7a. Wisdom (2005) on The Duane Berquist Lectures

1. The Fourteen Books of Wisdom: Naming, Dividing, and 'All Men by Nature Desire to Know'

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Why is this work called first philosophy, wisdom, or metaphysics, and why does Berquist reject the traditional title as misleading? He starts by laying out Aquinas’s division of the text into proemium and tractatus, comparing it to similar structural moves in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Gospel of Matthew. Most of the class then stays with Aristotle’s opening sentence, “All men by nature desire to know,” asking what it means and whether it’s true. Berquist tests it against ordinary experience—the pleasure of seeing, the pull of a good story, the appeal of sports—to show why Aristotle chose this claim to launch an inquiry into wisdom as a good pursued for its own sake.

2. The First Road in Our Knowledge: From Sensation and Memory to Experience and Art

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins reading the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, following the natural road of human knowledge as it rises from sensation to memory, from memory to experience, and from experience to art or science. Using homely examples—a cat that learns to avoid a hot stove, tea steeping, a doctor treating this man versus treating man as such—he shows why Aristotle judges knowledge of universal causes wiser than experiential knowledge of particulars, even though experience sometimes acts more successfully in practice. He works through the “Distinction of the Roads” handout and “The Royal Fragment,” closing with a preview of Aristotle’s further signs that knowing the why surpasses merely knowing the that.

3. Metaphysics I.1 (end): Why Knowing the Cause Is Wiser Than Experience

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads through Aristotle’s opening arguments in Metaphysics I, asking why art and science rank above mere experience. He follows Aristotle’s examples—the chief artist over the subordinate craftsman, the doctor over the pharmacist, the teacher who can say “why” and not just “that”—to show that grasping causes, not just facts, is what makes someone wise. Along the way he draws out Aristotle’s distinction among arts serving necessity, pleasure, and pure knowledge, tracing the Greek roots of “philosophy” and “mathematics.” He closes with student questions on how experience relates to theoretical knowledge, pointing ahead to later passages that pin down wisdom as knowledge of causes rather than universals.

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

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the second part of the proem to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where Aristotle lists six things people commonly say of the wise man: he knows all things, knows hard things, is more certain, can teach, seeks knowledge for its own sake, and is fit to direct others. Following Aquinas’s commentary, Berquist shows how the first three traits argue that wisdom concerns what is “said of all”—the universale in praedicando—while the last three argue separately that wisdom concerns the highest causes, the universale in causando, a distinction he insists later thinkers such as Hegel collapse. He draws out the argument with examples from Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, De Koninck, MacArthur, and Shakespeare, and ties it back to related discussions of immaterial cause in the Physics and De Anima.

5. Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wisdom Is About the First Causes; Philosophy Begins in Wonder

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, with an eye to Aquinas’s commentary, asking why wisdom must grasp both what is “said of all” and the first causes of things—since knowing causes is what makes teaching and understanding complete. He then turns to Aristotle’s claim that wisdom is speculative rather than practical, rooted in wonder rather than use, drawing on Plato’s Theaetetus and Aristotle’s image of the philosopher as a “philomythos,” lover of stories. Along the way he distinguishes universal poetic knowledge from singular historical knowledge, and warns against collapsing “the universal” into “the cause of all,” the mistake he locates in Hegel’s pantheism.

6. Metaphysics I, Proemium: Liberal Knowledge, Not a Human Possession, the Knowledge of God

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Why does Aristotle call wisdom the most “liberal” and most “divine” of the sciences? Berquist works through the end of the proemium to the Metaphysics, read with Aquinas’s commentary, tracing the analogy between free and servile knowledge and Aristotle’s catalogue of practical bondage in ordinary human life. He examines the Simonides quotation, which assigns wisdom properly to God alone, and unfolds the double sense in which wisdom is “knowledge of God”—as its highest object and as possessed most fully by the divine intellect itself. Along the way he brings in Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, and Shakespeare, and points ahead to Aquinas on pride and humility, to show why the ancients approached this science with reverence rather than presumption.

7. Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wonder Fulfilled, Iris Daughter of Thaumas, and Learning from Predecessors

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where philosophy is said to begin in wonder. He separates two kinds: the wonder of ignorance, which vanishes once a cause is grasped, and the wonder of admiration, which excellence only deepens, as with the divine. The incommensurability of the diagonal and Euclidean geometry illustrate the first; Plato’s Theaetetus, where Iris is called the child of Thaumas, illustrates the pull toward the second. He closes by locating the proemium within Book One’s review of earlier thinkers on causation, framing the question of whether wisdom can be received from predecessors or must be won anew.

8. The Four Causes and the First Philosophers: Thales and Anaximander

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book I, Berquist re-establishes the four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—along with three corollaries governing how they relate, before turning to Aristotle’s review of the Presocratics. He works through the fragments on Thales, who held water to be the origin of all things, and Anaximander, whose notion of the apeiron, or “unlimited,” develops that first thought. Along the way he draws connections to Scripture and theology, including water as a figure for God and the matter of Baptism, and situates the discussion in the historical and geographic setting of Miletus.

9. Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus: Air, Number, and the Puzzle of Change

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows the Presocratics as each philosopher tries to improve on his predecessor’s guess about the world’s first principle, moving from the poets’ Mother Earth through Thales’ water and Anaximander’s Unlimited to Anaximenes’ choice of air, weighing why each step gains in unlimitedness and fineness. He then takes up Pythagoras’s discovery that the octave is a 2:1 ratio to introduce formal cause as something distinct from material stuff. Turning to Heraclitus, he reads the river fragment and the pairings of contraries—day and night, living and dead—as posing the problem of change and apparent contradiction that Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle will later have to answer.

10. Heraclitus: Hidden Harmony, Strife as Father of All, and Fire

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through a cluster of Heraclitus fragments on the unity of opposites, showing how a hidden harmony can underlie apparent contradiction in change, in friendship, and in cosmic order, and how strife or “war” serves as a moving cause behind becoming. He asks why Heraclitus settles on fire as first principle, tracing its influence on Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and drawing out later echoes in Hegel’s dialectic, Marxist dialectical materialism, and Heisenberg’s notion of energy. He closes on Heraclitus’s own unresolved tension between a rationally ordered cosmos and a universe described as “a heap piled up at random,” setting up the turn to Anaxagoras and mind.

11. Empedocles: The Four Elements, Ratios, and Change as Mere Mixing

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Empedocles’ surviving fragments—working from the “On the Natural Fragments” handout and DHB Vol I—to ask why earth, air, fire, and water, distinguished by hot/cold and wet/dry, must be posited as unchanging roots beneath apparent generation and corruption. He uses homely examples like sugar dissolving in coffee, heat passing between bodies, and ashes turning to smoke to show the ancient strategy of reducing qualitative change to local motion, mixture, and separation. Along the way he sets Empedocles against Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, and Aristotle on this same problem. The class ends by opening the question of the void, contrasting Empedocles’ denial of it with Democritus’ atomism.

12. Empedocles on Love and Hate, Mind vs. Chance, and Anaxagoras on Everything in Everything

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Working from the “Natural Fragments” handout and Aristotle’s account in the First Philosophers volume, Berquist asks what actually moves and orders the four elements. Empedocles answers with Love and Strife, two contrary forces that combine and separate matter—a picture Berquist compares to modern chance-based evolutionary theory—paired with his “like knows like” account of cognition. He then turns to Anaxagoras, whose claim that everything contains a portion of everything Berquist likens to particle physics, and whose introduction of Mind as the cause of order stands against mere chance. Aristotle’s critiques, the Manichaean heresy, and Aquinas recur as points of comparison, alongside the recurring difficulty of grasping potency and act.

13. Anaxagoras on Matter and Mind: Infinite Division, the Continuous, and Why the Ruler Must Be Separate

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Anaxagoras’s claim that nothing truly comes to be or perishes but only mixes and separates, since everything already contains a portion of everything else. Working from the handout on Book One, lectio nine, alongside the collected Natural Fragments, he traces how this forces Anaxagoras into infinite divisibility of matter, and asks how points, lines, and number bear on that claim. The class turns to the culminating fragment on Mind as unlimited and unmixed, ruling matter precisely by standing outside it, and asks why the ruler must be separate from what it orders.

14. 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

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to Anaxagoras’s fragment on Nous, walking through its ten stated characteristics—self-rule, purity, thinness, universal knowledge, power, and its work of ordering and separating the cosmos. He confronts an apparent contradiction: how can mind be self-ruling if ruler must be separated from ruled? Turning to Socrates and Plato’s Republic, especially the analogy between the just city and the just soul, he argues self-rule means mind governing what it doesn’t know by what it does know, not two distinct parts. He closes by weighing Anaxagoras’s “greater mind” against Einstein’s pantheism and Aristotle’s later remarks on mind and purpose, concluding it resembles an angelic rather than a divine intellect, since it orders matter through motion rather than creating it.

15. Leucippus and Democritus: Determinism, Atoms, the Void and Man as Microcosm; Why Book Two of Wisdom Begins with Truth

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Leucippus’s principle that nothing happens by chance but everything by necessity and reason, tracing its afterlife in modern science from Galileo and Laplace through Claude Bernard to the Heisenberg-Einstein dispute over quantum indeterminacy. He then takes up Democritus’s atomism and his claim that sense qualities like sweet and bitter are not real but only convention, alongside his sayings comparing man to a small world, an imitator of nature. From there Berquist pivots to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asking how the road of any science, and finally wisdom itself, gets determined—a question Book Two, “Alpha the Lesser,” roots in man’s natural relation to knowing the truth.

16. Is Truth Easy or Difficult? Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Two, First Reading: The Bat's Eye and Our Debt to Predecessors

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening lines of Book Two, where Aristotle calls the study of truth both easy and hard. He distinguishes three senses in which it is easy: the small truth anyone can hit, the larger truth built up cumulatively by many contributors, and the shared first truths, like the whole being greater than the part, that everyone already grasps. Difficulty, by contrast, traces either to a weakness in the knower or to something in the object itself, and Aristotle’s image of the bat’s eye in daylight explains why the most knowable things, the first causes and God, are hardest for minds like ours to see.

17. Why Truth Belongs to the Wise Man: Wisdom, Truth, and the Balance of Hope and Fear (Metaphysics II, Reading 2)

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Working from Aristotle’s Metaphysics II and Aquinas’s commentary on it, Berquist asks why truth belongs above all to the wise man rather than to other knowers, distinguishing speculative from practical knowledge and showing that a cause is more true than what it causes—so the science of first causes has the greatest claim to truth. He traces a subplot running through Books I and II: the gradual discovery that there are four kinds of causes, each with its own first cause, paralleling the structure of the Nicomachean Ethics. He closes on the pedagogy of pursuing such truth, weighing hope against caution, and illustrates the point with Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo and stories from his own teachers.

18. No Infinite Regress: The Moved Mover, the Train, and the First Matter (Metaphysics II, Readings 2–3)

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, in the second reading on Book II of the Metaphysics, that no series of causes can proceed infinitely, whether in a straight line or across the four kinds of cause. He works through the case of the moved mover, using a train of linked cars to show why motion demands a first, unmoved source, then turns to matter itself, distinguishing generation that moves from imperfect to perfect from generation between reciprocal contraries to show why material coming-to-be also requires a starting point. Along the way he draws on the Poetics on plot, Albert the Great on experience, and the Ethics on happiness as self-sufficient, to place the argument in Aristotle’s wider thought.

19. Endless Ends and Endless Definitions, and the Influence of Custom on Thinking (Metaphysics II, Readings 4–5)

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, in Metaphysics Book II, that an endless series of means would destroy the very possibility of a good, of definition, and of knowledge (episteme) ever coming to rest—so the causes called “end” and “form” cannot proceed to infinity. He ties this back to the earlier case against infinite regress in efficient and material causes, and singles out the end as in some way the cause of the other causes, which is why the metaphysician, searching for first causes, has special interest in it. He closes by introducing the text’s next question: how custom, rather than reasoned argument, influences the “road” or method one takes up in any science, wisdom included.

20. Metaphysics II, Reading 5: Custom, Certitude, and Matching the Way of Proceeding to the Subject

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads through the fifth lectio of Book II of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, with Aquinas’s commentary, asking why habit and custom often carry more weight with a mind than argument does, and why people expect proof to come mathematically, by example, or on authority depending on how they’ve been trained. From there he takes up Aristotle’s rule that the manner of proceeding in a science must match its subject matter, working the point through comparisons to the crafts and to the senses—sight, hearing, taste. He presses the point that demanding the wrong kind of certitude or pleasure for the matter at hand, like mathematical rigor everywhere or a lollipop’s pleasure from a kiss, is simply a mistake in reasoning.

21. Metaphysics III, Reading 1: Tying and Untying the Knots — Doubting Well and How Discoveries Are Made

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Book Three of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a plot, comparing its work of raising roughly twenty-three disputed questions of wisdom to the way Shakespeare ties dramatic knots in Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night—knots that Books Four through Fourteen will later untie. The heart of the reading is Aristotle’s claim that canvassing every opposing argument, doubting well, is the necessary path to real discovery. Berquist traces this method through Augustine and Aquinas’s disputed questions, Socrates’ questioning of the slave boy in Plato’s Meno, and remarks by Einstein and Heisenberg on how confronting contradictions drives scientific breakthroughs.

22. The Role of Contradiction in Discovery: Heraclitus, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and Theology

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what role contradiction plays in coming to know something new. Starting from Heraclitus’s fragments on strife and a harmony that hides itself, he moves through the twentieth-century physicists’ own accounts—Planck, Gamow, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein—of how apparent contradictions in nature forced genuine scientific breakthroughs. He draws the same pattern out in Socrates’ questioning of the slave boy in the Meno and in Aquinas’s disputed-question method, then turns to Matthew 22, where Christ presses an apparent contradiction in Scripture—David calling the Messiah “Lord”—to disclose the hidden truth of his own divine and human nature. The thread throughout is that facing contradiction squarely, rather than smoothing it over, is what opens the mind to deeper truth.

23. Metaphysics III, Second Reading: Which Causes Wisdom Studies, the Axioms, and Whether the Way We Know Must Be the Way Things Are

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s second reading of Metaphysics III, where the questions concern what wisdom is about rather than the things themselves. He tracks the first two aporiai: does wisdom consider all four causes or only some, and must it also treat common axioms like non-contradiction and “the whole is greater than the part”? Working from his handouts and Aquinas’s commentary, he uses Zeno-style sophisms, a whole/part equivocation, and a Chaucer/Shakespeare example to show why self-evident principles still need philosophical defense. He closes with a digression contrasting Plato and Aristotle on whether knowing must mirror the way things are.

24. Wisdom's Questions About Substance and the Plan of the Third Reading: Is There a Cause Besides Matter?

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to the aporiai Aristotle poses before settling wisdom’s subject: does it treat only material things, or also causes existing apart from matter? He shows how these questions cluster around Plato’s separated Forms and mathematical entities, and sets them against the older natural philosophers—Thales, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras—and against Aristotle’s own Physics, leaning on Aquinas’s commentary to lay out the order in which the questions follow from one another. He reads a stretch of “The Royal Fragment” and works from DHB Vol. I, pausing along the way over Plato’s Protagoras, the nature of virtue and contrariety, and the etymology of “understanding” to show dialectic in action.

25. Dividing to Reach the Beginnings: Kinds of Whole and Part, Universals, and Hegel's Error

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by widening “matter” beyond physical stuff to any part of a whole—material, definitional, or otherwise—and separates division from distinction and from definition proper. He then turns to a set of opening questions on how thinkers try to reach the first principles of reality: dividing toward the smallest, least universal elements, as Empedocles and Democritus do; dividing toward the most universal terms, the path of Plato and, he argues, Hegel; and dividing by definition. He measures these against Aristotle’s four senses of whole and part, and closes by flagging the next question: whether the causes are one or many, and whether they exist in potency or in act.

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

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his commentary on the “Book of Doubts,” Metaphysics Book III, turning to a second group of aporiai. He asks whether principles are limited in kind or number, whether the same causes account for both corruptible and incorruptible things, and whether unity and being are themselves the substance of things—as the Pythagoreans and Platonists held—or belong instead to some underlying subject, as Empedocles and the pluralists maintained. He closes by raising whether ultimate principles are universal or individual, using ordinary examples like typewriters, tea, and fruit to keep the one/many and act/potency structure concrete, while pointing ahead to Anaxagoras’s mind and Aquinas’s later use of these questions.

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

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the aporiai of Metaphysics Book III: does ability or act come first, does everything come to be through motion or can something come to be by creation, and are mathematical things like numbers, lines, and figures substances? He tests Aristotle’s answers against materialists, Platonists, Pythagoreans, Hegel, Marxists, and Descartes, and reaches for the chicken-and-egg puzzle, the Locke-Berkeley dispute over general ideas, the Eucharist, and Shakespeare’s dramatic structure to make the stakes concrete for the soul and the first cause. He closes by describing Book III as tying knots that Books IV through XIV will untie, setting up being qua being and the axioms as wisdom’s proper subject.

28. Wisdom as the Knowledge of Being as Being: 'Through Itself', the First Cause, and Words Equivocal by Reason

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Aristotle’s distinction between what belongs to a thing through itself, as part of its definition, and what follows as a proper property, drawing examples from geometry, logic, and ethics. He then turns to the opening chapters of the Metaphysics, showing that because the highest cause corresponds to the most universal subject, the science seeking first causes must be the science of being as being—just as knowledge of the king or of the end of human life reaches further than knowledge of subordinate causes. He closes on the problem of equivocity, showing “being” is said not univocally, like a genus, but analogically, as “healthy” or “political” are, each ordered back to one primary sense, which is what makes a single science of being possible.

29. Substance as the First Meaning of Being, the Philosopher, and Why Wisdom Must Consider the Axioms

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim that “being” is not one univocal term but is said in many ways ordered to a primary sense, substance, much as “healthy” and “medical” are said in reference to a central meaning rather than as pure equivocations. Working through Aquinas’s commentary, he lays out the fourfold division of being—substance, accident, generation and corruption, and privation—and explains why metaphysics takes substance rather than God as its proper subject, even though it culminates in knowledge of God, marking the difference from revealed theology. He then turns to the Posterior Analytics distinction between axioms, self-evident statements known to everyone, and principles known only to the learned, asking why philosophy must still scrutinize axioms given their equivocal terms and exposure to sophistical objections.

30. Why Wisdom Defends the Axioms and the 'Great Turnaround' in the Order of Wisdom (Book IV, Reading 5; Overview of Book V)

Thu, 12 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Why should the metaphysician, who studies being as being, also be the one to defend the common axioms rather than leaving that task to some other science? Berquist works through Reading 5 of Book IV of Aristotle’s Metaphysics to show that the axioms, like the principle of non-contradiction, hold universally of being and so fall under the wise man’s charge. He uses this text to explain the “great turnaround” in the order of wisdom: how first causes, being as being, and the axioms get treated in an order opposite to how they are first introduced, each conclusion becoming a premise for what follows across the fourteen books. He also touches on the old identification of wisdom with natural philosophy and paradoxes from Zeno and Heraclitus that the axioms resolve.

31. Book V: The Meanings of 'Beginning' and of 'Being' (By Happening, by the Figures of Predication, as True)

Thu, 12 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the start of Book Five, where Aristotle catalogues the ways “beginning” is said—from a road’s starting point and a ship’s keel to a father, the axioms of demonstration, and wonder as the beginning of philosophy—up to the broadest sense in which any cause counts as a beginning. A theological aside considers why this notion of “before” cannot apply to the Trinity. He then turns to Aristotle’s opening treatment of “being,” setting accidental being, as in a “Christian geometer,” against being per se, analyzed through the figures of predication—substance, quality, quantity, relation—drawing throughout on Aquinas’s commentary and on examples like Marxist dialectics and affirmative-action hiring.

32. Metaphysics V, Reading 17: The Senses of Being – Being by Happening, the Ten Categories, Being as True, and Act and Ability

Thu, 19 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s commentary on this reading, asking how many ways “being” is said. He separates accidental being from being per se, then divides being per se into being according to the ten categories, being as true or false, and being as act or potency—moving from the less universal to the more universal sense. He ties the division back to Book IV’s account of being as an analogical term centered on substance, drawing examples from creaturely composition, divine simplicity, and the puzzle of becoming, with a nod to motion, time, and transubstantiation. The aim throughout is to locate this inquiry within wisdom’s study of being qua being.

33. Metaphysics V, Reading 18 on 'Perfect' and the Start of Book VI: How Wisdom Differs from the Making and Doing Sciences

Thu, 19 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the term “perfect” or “complete,” the first word of the third group of terms in Book Five of the Metaphysics, reading it alongside Aquinas’s commentary. He distinguishes three senses: having all one’s parts, possessing the full range of ability proper to one’s kind, and having attained one’s end, drawing examples from Homer, Shakespeare, and Mozart. He notes that creatures are perfect only within a genus, while God alone is perfect without qualification. The class closes by turning to the start of Book Six, where Aristotle begins distinguishing wisdom from natural philosophy, art, and choice.

34. Metaphysics Book 6, Part 1: Wisdom's Subject, and How the Making, Doing and Looking Sciences Are Divided

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a prayer to St. Thomas and a note on Paul VI’s Lumen Ecclesiae before turning to what he calls the books of wisdom, Metaphysics Book Six. He asks what sets wisdom apart from the other sciences, and answers that it alone considers being as being and seeks the most universal, first causes. From there he separates the three theoretical sciences—natural philosophy, mathematics, and wisdom—from the practical and productive sciences, contrasting causes arising from nature, from choice, and from art. He works through examples from geometry, carpentry, family life, and civic decision-making to show how each science’s subject and end fix its proper universality and its way of explaining causes.

35. Metaphysics Book 6, Part 2: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and First Philosophy; Introducing Accidental Being

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why speculative philosophy has exactly three parts—natural philosophy, mathematics, and first philosophy—rather than four, grounding the answer in Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The division turns on whether a subject’s existence depends on matter and change, and whether it can be defined without reference to matter, as with a sphere considered apart from any sensible material. He illustrates the “crisscrossed division” that yields only three real members with examples from the Trinity and Aristotle’s Poetics, touches on Thales, Anaxagoras, the Pythagoreans, and the medieval Paris curriculum, then closes by previewing Book Six’s move into accidental being and being as truth.

36. Metaphysics VI, Reading 2: Accidental Being and Why No Reasoned-Out Knowledge Is About It

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s fourfold division of being—accidental being, being as true, being according to the categories, and being as act and potency—and asks why accidental being alone resists scientific demonstration. Working closely through the text with help from Aquinas’s commentary, he distinguishes an accident in this loose sense from the categorial “accidents,” and necessity from what happens merely “for the most part,” illustrating with the housebuilder, the geometer, and stock sophistical puzzles about the sick and the healthy. He then turns to Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus, and Senator Styles Bridges to show that what escapes philosophical science—the chance coincidence, the unplanned meeting—is exactly the material history, biography, and poetry are made of.

37. Is Moral Effect Accidental to the Poet? Accidental Causes, No Science of the Accidental, and Modern Determinism

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from Thomas’s remarks on poetry and Aristotle’s Poetics on tragedy and catharsis, Berquist asks whether moving an audience morally is something the poet does per se or only incidentally. That question sends him into Aristotle’s Metaphysics on accidental being: the housebuilder who happens also to be a cook illustrates a cause that produces an effect outside its proper account, and Aristotle argues there can be no science of such accidents, since science concerns what happens always or for the most part. Berquist demonstrates dichotomous and trichotomous division as a method along the way, and closes by pointing toward the next reading’s challenge to modern determinism—Claude Bernard, Heisenberg, and quantum indeterminacy—against this Aristotelian backdrop of chance and matter.

38. Metaphysics VI: The Whole Truth, Contradiction, and Truth in the Mind, Good in Things; Predicates and Definition in Logic

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through lectio 4 of Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics VI, asking where truth and falsity actually reside: not in things, he argues with Aristotle, but in the mind’s act of combining and dividing, where good and bad, by contrast, belong to things themselves. He draws out consequences for contradiction, for the theological question of God’s truth versus God’s goodness, and for why knowledge can hold opposites together while love cannot. He also turns to the handouts on statement and on the aim of Aristotle’s Categories, tracing predication and definition back to the mind’s “first act,” with Cajetan and Albert the Great brought in alongside Aquinas.

39. Isagoge vs. Categories, What a Thing Is, and Metaphysics VII: Defining Substance, Accident and Motion

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why Porphyry’s Isagoge, with its five predicables—genus, species, difference, property, accident—differs from Aristotle’s ten categories. His answer: the Isagoge treats names said univocally of many things, while the Categories distinguishes what a substance is from what inheres in it and what is merely extrinsic to it. Turning to Metaphysics VII, he asks why substance alone admits strict definition, while accidents, privations, and motion can only be defined by reference to something beyond themselves. He closes by connecting this to immaterial substances and to why motion’s definition matters for proving God’s existence.

40. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 1: Summing Up Book VII, Change, and Knowing First Matter by Proportion

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins by recapping the terminology of cause, beginning, element, and substance carried over from Book VII, then lays out Aristotle’s plan in Book VIII for treating sensible substances through matter, form, and their composite. The core of the class asks how matter, especially prime matter, can be known at all, since it never appears by itself. Working through examples like health and sickness, hardness and softness, and finally substantial change such as a man becoming a lion, he shows how the dispute between Parmenides and Heraclitus over contraries and becoming forces us to posit an underlying subject, one grasped only analogically, by proportion, never directly. He draws throughout on Aquinas’s commentary to clarify Aristotle’s reasoning.

41. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 2: Substantial Form Compared with Accidental Form, and Why Proportions Matter

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s account of sensible substance, starting from Democritus’s list of accidental differences—shape, position, order—and other modes like mixture, binding, and quality by which a thing is said to be what it is. He builds out the central comparison: accidental form presupposes an already-actual substance and gives being only in a qualified sense, while substantial form actualizes prime matter, which is purely potential, and gives being simply. Along the way he argues that grasping such analogical realities requires proportional reasoning, drawing examples from Euclid, Scripture, and Plato. He closes by pointing ahead to the next lesson’s direct treatment of substantial form.

42. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 3 (Part 1): Form Compared with Plato's Separate Species

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the third reading of Metaphysics VIII, where Aristotle sets form against Plato’s separated species. He traces a fourfold comparison: whether essence belongs to the composite or to form alone, why form is not itself made of matter, why form as such is neither generated nor corrupted, and whether wholly separated substances—Aristotle’s God, the angels—actually exist. Concrete cases carry the argument: a Manhattan cocktail, the word “cat,” a carpenter’s chair. He extends the discussion to the immateriality of the human soul and why no two angels can share a species.

43. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 3 (Part 2): Definitions and Forms Are Like Numbers

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, read with Aquinas’s commentary, that a definition is more like a number than a line: change one element and you get a different definition, just as adding or subtracting a unit gives a different number, whereas a line can be divided endlessly without losing its nature. He traces how form actualizes the potency of a genus to make a real unity rather than a mere heap, using the geometry of squares and the genus-species hierarchy as illustrations, and noting where Locke and Berkeley go wrong on general ideas. The class closes on the ordered scale of natures from stone through plant and animal to man, and on the equality of human beings despite unequal accidental perfections.

44. 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)

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book VIII, taking up the fourth reading on matter: first the distinction between proximate and remote matter and the reversible senses of “from,” then matter compared with the other causes, using the chest and the bed alongside the causes of man, an eclipse, and sleep. He then turns to why forms as such do not come to be, working through the puzzle of contrary states like health and sickness, and wine turning to vinegar. Following Aquinas’s commentary, he digresses into divine simplicity, angels as pure form, and Socrates’s cyclical-change argument for immortality in the Phaedo to sharpen Aristotle’s distinctions.

45. Metaphysics Book 8, Reading 5: How Matter and Form Are One, and an Introduction to Book 9 on Act and Ability

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of what makes matter and form—like the parts of a definition or a number—into a genuine unity rather than a mere aggregate. He works through mistaken answers (participation, contact, “putting together”) before laying out Aristotle’s own solution: matter and form need no third uniting cause because they stand to one another as potency to act. He extends this to mathematical objects, treated as form in intelligible matter, and to immaterial substances, unified through themselves as pure form. He closes by situating Book Eight within the whole of the Metaphysics and previewing how Book Nine’s account of act and potency moves toward the first cause as pure act.

46. Metaphysics IX, Reading 1: Substance, the Categories, and the Senses of Ability (Active and Passive Potency)

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist situates Book Nine’s study of potency and act within the argument about being and substance built up across Books Four through Eight, previewing how Aristotle will carry potency/act from the case of motion to a fully universal sense reaching even immaterial beings and God. Working closely from his handout on the opening pages of Book Nine, he distinguishes several senses of “ability”: active power to act on another, passive power to undergo, and the power to resist corruption, each paired with a “doing well” sense, illustrated with Thomistic commentary and analogies drawn from self-rule and the Trinity. He closes by treating inability as the privative opposite of ability, linking it to the logical notions of privation and property.

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

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim in Metaphysics IX that rational abilities, unlike natural ones, extend to contraries: a doctor’s art can heal or harm, a logician can reason well or badly, whereas fire only heats and never cools. He draws parallel cases from Plato’s Symposium, Homer, Shakespeare, and Aristotle’s Politics to fill out this “single knowledge of opposites.” From there he presses the distinction into the relation between nature and reason or will, arguing against Mill and Sartre’s refusal to admit any natural determination in thinking or choosing, and closes by contrasting Aristotle’s naturally known first principles with the modern habit of treating all knowledge as testable hypothesis.

48. Metaphysics IX, Readings 1–3: Kinds of Ability, the Megarian Error, and Why Motion Seems Most Real

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s account of potency in Book IX of the Metaphysics, separating natural abilities from rational ones and asking how a single rational power can produce contrary effects while a natural one cannot. He then takes up the Megarian position, which collapses ability into actual exercise—so that a builder who isn’t building has no ability to build—and traces the absurd consequences this has for change, sensation, and the arts. He also considers the opposite error, which treats even impossibilities as mere unrealized potencies, and closes by asking why motion, despite being the least actual kind of act, strikes us as the most vivid instance of actuality.

49. The Meanings of 'Necessary' and Metaphysics IX, Reading 4: Rational Ability, Choice, and Mind versus Love as First Mover

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by sorting out the several senses of “necessary”—absolute necessity, necessity for being versus for well-being, and the necessity of belief owed to revelation—before turning to Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX. There he draws the key distinction between non-rational powers, fixed to one effect, and rational powers, capable of contraries and requiring desire or will to settle which act occurs. He applies this to the pre-Socratics, asking why Anaxagoras posited Mind and Empedocles posited Love and Hate as the first movers of the cosmos, and closes by pressing the same analysis of will and necessity into a question about the divine generation of the Son.

50. Metaphysics IX, Reading 5: Act Known by Induction and Proportion; Motion vs. Perfect Act

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s fifth and sixth readings of Metaphysics IX, where Aristotle moves from act as motion to act in its widest sense, including form. He draws out the distinction between imperfect acts—walking, building, learning—which are never at once in progress and complete, and perfect acts—seeing, understanding, loving—which are whole at every instant. Since act is among the first, simplest notions, Berquist explains it cannot be defined but only grasped through induction and proportional analogy across cases. He ties this back to the definition of motion, criticizes Descartes and Locke on that point, and touches on how perfect versus imperfect and immanent versus transitive acts bear on ethics and on the argument for an unmoved mover.

51. Juliet's Beauty and God's Self-Knowledge; Reading 6 on Proximate Ability; Opening of Reading 7 on the Senses of 'Before'

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a digression: what does it mean to say Romeo sees Juliet’s beauty “before” he loves her, tracked through the four senses of “before” from the Categories, ch. 12 — in time, in being, in definition, and in goodness. He pushes the same distinctions into the question of God’s self-knowledge and self-love, faulting Plato’s Symposium and Republic for never quite saying the Good knows and loves itself, against Aquinas’s account of God’s substance and operations. He then returns to Metaphysics IX, working through Aristotle’s Greek terms for potency and denominative naming — the difference between calling something “wood” and calling it “wooden” — before turning to the coming readings on the order of act and potency.

52. Metaphysics IX, Readings 7–8: Act Before Ability in Definition, Time and Perfection (The Chicken or the Egg)

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics IX that act is prior to potency, even though any changing thing seems to be in potency before it acts. Drawing on the Categories’ senses of “before,” the Physics on nature and motion, and Book V’s account of “perfect,” he shows why form outranks matter as substance, why a potency is only known and defined through the act it is for, and why the chicken must in some sense precede the egg. He closes by linking this priority of act to the claim that the first cause must be pure act, setting up the connection to God as taught later in the Summa Theologiae.

53. Metaphysics IX, Reading 9: Eternal and Corruptible Things, Necessary and Impossible, Pure Act, and What Is More Knowable to Us

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues Book IX of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asking how act is prior to potency—first within one and the same subject, then more sharply between different things, such as the incorruptible compared to the corruptible, or the necessary compared to the possible and impossible. He draws on Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Poetics, De Anima, and the Categories to show how beginnings, middles, and ends, and the composition of act and potency in creatures against pure act in God and pure potency in prime matter, are grasped by analogy. He closes on Aristotle’s distinction between what is more knowable simply and what is more knowable to us, bringing in Descartes, Plato’s dialogues, and Einstein on the intelligibility of the universe.

54. Metaphysics IX, Readings 9–10: Act Is Better Than Ability, the Transcendentals, and the Ability for Contraries

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist argues that act is more perfect than potency, first comparing act and potency within one thing, then comparing necessary, eternal beings to corruptible ones—drawing a parallel to reason’s rule over the passions and to Plato’s Republic. He connects this to Aquinas’s treatment of the transcendentals—being, thing, one, true, good—and to Metaphysics Book V, showing why goodness is one while potency reaches toward contraries, so that being as such is good and evil is privation, illustrated with health against sickness and knowledge against error. He closes with Aquinas on Romans, comparing Adam as “forma futuri” to Christ: sin and death entering through one man, redemption through another.

55. Metaphysics IX, Reading 10: Evil as Privation, God as Pure Act and the Best Thing, and Why Act Is More Knowable

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist distinguishes privation from negation, sharpening the Physics account of matter, form, and lack, and ties this to Augustine’s case against the Manichaeans that matter itself is good. From there he draws the theological conclusion: since God is pure act with no passive potency, no evil can be found in him. He closes on Aristotle’s claim that actuality is more knowable than potentiality, using geometric proofs as an example, and explains why the divine—though maximally knowable in itself—remains hardest for the human mind to grasp.

56. Metaphysics IX, Chapter 10: Truth and Falsity in the Mind's Composing and Dividing

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s discussion of truth and falsity in Metaphysics IX, asking where truth is actually located: not in reality itself but in the mind’s act of composing and dividing what is united or separated in things. He distinguishes contingent truths, which depend on how the mind judges, from necessary ones, and considers the puzzling case of simple, immaterial beings—including God—who are grasped by simple understanding rather than by affirming or denying anything. Along the way he ties this back to Aristotle’s own earlier treatment in Metaphysics VI, which locates truth in the mind and goodness in things, and to Aquinas’s parallel treatment of God’s truth and understanding in the Summa Theologiae.