Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005) #

A systematic study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and first philosophy. These lectures trace the ascent from sensation to wisdom, examining being as being, substance and accident, act and potency, and the first causes—culminating in knowledge of God as pure actuality and first principle.

56 episodes, about 52 hours

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Classes #

Class 1 2004-12-16 #

Part 1 of 2 · The Fourteen Books of Wisdom: Naming, Dividing, and ‘All Men by Nature Desire to Know’ #

51 min Berquist opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics—which he calls “the fourteen books of wisdom”—and works through the opening line, “All men by nature desire to know,” testing its truth against everyday delight in seeing and storytelling.

Part 2 of 2 · The First Road in Our Knowledge: From Sensation and Memory to Experience and Art #

52 min Berquist opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics, tracing the road from sensation and memory through experience to art, and asking why knowing universal causes counts as wisdom.

Class 2 2005-01-05 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics I.1 (end): Why Knowing the Cause Is Wiser Than Experience #

62 min Berquist works through the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics I, using the master artist, the doctor, and the teacher to show why knowing causes—not just knowing that something is so—is wisdom.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics I.2: The Six Marks of the Wise Man; Wisdom as Knowledge of What Is Said of All #

68 min Berquist works through the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where six popular marks of “the wise man” split into two arguments—one for wisdom as knowledge of the universal, one for wisdom as knowledge of first causes.

Class 3 2005-01-13 #

Part 1 of 3 · Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wisdom Is About the First Causes; Philosophy Begins in Wonder #

56 min Berquist continues through the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, showing why wisdom concerns both the most universal truths and the first causes, then argues that it is speculative knowledge born of wonder rather than practical utility.

Part 2 of 3 · Metaphysics I, Proemium: Liberal Knowledge, Not a Human Possession, the Knowledge of God #

44 min Berquist closes the proemium to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asking why wisdom is called the most “liberal” science, the most “unenslaved,” and the “knowledge of God”—drawing on Aquinas’s commentary and the Simonides quotation.

Part 3 of 3 · Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wonder Fulfilled, Iris Daughter of Thaumas, and Learning from Predecessors #

48 min Berquist opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics proemium, distinguishing the wonder that ignorance dispels from the wonder that admiration sustains, using the diagonal’s incommensurability and Plato’s Iris, daughter of Thaumas, before turning to Book One’s survey of the first philosophers.

Class 4 2005-01-20 #

Part 1 of 2 · The Four Causes and the First Philosophers: Thales and Anaximander #

71 min Berquist reviews Aristotle’s four causes and their corollaries, then turns to the earliest Greek philosophers—Thales’s claim that water is the origin of all things, and Anaximander’s “unlimited.”

Part 2 of 2 · Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus: Air, Number, and the Puzzle of Change #

53 min Berquist traces the early Greek search for a first principle—Thales’ water, Anaximander’s Unlimited, Anaximenes’ air—then turns to Pythagoras’s octave and Heraclitus’s river and unity of contraries.

Class 5 2005-01-27 #

Part 1 of 3 · Heraclitus: Hidden Harmony, Strife as Father of All, and Fire #

41 min Berquist reads Heraclitus’s fragments on hidden harmony and strife, asking why war is “father of all” and why fire, not water or air, grounds his account of change.

Part 2 of 3 · Empedocles: The Four Elements, Ratios, and Change as Mere Mixing #

48 min Berquist works through Empedocles’ fragments to show why he broke with the monists, positing four root elements and reducing all “birth” and “death” to mere mixing and separating.

Part 3 of 3 · Empedocles on Love and Hate, Mind vs. Chance, and Anaxagoras on Everything in Everything #

46 min Berquist reads Empedocles’ fragments on Love and Strife as rival cosmic forces, then turns to Anaxagoras’ claim that everything contains a portion of everything, ordered by Mind rather than chance.

Class 6 2005-02-17 #

Part 1 of 2 · Anaxagoras on Matter and Mind: Infinite Division, the Continuous, and Why the Ruler Must Be Separate #

62 min Berquist works through Anaxagoras’s fragments on mixture, infinite divisibility, and Mind (Nous), reading Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics I against the fragment collection itself.

Part 2 of 2 · Anaxagoras on Mind, Part 2: How the Mind Rules Itself, the Ten Attributes of Mind, and a Greater Mind That Is Angelic Rather Than Divine #

65 min Berquist works through the ten attributes of Anaxagoras’s Nous fragment, resolves the puzzle of a self-ruling mind by way of Plato’s Republic, and argues the “greater mind” is angelic rather than divine.

Class 7 2005-02-24 #

Part 1 of 2 · Leucippus and Democritus: Determinism, Atoms, the Void and Man as Microcosm; Why Book Two of Wisdom Begins with Truth #

58 min Berquist reads the fragments of Leucippus and Democritus on strict determinism, atoms and the void, then turns to why Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins its second book with the question of truth.

Part 2 of 2 · Is Truth Easy or Difficult? Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Two, First Reading: The Bat’s Eye and Our Debt to Predecessors #

68 min Berquist opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Two, asking why grasping truth is at once easy and difficult—and why no one, not even the bat, can be blamed for the darkness that blinds it.

Class 8 2005-03-03 #

Part 1 of 3 · Why Truth Belongs to the Wise Man: Wisdom, Truth, and the Balance of Hope and Fear (Metaphysics II, Reading 2) #

48 min Berquist continues his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book II (lectio 2, with Aquinas), arguing that wisdom has the strongest claim to truth because causes are more true than their effects.

Part 2 of 3 · No Infinite Regress: The Moved Mover, the Train, and the First Matter (Metaphysics II, Readings 2–3) #

34 min Berquist works through Aristotle’s proof that causes cannot regress infinitely, using the moved-mover argument, a train analogy, and the two patterns by which matter comes to be.

Part 3 of 3 · Endless Ends and Endless Definitions, and the Influence of Custom on Thinking (Metaphysics II, Readings 4–5) #

51 min Berquist works through Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book II on why the causes called “end” and “form” cannot regress infinitely, then turns to how custom shapes the method of any science.

Class 9 2005-03-17 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics II, Reading 5: Custom, Certitude, and Matching the Way of Proceeding to the Subject #

69 min Berquist works through Reading Five of Book II of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with Aquinas’s commentary, asking why custom sways the mind more than argument does—and why every science needs a way of proceeding suited to its own subject.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics III, Reading 1: Tying and Untying the Knots — Doubting Well and How Discoveries Are Made #

50 min Berquist opens Book Three of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where some twenty-three disputed questions get “tied” before Books Four through Fourteen untie them—and why doubting well is the road to discovery.

Class 10 2005-03-31 #

Part 1 of 2 · The Role of Contradiction in Discovery: Heraclitus, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and Theology #

60 min Berquist traces how contradiction drives discovery, from Heraclitus’s “hidden harmony” through Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Einstein on physics, to Christ’s riddle about David and the Messiah in Matthew 22.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics III, Second Reading: Which Causes Wisdom Studies, the Axioms, and Whether the Way We Know Must Be the Way Things Are #

67 min Berquist works through Book III’s opening puzzles—whether wisdom studies all four causes and whether it must defend the common axioms—using Zeno-style sophisms and a whole/part equivocation.

Class 11 2005-04-07 #

Part 1 of 2 · Wisdom’s Questions About Substance and the Plan of the Third Reading: Is There a Cause Besides Matter? #

60 min Berquist continues working through Aristotle’s dialectical questions in Metaphysics Beta, asking whether wisdom studies only material substances or also causes apart from matter, reading from “The Royal Fragment” and DHB Vol. I.

Part 2 of 2 · Dividing to Reach the Beginnings: Kinds of Whole and Part, Universals, and Hegel’s Error #

49 min Berquist works through Aristotle’s broad sense of “matter” as any part of a whole, then compares three ways of dividing reality down to its principles—quantitative, most-universal, and definitional—reading from “Second Road in our Knowledge.”

Class 12 2005-04-21 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics Book III, Part 1: How Many First Causes? Corruptible and Incorruptible Things, the One and Being, and Universal vs. Individual Causes #

66 min Berquist works through the second set of doubts in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book III: are the causes of corruptible and incorruptible things the same, and are unity and being themselves the substance of things or attributes of some other subject?

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics Book III, Part 2: Which Comes First, Ability or Act? Mathematical Things, and the Start of Book IV (Knowledge of Being as Being) #

63 min Berquist works through Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book III puzzles—whether potency or act comes first, and whether numbers and figures are substances—before opening Book IV on being as being.

Class 13 2005-04-28 #

Part 1 of 2 · Wisdom as the Knowledge of Being as Being: ‘Through Itself’, the First Cause, and Words Equivocal by Reason #

64 min Berquist works through Aristotle’s “kath’ hauto” (per se) and then the opening of the Metaphysics, arguing wisdom’s search for first causes is one with the science of being as being.

Part 2 of 2 · Substance as the First Meaning of Being, the Philosopher, and Why Wisdom Must Consider the Axioms #

60 min Berquist reads Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV on how “being” is said many ways yet ordered to substance, then asks why philosophy must still examine self-evident axioms.

Class 14 2005-05-12 #

Part 1 of 2 · Why Wisdom Defends the Axioms and the ‘Great Turnaround’ in the Order of Wisdom (Book IV, Reading 5; Overview of Book V) #

70 min Berquist works through Reading 5 of Book IV of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where the wise man who studies being as being must also defend the axioms—above all non-contradiction.

Part 2 of 2 · Book V: The Meanings of ‘Beginning’ and of ‘Being’ (By Happening, by the Figures of Predication, as True) #

65 min Berquist opens Book Five of the Metaphysics, laying out six senses of “beginning” and then the opening distinction between accidental being and being per se through the figures of predication.

Class 15 2005-05-19 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics V, Reading 17: The Senses of Being – Being by Happening, the Ten Categories, Being as True, and Act and Ability #

58 min Berquist works through Aquinas’s commentary on this reading of Metaphysics V, sorting out the senses of “being”: accidental being, being per se by the ten categories, being as true, and being as act and potency.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics V, Reading 18 on ‘Perfect’ and the Start of Book VI: How Wisdom Differs from the Making and Doing Sciences #

58 min Berquist finishes Book Five’s list of terms with “perfect,” distinguishing three senses of the word, then opens Book Six where Aristotle begins separating wisdom from the sciences of making and doing.

Class 16 2005-09-15 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics Book 6, Part 1: Wisdom’s Subject, and How the Making, Doing and Looking Sciences Are Divided #

59 min Berquist opens Book Six of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, showing how wisdom is marked off from every other science by its concern with being as being, then divides the theoretical sciences from the practical and productive by their causes.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics Book 6, Part 2: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and First Philosophy; Introducing Accidental Being #

54 min Berquist works through Aristotle’s threefold division of speculative philosophy into natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics, then turns to Book Six’s treatment of accidental being.

Class 17 2005-09-22 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics VI, Reading 2: Accidental Being and Why No Reasoned-Out Knowledge Is About It #

41 min Berquist works through Book VI of Aristotle’s Metaphysics on why accidental being can never be the object of a reasoned science, using the housebuilder, sophistical fallacies, and the sick/healthy paradox as test cases.

Part 2 of 2 · Is Moral Effect Accidental to the Poet? Accidental Causes, No Science of the Accidental, and Modern Determinism #

44 min Berquist asks whether tragedy’s moral effect belongs to the poet’s art itself or only by accident, turning to Aristotle’s Poetics and Metaphysics to work out what “accidental” means and why.

Class 18 2005-09-29 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics VI: The Whole Truth, Contradiction, and Truth in the Mind, Good in Things; Predicates and Definition in Logic #

58 min Berquist reads Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics VI to locate truth and falsity in the mind’s combining and dividing, not in things—while good and bad belong to things themselves.

Part 2 of 2 · Isagoge vs. Categories, What a Thing Is, and Metaphysics VII: Defining Substance, Accident and Motion #

54 min Berquist separates Porphyry’s fivefold division of names in the Isagoge from Aristotle’s tenfold categories, then turns to Metaphysics VII on why only substance can be strictly defined.

Class 19 2005-10-06 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics VIII, Reading 1: Summing Up Book VII, Change, and Knowing First Matter by Proportion #

62 min Berquist opens Metaphysics VIII by reviewing Book VII’s terms, then shows why prime matter can only be known indirectly, through the fact of change, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics I and the Parmenides-Heraclitus dispute over contraries.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics VIII, Reading 2: Substantial Form Compared with Accidental Form, and Why Proportions Matter #

50 min Berquist works through Metaphysics VIII on Democritus’s accidental differences—shape, position, order—and builds the analogy between accidental form and substantial form, using examples from Euclid, Scripture, and Plato to show why proportional reasoning matters.

Class 20 2005-10-13 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics VIII, Reading 3 (Part 1): Form Compared with Plato’s Separate Species #

52 min Berquist works through Book VIII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics on form, comparing it point by point to Plato’s separated Ideas and to numbers, using a Manhattan cocktail and a carpenter’s chair as test cases.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics VIII, Reading 3 (Part 2): Definitions and Forms Are Like Numbers #

38 min Berquist continues through Aristotle’s Metaphysics, working out why substantial definitions behave like numbers rather than continuous magnitudes such as lines.

Class 21 2005-10-20 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics Book 8, Reading 4: How Matter Relates to Its Products, to the Other Causes, and to Coming to Be (with Wine and Vinegar and Socrates’ Argument from Contraries) #

52 min Berquist works through Metaphysics VIII on matter’s relation to the other causes and to coming-to-be, testing the distinctions on wine turning to vinegar and Socrates’s argument from contraries in the Phaedo.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics Book 8, Reading 5: How Matter and Form Are One, and an Introduction to Book 9 on Act and Ability #

62 min Berquist works through Metaphysics VIII on what unites matter and form into one thing, then closes by previewing Book IX’s turn to act and potency and the first cause.

Class 22 2005-10-27 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Reading 1: Substance, the Categories, and the Senses of Ability (Active and Passive Potency) #

58 min Berquist opens Book Nine of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, working through the handout’s distinctions of active power, passive power, and the power to resist corruption before drawing out inability as privation.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Reading 2: Rational vs. Natural Abilities — Knowledge of Contraries and the Modern Misunderstanding of Reason and Nature #

66 min Berquist works through Metaphysics IX on why rational powers—a doctor’s art, a logician’s skill—reach to contraries and can be used well or badly, while a natural power like fire’s heat cannot. He then turns this distinction against Mill and Sartre’s denial of any fixed nature in thought and will.

Class 23 2005-11-05 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Readings 1–3: Kinds of Ability, the Megarian Error, and Why Motion Seems Most Real #

44 min Berquist continues reading Metaphysics IX, distinguishing natural from rational abilities and refuting the Megarians, who deny any potency apart from its actual exercise.

Part 2 of 2 · The Meanings of ‘Necessary’ and Metaphysics IX, Reading 4: Rational Ability, Choice, and Mind versus Love as First Mover #

49 min Berquist works through Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX on rational versus non-rational powers, then asks why Anaxagoras needed Mind and Empedocles needed Love to move the world, and what this means for the Trinity.

Class 24 2005-11-10 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Reading 5: Act Known by Induction and Proportion; Motion vs. Perfect Act #

58 min Berquist works through Metaphysics IX on act (energeia) beyond motion, distinguishing imperfect acts like walking from perfect acts like seeing—and why act itself can’t be defined, only shown by induction.

Part 2 of 2 · Juliet’s Beauty and God’s Self-Knowledge; Reading 6 on Proximate Ability; Opening of Reading 7 on the Senses of ‘Before’ #

60 min Berquist opens by testing the four senses of “before” from Aristotle’s Categories, ch. 12 on Romeo’s seeing Juliet’s beauty, then returns to Metaphysics IX on act and potency.

Class 25 2005-11-23 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Readings 7–8: Act Before Ability in Definition, Time and Perfection (The Chicken or the Egg) #

67 min Berquist works through Metaphysics IX on why act comes before potency—in definition, knowledge, and substance, and even in time once “before” is properly distinguished.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Reading 9: Eternal and Corruptible Things, Necessary and Impossible, Pure Act, and What Is More Knowable to Us #

47 min Berquist works through Metaphysics IX on why act is prior to potency, tracing the case from incorruptible versus corruptible things to necessary versus possible and impossible.

Class 26 2005-12-01 #

Part 1 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Readings 9–10: Act Is Better Than Ability, the Transcendentals, and the Ability for Contraries #

56 min Berquist works through readings nine and ten of Metaphysics IX to show why actuality outranks potentiality, then traces how that claim underwrites Aquinas’s account of being, goodness, and evil as privation.

Part 2 of 2 · Metaphysics IX, Reading 10: Evil as Privation, God as Pure Act and the Best Thing, and Why Act Is More Knowable #

55 min Berquist works through Metaphysics IX on evil as privation—not mere negation—then argues that God, as pure act with no passive potency, can contain no evil at all.

Class 27 · Metaphysics IX, Chapter 10: Truth and Falsity in the Mind’s Composing and Dividing #

2005-12-06 · 39 min Berquist works through Metaphysics IX, chapter 10, on truth and falsity, showing how truth is grounded in the mind’s composing and dividing rather than in things themselves.