9. Thales and Anaximander: Reasonable Guesses About the First Matter

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the surviving fragments of the first Greek philosophers, working from the handout “On the Natural Fragments” and treating them not as certain knowledge but as reasonable guesses, unlike Aristotle’s reasoned-out science. He traces philosophy’s start in Miletus and Thales’s claim that water is the beginning of all things, asking why the mind naturally seeks one simple material cause before it looks for a maker or mover. He contrasts this with Genesis, which opens with a divine maker rather than a material origin, and uses the images of mother as matter and father as cause to frame the difference, setting up the movement toward Aristotle’s fuller causal account.

10. Simplicity, Pantheism and Digressions: Einstein, Hegel, Shakespeare, and Reflections on Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Anaximander’s surviving fragments, asking why the “unlimited” (apeiron) rather than a determinate stuff like Thales’ water should be the source of everything, and defends the claim both qualitatively and by analogy to conservation laws in modern physics. He considers Anaximander’s striking idea that the origin of things is also their end—comparing it to the Christian “Alpha and Omega”—and his description of natural regularity in terms of “justice.” From there the class wanders into Boethius’s life, the pantheist leanings of Hegel and Einstein, and a Shakespearean illustration, before turning ahead to Anaximenes.

11. Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus: Air, Form, and the Problem of Change

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows the progressive refinement of early Greek accounts of nature’s first principle, asking why Anaximenes settles on air rather than the poets’ Mother Earth, Thales’ water, or Anaximander’s “unlimited,” measuring each candidate against criteria of unlimitedness and fineness of matter. He then introduces Pythagoras as the discoverer of form and ratio as a distinct kind of cause, using musical harmony and geometry as examples and tracing the line to Plato’s Timaeus. The lecture closes by beginning Heraclitus of Ephesus, centered on the river fragment and the doctrine of universal flux, with a nod to Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Born as modern heirs to the problem. Discussion draws on Aristotle’s reports of the Presocratics alongside Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.

12. Heraclitus: Contradiction, Hidden Harmony, Strife and Fire

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Plato’s Parmenides and its axiom that being and non-being cannot both be affirmed, arguing that reason itself forces this conclusion before change can even be discussed. Against it he sets Heraclitus, working through fragments on hidden harmony, the unity of opposites, “war is father of all,” and fire as first principle, drawn from the “Natural Fragments” and “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing” handouts. He connects these fragments to Socratic dialectic and previews how Aristotle, in Aquinas’s Physics I commentary, will later reconcile real change with the law of non-contradiction. The class closes comparing Heraclitus’ fire to Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Heisenberg’s energy.

13. Reason's Inclination to Unity and Simplicity: From the Greeks to Einstein and Aquinas on God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why the intellect keeps reaching for what is one, simple, unlimited, and unchanging, starting from the earliest Greek philosophers’ hunt for a single first principle. He follows that same inclination through seventeenth-century science in Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, then into twentieth-century physics with Planck, Einstein, Born, Jeans, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Weizsäcker, using Euclid, Shakespeare, and Aristotle’s Poetics to show the pattern at work in mathematics and art as well. He closes by linking these four marks—one, simple, unlimited, unchanging—to Aquinas’s treatment of the divine attributes in the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles, setting up the next classes on Empedocles and Anaxagoras before returning to the moderns on the movers.

14. Empedocles: The Four Elements, Numerical Ratios, and Change as Change of Place

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Empedocles’ break with the earlier monists, who had reduced all things to a single underlying stuff. Working through fragments DK6, DK38, DK96, and the cluster DK8, DK9, DK11, DK12, and DK15, he shows how Empedocles posits four irreducible roots—earth, air, fire, water—distinguished by hot, cold, wet, and dry, and combined in fixed numerical ratios (borrowed from the Pythagoreans) to yield compounds like flesh, blood, and bone. The key move Berquist isolates is Empedocles’ denial of genuine generation and corruption: what looks like coming-to-be is really mixture, and perishing is separation, so all change is at bottom change of place. He closes by tracing the line from this position forward to Aristotle’s doctrine of potency and sideways to analogous questions in modern physics.

15. Empedocles' Love and Hate, Chance vs. Mind, and Anaxagoras on Matter and the Continuous

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Empedocles’ fragments on whether void exists and how Love and Strife act as opposing efficient causes driving the mixture and separation of the four elements. He examines Empedocles’ striking account of chance combinations of creatures, with only the fit surviving—a mindless picture of natural causation. Against this he sets Anaxagoras, who argues by analogy from human craft to nature for a cosmic ordering Mind. The class closes with Empedocles’ materialist theory of cognition, locating thought in blood and defending the principle that like knows like, drawing on Diels-Kranz fragments of Empedocles with comparative reference to Democritus and Anaxagoras.

16. Anaxagoras: Everything in Everything, All Things Forever Equal, and Q&A on Good and Evil

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through fragments of Anaxagoras to show that great and small are relational, that nothing is ever wholly separated from anything else, and that the apparent order of the world results from a circular motion begun by Mind rather than genuine generation or corruption. He traces how “all things are forever equal” anticipates the logic of conservation laws in modern equations, and sets Anaxagoras against Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Socrates’s argument in the Phaedo, then previews Aristotle’s later criticism of Anaxagoras on quantity in natural philosophy versus mathematics. He closes toward the famous fragment on Mind and reflects on method: how a philosopher like Aristotle reads and judges his predecessors.

17. Anaxagoras on the Mind: Unlimited, Self-Ruling, and Separate

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through Anaxagoras’s fragment on Mind, tracking its claims that Nous is unlimited, self-ruling, unmixed with other things, the thinnest and purest of all things, and the possessor of all knowledge and power that orders especially living things. He pauses on an apparent contradiction: if a ruler must be separate from what it rules, how can mind be called “self-ruling”? He resolves this by way of Socrates’ distinction between what mind truly knows and does not know, then maps each attribute of Nous onto a branch of philosophy—logic, the study of nature and soul, ethics and politics—drawing supporting comparisons from Plato’s Phaedo and Republic, Aristotle, and modern figures like Bacon, Heisenberg, and Einstein.

18. Heraclitus to the Moderns, Determinism, and Democritus's Atoms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what has moved things in nature according to the first philosophers, pairing Heraclitus’s fire and strife, Empedocles’s love and hate, and Anaxagoras’s cosmic mind with strikingly similar lines from Heisenberg, Darwin, Lenin, Helmholtz, Newton, Einstein, and Tocqueville read from the Natural Fragments handout. He then takes up Leucippus and Democritus on necessity and the unreality of sensible qualities, tracing how their determinism rose to dominate modern science through Claude Bernard, Freud, and Laplace, then cracked under quantum theory and the Bohr-Einstein debates. Throughout he weighs matter against mover and notes Aristotle’s later break from strict determinism.

19. Despair, Boldness, and Finding What Is Common Among Disagreeing Philosophers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces Aristotle’s logical division of his predecessors’ views on the principles of things, following the branching disagreements from Parmenides and Melissus through the natural philosophers, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras. He then steps back to a harder question: what should such persistent disagreement do to someone seeking the truth—drive him to despair, or tempt him to Descartes-like overconfidence? Drawing on the Phaedo and his own anecdotes, Berquist argues for a balance of hope and fear in the pursuit of truth. He closes with two ways forward, drawn from Empedocles and Heraclitus—gathering truth’s scattered pieces from disputants, or first finding what all of them hold in common—favoring the second as truer to how we naturally move from the more known to the less known.

20. The Common Basis of the Life of the Mind, Pride and Humility, and Pantheism Q&A

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Heraclitus’s claim that anyone who would speak with understanding must stand on common ground, and asks what that shared basis is for teacher and student, or for two people in genuine dispute. He connects this to Aristotle’s practice, early in his own inquiry, of surveying earlier thinkers’ disagreements to find what they hold in common, previewing later readings on contradiction as a spur to philosophical inquiry, with Anaxagoras and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the background. The class then turns discursive, touching Aquinas, St. Paul, and Augustine on pride and humility, and closing with digressions on pantheism, angelic versus divine minds in Anaxagoras, and stories about teachers like De Koninck—all circling the contrast between shared truth and private worlds of mere opinion.

21. Anaxagoras' Mind, Hope and Fear, and Heraclitus' Common Ways Forward

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what kind of cause Anaxagoras’s “greater mind” is, setting it beside Empedocles’ love and hate as principles of separation and combination, and questioning whether this mind is more angelic or divine—while faulting the Marx/Engels split of philosophers into materialists and idealists for missing Anaxagoras’s middle, dualist position. He then reads Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 2, where the Presocratics are catalogued as disagreeing over whether principles are one or many, finite or infinite, mobile or immobile. Turning to Heraclitus’s fragments, he argues the right response to such disagreement isn’t despair or Cartesian audacity but seeking the common ground shared by reason and nature—the method Aristotle himself follows in the readings that come after.

22. Change by Contraries: Aristotle Becomes Strong in the Common Basis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, via Aquinas’s Physics I, lectio 10, that thinkers East and West, ancient and modern, converge on explaining change through contraries—and works through the syllogism showing why these first principles must be contraries rather than derived one from another. He sets Aristotle’s claim that this conclusion is “forced on the mind” against Einstein’s picture of freely invented hypotheses, and brings in the yin-yang of the I Ching and figures like Helmholtz and Newton as parallel cases. The class closes by asking what distinguishes the grounds of experimental science, philosophy, and theology, and how custom, as opposed to reasoned argument, shapes what people come to believe.

23. Three Kinds of Beginnings, Custom, and the Role of Contradiction

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working through Aquinas’s tenth and eleventh readings on Aristotle’s Physics, Book I, Berquist asks how the early philosophers arrived at contrary principles and why Aristotle argues that two contraries alone cannot account for change—an underlying third element is required, standing to the contraries proportionally and hierarchically, as better to worse. He illustrates the force of contradiction in the mind’s progress with Heraclitus, Heisenberg, and Einstein, then turns to Aquinas’s teaching on the qualities of a good student, drawing examples from Shakespeare’s wordplay on “before” in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

24. Modern Physics, Knowing by Making, and the Closed Circle of Man

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Following a reading in Aristotle’s Physics I, Berquist opens a discussion of how modern physicists — Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Weizsäcker, Einstein — talk about matter, energy, and substance, and whether that talk still reaches things as they are. The class tests Bohr’s claim that science “extends the range of experience and reduces it to order,” asking whether such order belongs to nature or is imposed by the experimenter, and draws this to Kant’s and Marx’s principle that we know only what we make. Passages from the Summa Contra Gentiles, Weizsäcker’s The World View of Physics, and Kant’s second preface anchor the exchange, which closes on whether experimental, interventionist science can still count as genuine knowledge of nature.

25. Aristotle's Physics I.11: Why Two Contraries Need a Third Thing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading closely in Physics I, lectio 11, Berquist asks why the beginnings of change can be neither one nor infinite in number, invoking the same instinct for explanatory economy he finds in Empedocles, Newton, and Einstein. He then presses the harder question: why can’t two contraries by themselves account for change? Using hardness and softness as his example, he shows that a contrary cannot become its opposite “as such” without contradiction, so a third thing—an underlying subject—must persist beneath the change. Along the way he ties this back to Heraclitus’s puzzles and the move from confused to distinct knowledge.

26. Contradiction and the Progress of Knowledge: Heraclitus, Aristotle and the Untying of Knots

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does real understanding advance only by working through apparent contradictions rather than avoiding them? Berquist takes up Heraclitus’s fragments alongside Aristotle’s account in Physics Book I of change as requiring both contrary terms and an underlying subject, then turns to Metaphysics Book III on the necessity of dialectically “tying” and “untying” knotted difficulties before any question can be settled. He extends the pattern to Plato’s Phaedo, to Aquinas’s treatment of divine simplicity and his use of disputed questions, and to modern physicists like Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, whose theories advanced by confronting conflicts with observed reality. Analogies from Haydn, Mozart, and Shakespeare illustrate the same structure of knot and resolution at work outside philosophy.

27. Contradiction in Science and Theology: Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Augustine and Thomas, plus Q&A

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what apparent contradiction is good for, using episodes from modern physics—Planck’s quantum, Bohr’s atom, Heisenberg and Einstein on particle-wave duality—where seeming contradictions pushed scientists toward more comprehensive theories rather than being simply resolved away. He carries the same pattern into theology: Christ’s questioning of the Pharisees in Matthew, Augustine’s observation that heresy forces the Church to articulate doctrine more precisely, and the Second Vatican Council’s decree on priestly formation, which commends Aquinas’s method in the Summa Theologiae of raising and resolving difficulties. He closes with Aquinas’s commentary on Ephesians on faith, hope, and charity as “pillars of the church,” and class scheduling notes.

28. Substance, Accident and Dialectical Probability: Resolving the Apparent Contradiction in Physics I

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his close reading of Physics I, taking up the second and third arguments for why change requires a subject underlying two contraries, built on the substance-accident distinction, and arriving at Aristotle’s conclusion that matter plus two contraries suffice as principles of change. He then confronts an apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s treatment of contrariety in substance, working out its resolution through Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 11, by distinguishing dialectical or probable reasoning from strict demonstration. Along the way he contrasts Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of matter and form with Plato’s theory of forms, and closes by pointing toward how this reasoning about composition and change bears on later arguments concerning the nature of God.

29. Three Is Enough: The Number Three in Logic, Rhetoric, Music, Physics and Theology

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a puzzle from Aristotle’s Physics I: are the principles of change—subject and contraries—really two, or do they amount to three? Working from a handout on “whether the beginnings are two, three or more,” he uses this question as a springboard to trace how the number three keeps turning up as sufficient across the arts and sciences—in logic and rhetoric, in poetic examples from Shakespeare and Milton, in music from Handel, Corelli, and Mozart, and even in Heisenberg’s universal constants. He keeps returning to Aristotle’s own texts—the Poetics, the Rhetoric, On the Heavens, the Physics—as anchors, while cautioning that threefold division is a common but not universal pattern of intellectual analysis.

30. Becoming, the General Before the Particular, and Why the End Is Better Than the Means

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens a new stretch of Aristotle’s Physics, moving from “change” to “becoming” as the common basis he wants readers to grasp first from how all men speak, before lectio thirteen tightens an earlier merely probable claim about contraries into a necessary conclusion. He interrupts the preview with a long excursus on why learning proceeds from the general to the particular, working the point through the words “change” and “becoming,” then “going” and “coming,” and through examples of desire and virtue from the Nicomachean Ethics to show why the end is better known and better than the means. He closes with brief remarks on the next meeting.

31. Heisenberg on Natural Language, Number and One, and Student Questions on Nature and Motion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Heisenberg’s lecture on philosophy since Descartes, weighing the res cogitans/res extensa split against Heisenberg’s observation that natural-language words like mind, soul, life, and God hold their meaning more stably than technical scientific terms. He then returns to Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 12, on nature as defined by motion and on Euclid’s equivocal-by-analogy uses of “number” and “one.” Shakespeare enters next: Hamlet’s advice to the players and the example of Romeo and Juliet illustrate nature, virtue, and vice in action. The class closes with an inductive demonstration, via the propter quod principle, that the end is better than the means, applied to goods of soul versus body.

32. Reading 12: Common Understanding of Becoming: Three Things in Every Becoming

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s treatment of becoming as something all people, not just natural philosophers, already understand, and argues it rests on a more evident necessity than the earlier account of change. Working from ordinary speech—“the young man becomes old,” “from young to old”—he shows that every becoming involves a persisting subject, an opposite or privation that is lost, and the new thing that comes to be. Two inductive surveys, one from substances and accidents and one from the common modes of coming-to-be (shaping, addition, subtraction, alteration, composition), confirm that nothing comes from nothing. He closes by noting that everything which becomes is therefore composite, unlike the utterly simple, unchanging God.

33. Reading 13: Only Two Causes, and Lack versus Contrary (Virtue, Vice, Ignorance, Error)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his commentary on Physics I, taking up the thirteenth reading. He shows that although every becoming involves matter, form, and privation, only matter and form count as causes, since the privation—such as the softness lost when butter hardens—is never actually present in the thing that results. Reviewing how the principles get numbered as two or three, he then sharpens an earlier point: change requires only the absence of the form to be acquired, not the presence of its full contrary. He works this out through ethical examples—virtue and vice, continence and incontinence—and through the difference between error and ignorance, drawing on Plato’s Meno.

34. Reading 13: First Matter Known by Proportion, Ability, and the Soul as Substantial Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, in Physics I, Reading 13, that prime matter—pure potency underlying substantial change—cannot be known directly but only by proportion, as clay is to a shaped sphere or cube. He warns against pressing that analogy too far, then traces the same failure to grasp potency in Anaxagoras and in modern physicists like Heisenberg and de Broglie. Turning to the Phaedo’s dispute over the soul, he argues that the soul must be understood as substantial form, a middle position between treating it as a separate substance and treating it as a mere harmony of the body.

35. Anaxagoras Refuted: Fewness, Infinity and the Limits of Natural Quantity (Part 1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s eightfold critique of Anaxagoras, who held that all things are already present in all things, mixed together without limit. Against this he lays out prime matter as pure potency rather than any actual ingredient, illustrating the difference between potency and act with clay becoming a sphere or cube and with the letters that compose the word “cat.” He ties Aristotle’s demand for explanatory simplicity to later scientific practice in Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and contrasts it with Empedocles, while a detour through Aristotle’s eight senses of “in” from Physics IV exposes related confusions in Locke and Berkeley about universals. The class opens with a short aside on angels as “spirits” and “flame of fire” from the Catena Aurea on Hebrews 1.

36. Smallest Pieces and Modern Physics: Arguments 2-7 Against Anaxagoras, Locke and Ability

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces a linked sequence of arguments Aristotle brings against Anaxagoras’s claim that all things are mixed in all things. He shows first that natural parts like flesh and bone cannot diminish infinitely, then that a finite body cannot yield infinite extractions of the same substance, and finally that the smallest piece of flesh cannot itself contain bone. Berquist reads this as Aristotle uncovering a second difference between mathematical and natural quantity: nature imposes size limits that pure mathematics does not. He closes by comparing this ancient insight to quantum theory and relativity, which reasserted limits in the small and large after centuries of classical physics treating quantity as boundlessly divisible.

37. Aristotle, Plato and the Good Student: Preparing for Matter and Lack of Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist sets up the fifteenth reading in Book I of the Physics, where Aristotle takes up the natural philosophers’ account of change and Plato’s failure to distinguish matter from privation—treating lack of form as if it were the same principle as matter itself. He shows why this distinction matters later, for understanding good and evil in Metaphysics IX, and links Plato’s error to the “fallacy of the accident” from the Sophistical Refutations. Along the way he digresses into what makes a good student, drawing on Aquinas’s scriptural commentary on humility, discretion, and fruitfulness, arguing that Aristotle’s corrective reading of Plato makes him Plato’s best student, just as Aquinas was Aristotle’s.

38. Matter vs. Lack of Form: Heisenberg, Plato's Confusion, and Augustine against the Manichaeans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a digression on Heisenberg’s quantum field theory and its talk of a “unity of matter,” asking how energy-as-potentiality compares to Aristotelian matter and form. He then works through Physics I, lectio 15, where Aristotle corrects Parmenides and Plato on coming-to-be by distinguishing matter from privation: privation is non-being as such, but matter stands in potency toward form as something good and godlike. Tracing this confusion historically, Berquist shows how Plato’s failure to separate the two fed Manichaean and Plotinian claims that matter is evil, and how Augustine’s and Aquinas’s arguments answer that error in parallel.

39. Ability and Lack: Sartre's Freedom, the Meaning of Bad, Fallacies, and the Perfection of Man

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from Aquinas’s lectio 15 on Physics I and a handout distinguishing matter from privation, Berquist asks why matter must be ungenerated and incorruptible even though it is always found with some privation attached. He then extends the matter/privation distinction to a broader philosophical error: mistaking a capacity or subject for the lack that happens to accompany it, as when Sartre identifies human freedom with nothingness. Berquist names this the fallacy of accident, and traces the same confusion in accounts of evil as sheer indetermination. The class closes by applying the privation analysis to moral badness as disordered action.

40. First Matter, the Five Attributes of God, and the Four Kinds of Cause (Reading Five)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the last passage of Physics I, where Aristotle argues prime matter is ungenerated and incorruptible even though everything made of it comes to be and passes away — a puzzle he traces back to Thales and Anaximander and forward to modern conservation laws. He links this to four of the five attributes Aquinas gives God in the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles: simplicity, unity, infinity, and immutability. He then turns to Book II, previewing the four causes not just as four kinds of cause but as four distinct senses of the word “cause,” using analogies from parts and things to show the term isn’t used univocally, before assigning the next reading.

41. The Four Kinds of Causes: Matter, Form, Mover, End

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Reading 5 of Aristotle’s Physics, Book II, where the four causes—matter, form, mover, and end—get their definitions and their examples. He dwells on why Aristotle reaches for artificial things to illustrate matter, Pythagoras’s musical ratio to illustrate form, the father rather than the mother for the moving cause, and chains of subordinate ends for the final cause. He then traces how each cause surfaces historically, from the early material monists through Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Socrates and Plato, arguing this sequence tracks how reason itself comes to recognize all four. He fixes the point with homely cases: the word “cat” and a wooden chair.

42. Aristotle's Three Corollaries on Causes and Nature as Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Having just distinguished the four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—Aristotle draws three further conclusions: a single thing can have several causes at once, two things can cause each other though in different senses, and one cause can produce contrary effects. Berquist works through each with examples such as the house-builder and pianist, exercise and health, and the ship’s steersman, then turns to Aristotle’s concluding paragraph, where each causal sense is broadened and illustrated across nature, art, and logic, including the syllogism, and end is linked to good. He closes by laying out the ways the four causes can be paired two by two and what each pairing shows about how they relate.

43. Dividing the Causes, Applications, and Preface to End in Nature

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why the four causes get grouped against one another in different ways: matter set against form, mover, and end as potential against actual, or the mover set against the other three as what lies outside the process of becoming versus what lies within it. Drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics with Aquinas’s commentaries, he extends the scheme to God as cause and to definitions, where genus and difference mirror matter and form. He tests it against marriage, the sacraments, the Church, and geometric theorems to show that not every subject calls for all four causes equally. The class ends by turning to the harder question of whether nature itself acts for an end, a dispute Aristotle takes up at greater length later in the Physics.

44. The Importance of the Question of Final Causality: Natural Philosophy and Ethics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by asking why the question of final causality matters at all: it decides whether man and his parts—down to a severed arm—have any natural purpose, with consequences for ethics, medicine, logic, and theology. He illustrates the stakes with examples like a grinder and a case of deception before turning to Aristotle’s technical apparatus in the Physics. He distinguishes per se from accidental causes and prior from posterior causes, then introduces the “removing” cause, or causa removens prohibens, using the buried treasure, the lioness and her cub, and a collapsed pillar to show how luck and chance are a peculiar species of accidental causation.

45. Misunderstandings, Custom, and the Modern World's Mathematical Habit of Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Aristotle’s case that nature acts for an end, distinguishing arts like medicine and ethics, which help nature reach what it already tends toward, from arts like carpentry, which impose a wholly new form—and clears up common confusions between final and efficient causality. He then turns to a different question: why custom so often governs belief more than argument does, using Socrates’s trial in the Apology, Max Planck, and the shift from geocentric to heliocentric astronomy as cases. From there he surveys three historical sources of the modern habit of mind—mercantile cities, mathematics fused with technical science, and the democratic revolutions—drawing on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and McNeill’s Rise of the West.

46. Aristotle's Arguments for Nature Acting for an End, and the Objections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s case in the Physics, Book II, that nature acts for an end, expanding Aristotle’s reasoning into six distinct arguments: nature’s regular production of the good, its orderly developmental stages, art’s necessary imitation of nature, induction from animal behavior, and the priority of form over matter. He illustrates these with spider webs, parasitic wasps, and bee navigation, drawing analogies to human craftsmanship and noting where Newton, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Empedocles bear on the question. He then lays out three standard objections—that purposive action requires mind, that nature’s failures tell against directedness to the good, and that chance together with the other causes might explain things without finality—but leaves the reply to these for the next class.

47. Nature Acts for an End: Replies to the Objections and the Infinity of Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s defense of final causality in nature against three standing objections: that acting for an end requires a mind, that nature’s failures (monstrous births, bad outcomes) disprove purpose, and that Empedocles’ appeal to chance can explain apparent order without a fourth cause. Working through the text closely, he answers each in turn, drawing on examples like thermostats, habitual driving, hunting with buckshot, and seed dispersal to show that failure and chance are compatible with, not contrary to, nature acting purposively. He opens with a reflection on how “natural philosophy” narrowed into modern “science,” defending philosophy studied for its own sake before returning to the argument itself.

48. Natural Hearing III: Why Motion, Place and Time Come First

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Book Two of Aristotle’s Physics by reviewing the arguments for nature acting for an end—its regular production of good results, its ordered steps, art’s imitation and completion of nature, the evidence of organic parts, and matter’s existing for the sake of form—and weighs what denying final causality costs ethically, with side glances at Denton, Bertalanffy, and Anaxagoras’s unlimited mind. He then turns to Book Three, unpacking the Greek title “natural hearing” as a call to listen to nature the way a student listens to a teacher, against Kant’s image of the judge interrogating a witness, and argues that motion must be defined first since it belongs to the continuous and unlimited.

49. Defining Motion: Descartes, Locke and Aristotle's Act of the Able

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of Book Three of Aristotle’s Physics, asking why place and time are treated only after motion, and setting Aristotle against Descartes and Locke, who held that motion cannot be defined at all. He works through Aristotle’s strategy of defining motion in terms of act and potency, trying out formulas like “the act of what is able to be in the room” and checking each against the demands that a definition be true and not circular. Using walking, the heating of water, and entering a doorway, he narrows motion down to the incomplete act of what is potentially in a further act, closing with a brief comparison to learning as a similar case of a potency being actualized only incompletely.

50. Motion, the Continuous, and the Discrete: Why the Continuous Dominates Our Naming

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the sea-voyage imagery of Shakespeare’s “Come, bitter conduct” speech, linking it to Aquinas’s idea of wisdom as “sapida scientia” and to the Eucharistic hymn Adoro Te Devote. He then works through the opening of Book Three of Aristotle’s Physics, asking what motion is and how discrete quantity differs from continuous quantity, noting that the logician defines the continuous by form while the natural philosopher defines it by matter. Drawing briefly on the Nicomachean Ethics for context, he traces how this distinction bears on the immateriality of thought and on Aristotle’s ordered senses of “before,” “beginning,” and “in,” showing why language built for continuous things keeps getting borrowed to name discrete and abstract realities.

51. Can Motion Be Defined? Why Descartes and Locke Say No, and Aristotle's Approach to Definition

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening of Physics Book III, where Aristotle names motion, the infinite, place, the void, and time as what the study of nature must take up. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s commentary, he shows how Books III and IV are ordered by what follows upon motion: the infinite, bound up with the continuous, intrinsically (Book III); place, the void, and time extrinsically (Book IV), time as an extrinsic measure. He shows Aristotle’s habit of provisionally adopting predecessor opinions—Democritus and Empedocles on the void—before settling the truth later. He previews the “last instant” paradox of change, resolved only in Book VI, and pauses over points and surfaces as limits, with side glances at transubstantiation and modern physics.

52. Act and Ability: Being versus Becoming and Aristotle's Definition of Motion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does Aristotle define motion the way he does, and what work does the qualifying phrase “as such” do in that definition? Berquist moves from the categories—substance, quantity, quality, relation—into act and potency, using clay taking on shapes, someone entering a room, and water heating on a stove to show how motion differs both from actualities a thing already has and from mere static states like standing in a doorway. He digresses into univocal versus analogical predication, illustrated by “parallelogram,” “square,” and “cause,” and into Plato’s treatment of being and becoming, setting up Aristotle’s fuller account of the kinds of change in Physics Book V.

53. Motion as the Act of the Able, and Place: The First Senses of 'In'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s notoriously compressed definition of motion in Physics III, “the act of what is potential insofar as it is potential,” and tests it against examples like the buildable, the healthy and sick, and bronze becoming a statue to show what the definition captures and what it rules out. He traces the distinction between act and potency across the categories that makes the definition intelligible. He then turns to Physics IV, setting Aristotle’s account of place—the inner surface of a containing body—against the common but mistaken idea that place is simply dimensions, and previews Aquinas’s ordering of the several senses of “in” that his commentary draws out of the text.

54. The Eight Senses of 'In', Equivocation and the Axioms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist walks through Aristotle’s eight senses of “in,” from whole-in-part and part-in-whole to being in another’s power, and finally to being “in” the good or end one loves — illustrated by Augustine’s line that the soul is more where it loves than where it animates, and by “I left my heart in San Francisco.” He ties these distinctions to other equivocal terms like universal versus class, “before,” and “has,” and shows how failing to distinguish senses of “in” trips up Anaxagoras, Locke, Berkeley, Heidegger, and Weizsäcker. He argues that defending an axiom like “nothing is in itself” requires guarding against equivocation, and closes by noting that the spatial sense of “in” is primary — a point that will matter when the treatment turns to time.

55. Beginning the Study of Time: Puzzles About the Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Reading 15 of Aquinas’s commentary on Book IV of Aristotle’s Physics, taking up Aristotle’s puzzles about time’s existence: past and future do not exist, yet the now that separates them cannot count as a part of time, any more than a point is a part of a line. He follows this into further paradoxes—whether the now stays the same or is always changing—using the geometric problem of a “next” point as an analogy, and setting the discussion alongside Augustine’s reflections on time and matter in the Confessions. He closes with a detour into Aristotle’s Metaphysics distinction between difficulty rooted in the thing known versus in the knower, applying it to natural philosophy, wisdom, and ordinary cases of failing to understand other people.

56. Aristotle's Physics IV: Time Is Not Motion, but Something of Motion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two opinions Aristotle rejects — that time is identical with the circular motion of the heavens, or with the celestial sphere itself — before showing why neither survives scrutiny. Using the Rip Van Winkle story and our ordinary sense of fast and slow, he traces how time is tied to the before-and-after found in motion and magnitude, without simply being motion. The class points ahead to Book Six, where distance, motion, and time will be shown to share one continuous structure, and digresses briefly into the definition of things “of another” (like accidents or poetic meter) and the discreteness of thought against the continuity of line and number.

57. Time as the Number of Motion, and the Problem of the Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aristotle’s argument, as Aquinas lays it out in lectio 17, that “before and after” appears first in place, then in magnitude, and finally in motion by a kind of proportional transfer—setting up the definition of time as “the number of motion according to before and after.” He explains this with the numbering/numbered-number distinction and homely cases like counting days or minutes. He then looks ahead to lectio 18’s puzzle about the now—whether it is always the same or always different—comparing it to a point moving along a line, the same in substance but always other in position, and draws on Euclid’s Book V proportion theory to show how time stands to motion as the now stands to the moving thing.

58. The Now, the Thing in Motion, and the Causes of Before and After

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the proportion Aristotle draws in the Physics: as the moving thing is to motion, so the now is to time. Through examples—a ball in flight, a car trip, someone waking from sleep—he shows how the now remains one in substance while being “other” in position or account, and how this sameness-with-otherness is what makes time continuous, divisible, and numerable without the now ever being a part or number of time itself. Along the way he digresses into exemplar causation and definitions drawn from Plato’s dialogues and the Nicomachean Ethics. He closes by previewing next week’s question of what it means to be “in time” as opposed to eternal.

59. Time, Metaphor and Boethius: Measuring Time and the Numbering Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what motion time actually measures and what it means for a thing to be “in time,” working through Aristotle’s puzzle in the Physics about whether time could exist at all without a soul to number it. He digresses through Pope Leo’s address quoting the Kazakh thinker Abai Kunanbai, then to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae article on how Scripture uses metaphor, drawing examples from Dickens, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Shakespeare to show how poetic fiction can make events more intelligible than bare fact. He closes by introducing Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as the source of the classical definition of eternity, setting up a coming discussion of eternity as existence unmeasured by time.

60. Eternity Defined: Boethius's 'Tota simul et perfecta possessio', the Now of Time, and Future Contingents

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Boethius’s formula for eternity, showing how each phrase—“whole,” “simultaneous,” “perfect possession”—denies some feature of time itself: before-and-after, beginning and end, the passing now. Drawing on Aristotle’s Categories for the sense of “before/after” and “together,” and on figures like circle and center, he presses Aquinas’s account in the Summa Theologiae of how eternity relates to time and how God knows future contingents. He then digresses at length on Adam and Eve’s sin as a grasping after divine foreknowledge and self-direction beyond human nature, closing with Aristotle’s Ethics and Plato’s Phaedo on why truth must outrank friendship or loyalty in argument.

61. Why the Philosophy of the Continuous Matters: Motion, Time, Zeno and the Limits of Imagination

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

After a long personal digression on friendship, flattery, and honest criticism, Berquist turns to Aristotle’s Physics, Book VI, which he calls the foundation of geometry itself. His question: why can continuous magnitudes—lines, motion, time—never be built up out of indivisible parts, points or instants stacked one after another? He traces the stakes of this problem through Zeno, Parmenides, and Hegel, and into ordinary language, where words like “beginning,” “end,” and “in” already presuppose the continuous. He even draws out its bearing on theology—eternity, the soul’s immateriality—before the class begins reading Book VI’s opening lines together.

62. Continuous, Touching and Next; Reason and the Brain; One Substance and Immanent Activity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aristotle’s Physics distinctions among the continuous, the touching, and the next, then applies them to the act of reasoning: joining terms in a definition or syllogism is not a continuous process the way bodily motion is, so thinking cannot simply be identified with brain activity. He turns to Aristotle’s De Anima to work out how reason depends on sense and imagination without being reducible to them, and brings in Boethius’s De Trinitate on how we come to know immaterial things such as God and separated substances. Along the way he flags the fallacy of affirming the consequent and distinguishes the proper objects of intellect and imagination, drawing out what this means for the soul’s existence apart from the body.

63. Physics VI: The Continuous Is Not Composed of Indivisibles, and Democritus' Cone

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening arguments of Physics VI, asking why a continuous magnitude like a line cannot be composed of indivisible points. Working through Aristotle’s definitions of continuous, touching, and “next,” he shows that points can do none of these to one another without collapsing into a single point, and draws on Aquinas’s commentary and the De Potentia comparison of creaturely to divine goodness as illustration. He then returns to Democritus’s cone—cut parallel to its base, its cross-sections seem both equal and unequal—showing that denying any “indivisible next” between the cuts dissolves the contradiction. A digression on demonstrative versus persuasive “reason” and conditional syllogisms reinforces the lesson’s insistence on precise basic distinctions.

64. Motion and Indivisible Points: Aristotle's Physics, the Three Senses of "Before," and a Digression on Mill

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s case in the Physics against the idea that motion is composed of indivisibles. He sorts out three senses of “before” — before in time, before in motion, before in magnitude — and uses these to unravel the paradox of a body having moved across a point without ever moving through it. From there the class widens into a digression: the notion of “instantaneous velocity” in modern physics as a kind of useful fiction, questions of how historical periods get carved up, and Mill’s ranking of higher and lower pleasures, before drifting into unrelated conversation.

65. The Continuous and Its Basic Role: Beginning, End, and the Point Without a Limit

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s Physics Book VI, with Aquinas’s commentary, on the continuous, asking why this single notion is foundational to every branch of philosophy. He distinguishes two definitions Aristotle gives—one logical, that the continuous is what has parts meeting at a common boundary, the other from natural philosophy, that it is what is infinitely divisible—drawing on Euclid, Plato’s Meno, and Melissus’s argument in Physics Book I to show equivocation and proper demonstrative order. He closes by beginning the argument that the continuous cannot be composed of indivisibles.

66. Points Cannot Compose a Line: Aristotle's Arguments in the First Reading

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Aristotle’s argument in Physics VI that a line cannot be made of points: indivisibles have no edges or limits distinct from themselves, so they cannot be continuous or touch as lines, surfaces, and bodies do. He follows this into the logical axiom that nothing can be its own beginning, end, or limit, connecting it to Metaphysics V’s treatment of before, after, and limit and to the Posterior Analytics on demonstration and per se necessity. Digressions take up the impossibility of a true cause of oneself, the difference between negation and privation as applied to “unlimited,” and Aquinas on divine love and joy—all returning to the claim that a line is infinitely divisible, never a sum of points.

67. Which Definition Comes First? Circularity in Aristotle's Reasoning

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to Physics VI, where Aristotle argues from faster and slower moving bodies that time and distance divide without limit, and to the book’s closing proof that the continuous cannot be built from indivisibles. He treats this as an example of convertible demonstration—arguing from one truth to a related one and back again—comparing it to Euclid’s reciprocal theorems and to how Aquinas orders his arguments for the divine attributes differently in the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles. He ties this to Aristotle’s proemium on wonder and wisdom in the Metaphysics, then closes with the principle of simplicity in explanation, drawn out through examples from Born, Heisenberg, and Weizsäcker alongside the question of an unmoved first cause.

68. Student Questions on the Continuous, Kant, Natural Law, and Shakespeare

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a set of student questions, beginning with Book VI of Aristotle’s Physics on the continuous: what distinguishes continuity from mere contact or succession, and the puzzle of how a magnitude infinitely divisible can still be traversed in motion, since one must always have moved some distance before completing any distance. From there the discussion ranges further afield, touching Kant’s claim that goodwill rather than good is ethics’ first principle, Aristotle’s Topics and Nicomachean Ethics on acts admitting no mean, such as adultery and murder, and questions of abortion and natural inequality between the sexes. He closes with an extended reflection on Shakespeare’s likely Catholic sympathies and the sonnets’ opposition of true birth to revolt from nature.

69. Ends and Limits, and the Dependence of Philosophy on the Natural

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what Aristotle means by “end” or “limit” in Metaphysics V—the boundary of a magnitude, the terminus of a motion, a final cause, and a definition—and shows through Aquinas’s commentary how these senses are ordered and analogically related rather than merely ambiguous. He pairs the axiom “nothing is an end of itself” with the earlier Physics axiom “nothing is a beginning of itself” to catch equivocations on “end,” “part,” and “before” that generate common logical fallacies. From there he broadens out to argue that all philosophical reasoning rests on naturally known first principles and natural desire to know, contrasting this with modern philosophy’s rejection of the natural since Descartes.

70. Motion and Time Divisible Forever: Aristotle's Argument from Faster and Slower

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, read alongside Aquinas’s commentary, that magnitude, motion, and time cannot be composed of indivisible points but must instead be divisible without end. He works through the reasoning that a body moving toward a place cannot simultaneously have already arrived there, then shows how comparing a faster body with a slower one forces distance and time to divide endlessly in tandem. Along the way he turns to Aristotle’s Metaphysics on activity versus motion and to Euclid’s geometry, weighing ancient against modern accounts of continuity, infinity, and matter.

71. False Imagination, Wonder, and Learning from Nature: Student or Judge

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how imagination deceives us about things that have no image: the soul, universals, mathematical objects. He draws examples from Homer’s Odyssey, Dante, Plato’s Parmenides, and Boethius’s De Trinitate to show the soul wrongly pictured in sensible terms, then turns to Aristotle’s Physics, using incommensurability, tangent lines, and the bisection of a line to show imagination misleading reason even in geometry, alongside Aristotle’s account of wonder. He closes by weighing natural sign against convention (the smile, the frown), Plato’s Apology on the examined life, and, following Aristotle and Kant, whether reason should stand toward nature and the passions as student or as judge.

72. Zeno, Parmenides and the Continuous: Why Nothing Continuous Is Indivisible

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in Physics VI that nothing continuous—time, magnitude, or motion—can be composed of indivisible parts, working through Zeno’s paradox of infinite points and Aristotle’s ad hominem reply to it. He tests the claim with the example of a faster and a slower body each crossing a supposedly indivisible stretch, showing the notion collapses. He digresses to Parmenides and Zeno’s denial of change, and to how the principle of non-contradiction resolves apparent contradictions like health and sickness or day and night through an underlying subject, drawing comparisons to wave-particle duality and to Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger.

73. The Now as Indivisible Limit of Past and Future

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the general account of the continuous and turns to Reading 5 of Book VI of Aristotle’s Physics with Aquinas’s commentary, where Aristotle shows that the “now” is indivisible, that nothing moves within it, and that whatever is moved must itself be divisible. He sets this within Aquinas’s larger picture of natural philosophy’s subject, ens mobile, and its properties, then reaches back to Metaphysics V’s discussion of the senses of “beginning” to explain how the now serves as the shared limit joining past and future. He closes by weighing the strange fact that, strictly, only this indivisible now exists at all.

74. No Motion or Rest in the Now, the Divisibility of What Moves, and Boredom and Loneliness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in the Physics, Book VI, that motion and rest cannot occur in an indivisible instant, since rest, properly understood, requires the before-and-after that only time supplies. He follows this into the connected proof, worked through examples of locomotion and alteration, that anything undergoing change must itself be divisible. Along the way he distinguishes negation from privation using terms like “unlimited” and “blind,” touches Xenophanes on divine simplicity, and criticizes the modern habit of equating reality with motion or history, closing with a comparison between Aristotle’s analysis of the instant and puzzles in quantum physics reminiscent of Zeno.

75. Nature and Reason: Distinction, Equivocal Names, and Why the Beginning Matters

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a text from Aquinas, read alongside Aristotle on wisdom and causation, to ask what relationship “nature” bears to “reason” or “will.” Rather than a strict logical opposition, he argues it is inclusive: reason and will are natures with something added, as three contains two. He tests the distinction against Shakespeare, contrasting Hamlet’s praise of Horatio with Coriolanus’s rigid soldierly nature, and against Plato’s Meno and Porphyry on equivocal naming. He closes by arguing Sartre gets this backward, treating free will as severed from nature instead of built upon it.

76. Physics Book VI: The Division of Motion, the Three Roads, and First and Last Philosophy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Physics VI, lectio 6, where Aristotle divides motion in two ways: according to time, and according to the parts of the thing moved. He traces how time, motion, the mobile, and the medium of change all divide correspondingly, and argues that the moving thing itself is the deepest basis for this divisibility. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary, he distinguishes “division” from the broader term “distinction,” illustrating the difference with Trinitarian theology, and explains the threefold sense of “way”—via naturae, via rationis, via disciplinae—that orders the sciences and underlies Aristotle’s idea of first philosophy. He closes by previewing the next readings, which turn to whether motion has a first and how before and after establish order.

77. Physics Book VI: The First in Change, Contradiction, and Relation in the Trinity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, read through Aquinas’s commentary, that whatever has first changed must already be in the terminus reached, not still caught between start and end. To sharpen the point he distinguishes four kinds of opposition—contradictory, privative, contrary, and relative—using being and non-being, sight and blindness, virtue and vice, and double and half as examples. A digression follows on the Greek preposition “pros” (toward), which Aristotle uses for relation in the Categories and which John’s Gospel uses when it says the Word was “with,” or toward, God, with a further aside on how Luke renders the love commandment. He closes by turning to whether this first moment of having changed is itself indivisible, preparing the ground for the later argument to a first unmoved mover.

78. Distinction, Order and the Strange Lack of a First in Motion (Physics Readings 7–8)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of why a motion has no first instant or first part, whether one looks to its terminus, its beginning, or the time and magnitude it traverses. Working closely through the text, he shows that “having moved” and “moving” each presuppose the other, so neither can claim strict priority — a result he ties to Aristotle’s later argument, developed by Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles, that nothing moves itself. Along the way he distinguishes “order” from mere “distinction.” He closes with a digression into Aquinas’s Sentences commentary and De Potentia, on how before-and-after and genus-and-difference are, and are not, predicated of the Trinity.

79. Moving and Having Moved, Becoming and Contradiction, Eucharist and Idealization in Science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aristotle’s treatment of beauty—order, symmetry, and limit—illustrated through the arrangement of Plato’s dialogues, Shakespeare, Mozart’s Mass, and McNeill’s history of the world, distinguishing strict before-and-after order from mere symmetry. He then returns to Physics VI, working through the argument that whatever has changed was previously changing, and that no first instant of motion exists given the infinite divisibility of time and magnitude. This opens onto the harder problem of change between contradictories, such as becoming a sphere or the Eucharistic change of substance: why there is a first “now” of the new state but no last “now” of the old. Drawing on De Koninck’s article and the mathematical image of polygons approaching a circle, he shows how accidental predication—as in “day becomes night”—resolves what looks like Hegelian contradiction.

80. Q&A: Motion and Rest in the Now, More Known to Us, Purgatory and Baptism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks a puzzle from Aristotle’s Physics: since motion and rest belong properly to time rather than to an indivisible instant, is there any real difference between a moving body and a resting one at the very “now” where both coincide? He works through act and potency in motion, the divisibility of lines and points, and the paradoxes of Zeno and Democritus, leaning on Aquinas’s commentary to explain why motion is the least actual yet most familiar of acts. The class closes with questions on purgatory, baptism, and the beatific vision, drawing on the Summa Contra Gentiles and the testimonies of Catherine of Genoa and Gertrude the Great.

81. Zeno's Paradoxes, the Socratic Method, and the Four Kinds of Conversation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Zeno’s four paradoxes against motion in Aristotle’s Physics, Book Six, showing how each tries to defend Parmenides’ claim that change is impossible because it would require being to come from not-being. He explains Aristotle’s resolution: a continuum is divisible without limit only potentially, never actually, which dissolves the contradiction Zeno relies on. He extends the problem to change between contradictories like life and death and to the puzzle of circular motion, drawing on Plato’s Parmenides and Meno and the Socratic method, and uses a proposition from Euclid’s Elements, Book II, to show how a paradoxical-sounding truth can provoke genuine wonder.

82. Wisely and Slow: Friar Lawrence, Shakespeare, and Seven Places Where the Wise Man Proceeds Slowly

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies before turning to Friar Lawrence’s counsel to Romeo in Act II, Scene III of Romeo and Juliet: “wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast.” He uses the line to ask what distinguishes the wise man’s deliberate slowness from culpable hesitation or plain dullness, drawing on Aquinas’s account of wisdom as “savory knowledge” and touching Hamlet, Augustine’s De Trinitate, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, and Plato’s Timaeus. From these he draws out several situations—complex judgments, difficult objects, first principles, ordered inquiry, and reasoning from general to particular—where genuine wisdom refuses to rush.

83. Shakespeare's 'Stumbling on Abuse': Nature, Bad as Privation, and Equivocal Words

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from the Lord’s Prayer and the liturgical Kyrie and Agnus Dei, Berquist turns to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where Friar Lawrence’s meditation on plants warns that nothing so good but, “strained from that fair use, / Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.” He uses the line to draw out Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s account of nature and natural ends, and the sense in which “bad” names a privation rather than a positive thing. The class closes with a technical distinction between equivocal and analogous terms — words like “virtue,” “political,” and “bad” that carry several meanings ordered to one primary sense.

84. Can a Philosopher Deny God? Humility, Wisdom and Likeness to God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether one can genuinely philosophize while denying God, arguing from Aristotle’s Ethics and Metaphysics, Plato’s Theaetetus, the pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Empedocles, and even Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing that real humility and the pursuit of wisdom already presuppose some recognition of the divine. He illustrates the point with the natural ordering of the sexual faculties toward the common good, using it as an analogy for how the mind is ordered toward truth and, ultimately, toward God. He then turns to Aquinas, comparing the arguments for God’s existence in the Summa Contra Gentiles, which offers two distinct arguments from motion, against the Summa Theologiae’s single, more compactly stated argument from motion, noting how the two works differ in developing the premises and divine attributes.

85. The Argument from Motion in the Summa Contra Gentiles: Everything Moved Is Moved by Another

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s rejection of two extremes on knowing God: that his existence is self-evident, and that it cannot be demonstrated at all, truth lying between them as in the Trinitarian and Christological heresies. He then turns to chapter thirteen of the Summa Contra Gentiles and Aristotle’s argument from motion, drawn from books six and seven of the Physics, that whatever is moved is moved by another. Along the way he distinguishes demonstration quia from demonstration propter quid, cites Romans 1:20 and the First Vatican Council on demonstrating God’s existence, and uses Euclid and the figures of antonomasia and synecdoche to clarify how such arguments work.

86. Shakespeare Introductions and Aquinas's First Way: The Infinite Regress of Moved Movers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by praising older Shakespeare scholarship—Hudson, Kittredge—including Kittredge’s note that Antony’s speech runs through Aristotle’s qualities of an orator, before returning to Aquinas on motion. He distinguishes Plato’s broad sense of “motion,” covering any operation such as understanding or willing, from Aristotle’s stricter sense, then walks through the three proofs Aquinas offers against an endless series of moved movers, illustrating the point with a train and a hanging lamp. He closes by extending the same logic analogously to final causality, the ordering of ends and means in Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics.

87. The Second Way: Per Se and Per Accidens, and the Principle That What Is Through Itself Comes First

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s proof for God from efficient causality, reading the fuller version in the Summa Contra Gentiles against its terser counterpart in the Summa Theologiae. He lingers on Aquinas’s claim that “if every mover is moved, either this proposition is true per se or per accidens,” using it to unpack propositio, the per se/per accidens distinction, and necessary versus contingent truth, tracing these terms back to Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics. He then returns to the argument’s logical structure, following it toward an unmoved first mover, and brings in Plato’s self-subsisting forms to illustrate why what exists “through itself” must be prior to what exists “through another.”

88. The Self-Moving First Mover, the Eternity of the World, and the Meanings of Spirit

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces Aristotle’s argument that any self-moving thing must contain a part that moves without itself being moved, working through Physics Book VIII with side glances at Book VI and the De Generatione et Corruptione. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary, he follows Aristotle into Metaphysics Book XII to show how this unmoved mover within things points toward a wholly separate, immobile first mover, pure act incapable of receiving anything further. Along the way he takes up the eternity-of-motion premise and act and potency, and turns to gratitude, the Eucharist, and how mortal things imitate divine eternity through reproduction and teaching. He closes with notes on upcoming texts and a digression on “spirit” versus “soul.”