https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/Recent content in 7b. Wisdom (2006, Colorado) on The Duane Berquist LecturesHugoenhttps://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/001-why-metaphysics-is-the-wrong-name-wisdom-reason-and-shakespeares/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/001-why-metaphysics-is-the-wrong-name-wisdom-reason-and-shakespeares/Opening Book Nine of Aristotle’s fourteen books known as the Metaphysics, Berquist argues the title itself misleads: tracing “meta ta physika” to Andronicus of Rhodes, he contends “wisdom” or “first philosophy” better names what Aristotle intended. Since wisdom presupposes reason, he turns to Hamlet’s Act 4 soliloquy, treating “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after” as a working definition, and works through its several senses of “large” and “looking.” He closes by tying this to Aquinas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics on order and reason, and to Albert the Great on wisdom’s dependence on the other sciences.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/002-looking-before-and-after-the-senses-of-order-distinction/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/002-looking-before-and-after-the-senses-of-order-distinction/Berquist asks what Aristotle means by “before and after,” tracing its senses from the Categories, Physics, and Nicomachean Ethics through examples in geometry, chemistry, and Shakespeare’s puns on “before” in All’s Well That Ends Well and his definition of reason in Troilus and Cressida. He then distinguishes two ways of dividing a book: the editorial division used for reference and the logical division into two or three parts that actually yields understanding, illustrating it from Matthew’s Gospel, the Psalms, and the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Turning to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he begins locating its proemium and the overall structure of its fourteen books, working from the handout “Note for Aristotle’s Proemium to Wisdom,” to set up the afternoon’s question of where Book Nine falls within that division.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/003-custom-as-tyrant-method-and-matter-and-the-logical-division/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/003-custom-as-tyrant-method-and-matter-and-the-logical-division/Berquist works out why the Metaphysics divides as it does: Book One surveys the predecessors, Book Two asks about man’s relation to truth, and Book Three asks how wisdom itself gets discovered. He reads through his handout “Note for Word Cause” and Aquinas’s commentary on Book Five to press a warning drawn from Physics II—that a method suited to one science, like the Pythagoreans’ demand for geometric first principles, becomes a tyrannical custom when forced on matter it doesn’t fit. He tests the point against examples ranging from Huygens on light to Hamlet, arguing that method, like pleasure, must answer to its proper matter.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/004-metaphysics-book-nine-reading-1-distinguishing-kinds-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/004-metaphysics-book-nine-reading-1-distinguishing-kinds-and/Berquist begins Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Nine, following Aquinas’s commentary from where the study of substance in Books Seven and Eight gives way to the study of potency and act. He explains why Aristotle starts from the familiar, motion-related sense of potency before rising to the fully universal sense required to speak of immaterial substances and God. Working from a handout on the word “cause,” he shows how wisdom distinguishes both kinds of things and senses of a word at once, illustrated through the four causes and the categories of being, then traces Aristotle’s primary division of potency into active, passive, and resistive senses, all referred back to an active sense. He also takes up, via Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and an anecdote about Charles De Koninck, why natural philosophy must be studied before metaphysics.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/005-ability-and-beginning-mover-and-matter-and-thomass-texts/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/005-ability-and-beginning-mover-and-matter-and-thomass-texts/Berquist reopens the reading on potentia, asking how the active and passive senses of “ability” relate to the causes of mover and matter, and how both connect to the several meanings of “beginning” (principium) worked out in the Physics. Drawing on Aquinas’s Scriptum on the Sentences, De Potentia, and the Summa Theologiae, he argues that potentia belongs to the category of quality rather than relation, even though defining it requires the relational phrase “beginning of change”—much as knowledge is a quality that still implies a relation to what is known. The class closes with asides on metaphor and analogy, plus digressions on Shakespeare and Mozart, before turning toward the afternoon’s second reading.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/006-metaphysics-ix-lectio-2-natural-vs-rational-ability-and-nature/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/006-metaphysics-ix-lectio-2-natural-vs-rational-ability-and-nature/Berquist takes up why irrational, natural abilities are determined to a single effect while rational abilities—reason and will—extend to contraries, since knowing one opposite entails knowing the other. He tests the distinction against examples drawn from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Plato’s Symposium and Meno, then turns to a harder puzzle: how reason and will can still be said to act “naturally” toward first principles and happiness without erasing the line between nature and rational power. Drawing on Aquinas’s De Potentia, Summa Theologiae, and De Veritate, he proposes resolving the tension through a broader, Boethian sense of “nature.”https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/007-reason-and-will-as-natures-thomass-two-solutions-and-the/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/007-reason-and-will-as-natures-thomass-two-solutions-and-the/Berquist takes up a puzzle from De Veritate q. 22, a. 5: if reason and will are themselves kinds of nature, how can “nature” be used as something distinct from them? He traces Aquinas’s answer through the pattern of naming things equivocally by reason, where a shared term stays with whatever has nothing extra while the thing with an added feature gets a new name—illustrated by man and animal, habit and disposition, and finger and thumb. Drawing also on Summa Contra Gentiles III, 46 and parallel texts, he shows why reason and will must each rest on something known or willed naturally, prior to discursive activity. He closes by contrasting this with Mill and Sartre, who miss reason’s and will’s natural dimension.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/008-names-equivocal-by-reason-six-kinds-and-the-senses-of-nature/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/008-names-equivocal-by-reason-six-kinds-and-the-senses-of-nature/Berquist works through the difference between names equivocal by chance and names equivocal “by reason,” building a six-fold taxonomy under two branches: retained names, where one thing adds something notable to a shared meaning (as “making” does to “doing”) or possesses that meaning perfectly against another’s imperfect share (as intellectus does against ratio), and transferred names, carried to new things either by dropping part of the original sense or through various proportional ratios. Drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics with Aquinas’s commentary, he runs the scheme against “being,” “healthy,” “political,” and “act,” warning against flattening all of it into “analogy.” He closes by tracking “nature” itself from “birth” through “intrinsic source of motion” to “form” and “what a thing is,” setting up upcoming readings on act and potency.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/009-metaphysics-ix-refuting-the-megarians-on-ability-and-act/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/009-metaphysics-ix-refuting-the-megarians-on-ability-and-act/Berquist takes up the third reading of Book IX of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, following St. Thomas’s commentary line by line. The question is whether ability, or potency, is real only at the moment it is actually being used—the Megarian position Aristotle sets out to refute. He walks through Aristotle’s four arguments against it, drawn from house-building, from sensible qualities, from the operation of the senses, and from the case of standing and sitting, each showing that a thing can truly have a capacity it is not currently exercising. The session ends by pointing toward Book IX’s next task: ordering act and potency properly to each other.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/010-metaphysics-ix-motion-as-the-most-known-act-and-heraclitus/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/010-metaphysics-ix-motion-as-the-most-known-act-and-heraclitus/Berquist works through Aristotle’s definition of the possible—that whose corresponding act involves nothing impossible—and his puzzling claim that “act” (energeia) gets its name primarily from motion, since motion is what we know best, even though it ranks lowest among kinds of actuality. He traces this back into Metaphysics VI and Aquinas’s commentary, then widens out to Heraclitus and Cratylus on universal flux, Plato’s Forms as an answer to that flux, and the modern echo in Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, who make becoming more fundamental than being. Along the way he uses courtroom testimony and everyday examples of motion and rest to keep the abstract distinction between potency and act concrete.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/011-metaphysics-ix-the-second-error-everything-is-possible-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/011-metaphysics-ix-the-second-error-everything-is-possible-and/Berquist takes up Metaphysics IX and Aquinas’s lectio 3 on the possible and the impossible, distinguishing the “possible” as opposed to necessity from the wider sense that includes it. He traces two errors: the claim that everything is necessary, and its opposite, that everything is possible, illustrated by the absurd case of the diagonal becoming commensurable with the side. Working through Aristotle’s argument that if A entails B then A’s possibility entails B’s possibility, he shows how this differs from inferring B’s actuality outright. He also asks, with help from the handouts, why minds slip into these errors—chasing mathematical certitude or recoiling from necessity—linking the discussion back to Plato’s Meno.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/012-metaphysics-ix-how-rational-and-non-rational-powers-pass/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/012-metaphysics-ix-how-rational-and-non-rational-powers-pass/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s distinction between powers whose act precedes the power itself—like sensation—and powers acquired through practice or instruction. He then turns to the sharper contrast at the heart of Book IX: non-rational powers act automatically whenever agent and patient meet, while rational powers, capable of opposite effects, need desire or choice to settle which act occurs. He draws in related material from the Nicomachean Ethics on virtue and choice and from the De Anima’s account of the moved mover, and answers student questions about free will, the indeterminacy of choice, and what exactly makes a power fully “capable” of its act.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/013-shakespeares-definition-of-reason-the-exhortation-to-use/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/013-shakespeares-definition-of-reason-the-exhortation-to-use/Berquist takes up Hamlet’s line on “godlike reason” and argues Shakespeare is offering a genuine definition: reason as discourse, the ability to know one thing through another, capable of large-scale inference and of looking before and after. He defends this against defining reason by self-evident knowledge instead, and ties it to Aristotle’s account of wisdom as reason’s highest perfection, drawing on Aquinas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics. He then works through Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason as a compact five-part argument, comparing it to similar exhortations in Aristotle and Aquinas, before turning briefly to Book Nine of the Metaphysics on act and potency.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/014-native-words-vs-imported-words-and-aristotles-examples-of/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/014-native-words-vs-imported-words-and-aristotles-examples-of/Berquist begins with a defense of translating philosophical Greek and Latin into plain English—“before” rather than “prior,” “beginning” rather than “principle,” “ability” rather than “potency”—arguing that native words keep thought concrete and ordered, though some terms admit no real English equivalent. He then takes up Metaphysics IX, the fifth and sixth readings with Aquinas’s commentary, on why act (energeia) cannot be defined but only shown through examples—the statue, geometrical construction, understanding—since act is too fundamental to be explained by anything prior. He closes by contrasting this with Descartes and Locke, who treated motion as undefinable without seeing that Aristotle had already grounded definition itself in act and potency.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/015-act-cannot-be-defined-induction-by-proportion-descartes-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/015-act-cannot-be-defined-induction-by-proportion-descartes-and/Why can’t “act” be given a single definition the way a species can? Berquist works through Book IX of the Metaphysics to show that “act” is said in proportion—like Euclid’s ratios—across different things, not by one common note. He reads at length from a handout on man’s end or purpose and one on dividing Shakespeare’s plays, using Plato’s definition of a thing’s own act and the induction toward Aristotle’s account of happiness as test cases. The class closes on Augustine’s De Trinitate and the Metaphysics I proemium, tying the love of wisdom to the love of reason itself.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/016-defining-motion-by-act-imperfect-abstraction-and-two-kinds/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/016-defining-motion-by-act-imperfect-abstraction-and-two-kinds/Berquist asks how “act” can mean the same thing across motion and form when the two seem so different — is the word univocal, equivocal, or something else? He argues for an imperfectly abstracted common notion, comparing the difficulty to defining “substance,” “person,” and “thing,” where a single term must stretch to cover really distinct cases without losing its unity. Working from the handout Note on the Eight Books of Natural Hearing, he ties this analysis of act and potency back to the unmoved-mover argument for God’s existence, and contrasts Aristotle’s framework with the departures taken by Descartes, Kant, and Marx. He also recalls studying this material under Charles De Koninck and Kazimierz at Laval.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/017-act-as-form-and-act-as-operation-metaphysics-ix-perfect-vs/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/017-act-as-form-and-act-as-operation-metaphysics-ix-perfect-vs/Berquist reads Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book IX, reading 5, tracking how “act” is said analogically: first as form, then as motion or operation, with a detour through the peculiar actuality of the infinite. The heart of the class is Aristotle’s division between imperfect act—kinēsis, or motion, exemplified by walking home or building a house—and perfect act—energeia, or operation, exemplified by seeing or understanding—and what turns on this for why happiness must be a perfect operation rather than a motion or a making. Berquist brings in Aquinas’s commentary on the text along with parallels from the De Potentia and the Commentary on the Sentences to clarify the equivocal-by-analogy naming of act and potency, and uses the distinction to correct Marxist notions of self-perfection through making.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/018-thomas-on-operation-motion-and-doing-immanent-vs-transitive/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/018-thomas-on-operation-motion-and-doing-immanent-vs-transitive/Berquist asks what it means to act without acting on anything outside oneself. Starting from Summa Contra Gentiles III.22, with support from the Sentences commentary, De Spiritualibus Creaturis, and the Prima Pars, he sorts act into transitive operation (heating, cutting—acting on another), passive undergoing, and immanent operation, which perfects the agent from within. He weighs candidate names for this last kind—operatio, motus, doing—against Aristotle’s use of “motion” in the De Anima, then applies the distinction to happiness, arguing it must be immanent activity rather than transitive making, against a Marxist stress on production. He closes by showing immanent acts are not a real middle between knower and known but follow a prior union of power and object.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/019-prior-and-posterior-the-order-of-thomass-proofs-and-aristotles/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/019-prior-and-posterior-the-order-of-thomass-proofs-and-aristotles/Berquist asks why Thomas orders his proofs differently in the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles—treating simplicity before unchangeability in one, infinity before unity in the other—and what this shows about how different truths get demonstrated by syllogism. He weighs “materia” against “hule” for naming matter’s tie to nature, then works through a reading from the Physics on the senses of “prior and posterior,” drawing on geometry, grammar, and political anecdotes about Lincoln, Reagan, and Dirksen to show reason’s habit of “looking before and after.” He ties this to Plato’s Apology on the ordering of goods, with digressions on Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and the ordered ascent of taste in education.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/020-substantial-vs-accidental-form-existence-as-act-and-the-transcendentals/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/020-substantial-vs-accidental-form-existence-as-act-and-the-transcendentals/Berquist asks what separates a substantial form, which makes a thing what it fundamentally is, from an accidental form, which merely modifies something already existing. Working closely from a handout keyed to Physics I, lectio 13 of Aquinas’s commentary, he reads through the text with students to pin down Aristotle’s reasoning. He then draws an analogy between form and matter on one hand and existence and essence on the other, using the example of clay shaped into a sphere or a cube to show how a single underlying subject can take different determinations. Along the way he touches on the transcendentals “being” and “thing” and on Aristotle’s dialectical method of distinguishing senses of a word.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/021-when-is-a-thing-truly-in-ability-proximate-matter-and-one/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/021-when-is-a-thing-truly-in-ability-proximate-matter-and-one/Aristotle asks, in Metaphysics IX.7, what makes matter genuinely “in potency” to becoming something, rather than merely capable of it after many further changes. Berquist works through the criterion of proximate matter — being “one step away” from the form — using cases from generation, medicine, geometry, and house-building to show why we call something “wooden” rather than “wood” once it stands ready for a further act. He then turns to how ordinary speech marks this readiness through denominative terms. The class closes with a digression on the fallacy of confusing what holds “simply” with what holds “in a qualified way,” traced through Plato’s Meno and the contrast between divine and human wisdom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/022-denominative-speech-natures-steps-and-the-order-of-the-acts/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/022-denominative-speech-natures-steps-and-the-order-of-the-acts/Berquist reads Aristotle on denomination: why a thing coming to be is named from its proximate matter rather than some remoter stuff, with Heraclitus’s fire tested as a candidate first matter and the point tied back to the Categories. From there he opens onto Aquinas’s prooemium to the Posterior Analytics and the order of understanding, judgment, and reasoning, using Plato’s Meno to show guessing precedes knowing. Cooking, teaching, and embryonic development serve as running examples for a single principle: a subject is only truly “capable” of its very next state, never a distant one—which he uses to explain why dialectic precedes demonstration in texts like the Metaphysics and Euclid.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/023-metaphysics-ix-lectio-seven-actuality-is-prior-to-potency/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/023-metaphysics-ix-lectio-seven-actuality-is-prior-to-potency/Berquist takes up the third part of Book Nine of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where the question is whether actuality or potency comes first. Working closely with the text of lectio seven, alongside Aquinas’s commentary, he follows Aristotle’s argument that act is prior to potency in definition, then in time—resting on the principle that nothing gives what it does not have—and finally in substance and perfection. He tests the argument through Aristotle’s own examples, such as a man coming from a man and a musician being formed by a musician. He closes by pointing ahead to how this priority of act bears on the later treatment of goodness, truth, and nobility.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/024-act-before-ability-the-first-cause-as-pure-act-and-the-sophistical/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/024-act-before-ability-the-first-cause-as-pure-act-and-the-sophistical/Berquist asks why act must be prior to potency, testing the claim first on straightforward cases like teaching and house-building, then on the harder case of the self-taught discoverer, where the one who comes to know and the one who teaches are the same person. He follows Aristotle into Metaphysics IX and Aquinas into Summa Contra Gentiles I.16-17 to show how this priority underwrites the argument for God as pure act. He contrasts this with materialist positions that take potency as prior simply speaking, naming the sophistical error of confusing “simply” with “in some respect,” and draws parallel cases from Plato’s Republic and Meno and from Aristotle’s ethics on acquiring virtue.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/025-before-and-after-in-the-acts-of-reason-guessing-thinking/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/025-before-and-after-in-the-acts-of-reason-guessing-thinking/Berquist asks what has to happen, in what order, before reason arrives at a genuine “before and after.” He works through Aristotle’s senses of “in,” “out,” and “beginning,” and Shakespeare’s line that reason is “looking before and after,” to show discourse—not sight—as the path to seeing causal and evaluative priority. Socrates’s searches for the good and the pious in the Meno, Phaedo, Euthyphro, and Symposium supply the test cases, alongside the ethical question of ranking goods of soul, body, and external goods. MacArthur’s Inchon landing and a childhood dialogue about desire round out the induction.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/026-act-before-ability-in-perfection-metaphysics-ix-readings/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/026-act-before-ability-in-perfection-metaphysics-ix-readings/Berquist asks how act can be shown prior to potency not just in time or notion but in perfection itself. He follows Aristotle’s argument in two steps: first through act’s relation to form and end, drawn out with examples from natural powers, the arts, and the difference between immanent and transitive operation; second through comparing incorruptible beings to corruptible ones. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s account of “perfect” in Metaphysics V, Aquinas’s De Veritate on the true and the good, and texts on substance and accident from the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Scriptum on the Sentences, warning against confusing “simply” with “in some respect.” He closes by connecting the reading to Aquinas’s proofs for God as pure act.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/027-good-bad-and-privation-why-act-is-better-than-ability/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/027-good-bad-and-privation-why-act-is-better-than-ability/Turning from priority in time and definition to priority in perfection, Berquist asks why act is better than potency, taking health and sickness as his example: the capacity for one is inseparably the capacity for its opposite, while the actuality is not so divided. He follows this into Aristotle’s treatment of evil as a privation—a lack of what a subject ought naturally to have—rather than something positive, with the consequence that purely actual, eternal beings admit no evil. Drawing on Physics I and Aquinas’s Sentences commentary and Summa Theologiae, he distinguishes three analogical senses of “bad”: the privation itself, the subject bearing it, and the cause that induces it.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/028-bad-as-non-being-faith-and-the-road-to-knowing/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/028-bad-as-non-being-faith-and-the-road-to-knowing/Working through the third division of the third part of Book Nine of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Berquist asks why act, and even potency ordered to act, must count as good and knowable, while evil turns out to be a privation rather than a positive being. He tests the point against Scripture, Augustine, and Sartre’s identification of freedom with non-being, showing where the modern account goes wrong. The class then shifts to how belief works: using the image of a road and Plato’s Protagoras, he explains how trusting a reliable guide can itself become a path to genuine knowledge, illustrated by following Aristotle’s own argument up to the first cause as pure act.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/029-act-before-ability-knowability-truth-and-the-end-of-book/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/029-act-before-ability-knowability-truth-and-the-end-of-book/Berquist closes his treatment of act and potency in Book Theta by asking why badness must be understood as a privation rather than a positive principle, drawing on Aquinas’s threefold division of evil. Working through Lectio 10 and 11, he uses geometrical examples and the composition of truth and falsity to argue that act is more knowable and more true than potency. He ties this back to Physics I’s distinction between what is known to us and known by nature, and to points from the Ethics and Sophistical Refutations, using them to diagnose errors in Descartes, Marx, and materialism. He closes by previewing how Metaphysics XI–XII moves from imperfect to perfect being toward the treatment of the first cause, God.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/030-first-cause-first-being-and-the-order-of-the-books-of-wisdom/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/030-first-cause-first-being-and-the-order-of-the-books-of-wisdom/Berquist asks why Aristotle’s Metaphysics moves so tightly from the axioms through being as being to the first causes, and why Aquinas follows a parallel path in calling God both “first being” and “first cause.” Through close questioning he sorts out the different senses of “before” and “necessary,” pressing the class to say which sense is at work when Thomas argues in SCG I.16 that God is pure act, a claim resting on the Metaphysics IX conclusion that act is prior to potency. He also shows how Metaphysics V’s account of “necessary” and “cause” both finishes defending the first axiom and opens the inquiry into being qua being, so that each stage’s conclusion becomes the next stage’s starting point.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/031-can-objections-undo-faith-or-the-axioms-introducing-book/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/031-can-objections-undo-faith-or-the-axioms-introducing-book/Berquist takes up a hard case: what happens when someone raises an objection to an article of faith, or to a self-evident axiom, that you cannot personally refute? He argues that certitude itself—natural or by faith—guarantees the objection hides a flaw, even if unfound, working the point through Hegel’s paradox of “becoming” and a parallel puzzle in Eucharistic theology. He then turns to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book II, and Aquinas’s commentary on it, introducing the opening question of whether the pursuit of truth is easy or difficult, and setting Aristotle’s confidence against modern doubts about whether truth can be known at all, from Descartes through Kant and Cassirer.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/032-dispositions-of-the-will-for-the-philosopher-and-hope-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/032-dispositions-of-the-will-for-the-philosopher-and-hope-and/Berquist begins by tracing how the order of causes and the order of being correspond yet differ in Aquinas, following the theme through the Summa’s first four ways and back into Aristotle’s own treatment of causality. He then moves to Book Two of the Metaphysics, arguing that before Aristotle can claim that considering truth belongs to the wise man, he pauses to examine what dispositions of will—love of wisdom, desire for truth, avoidance of error, hope, fear, docility, humility—are needed to pursue it at all. He illustrates these through Plato’s Phaedo and stories from his own teachers, closing with Book Two as this preparatory turn toward man’s relationship to truth.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/033-is-truth-easy-or-difficult-metaphysics-ii-three-ways-it-is/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/033-is-truth-easy-or-difficult-metaphysics-ii-three-ways-it-is/Berquist works through the first chapter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book II, where Aristotle claims that knowing truth is in one way easy and in another way hard. Truth is easy because no one wholly misses it, because truths accumulate through many hands, and because everyone grasps first principles like the axioms. Difficulty has two sources: one in the object itself, as with matter, motion, and time, which are only partly actual; the other in our own intellect’s weakness before immaterial things, like a bat blinded by daylight. Berquist connects the passage to related discussions in the Physics, De Anima, and Posterior Analytics, and to Aquinas’s commentary, using the text’s own image of debtors owing thanks even to those who erred before us.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/034-truth-and-the-cause-why-wisdom-most-considers-truth-and-the/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/034-truth-and-the-cause-why-wisdom-most-considers-truth-and-the/Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, via Aquinas’s commentary, that theoretical wisdom is concerned with truth above all other sciences, since truth is its very end and it studies the first causes from which every other truth derives. He then turns to the opening of the next reading, where Aristotle sets out to establish a first cause within each of the four kinds of cause, and asks why matter and the efficient cause are treated before form and end—a question tied back to the different senses of “beginning” from Metaphysics Book Five. Along the way he draws on Plato’s Meno and the Theaetetus’s account of wonder as philosophy’s origin.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/035-no-infinite-regress-in-the-causes-the-middle-the-moved-mover/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/035-no-infinite-regress-in-the-causes-the-middle-the-moved-mover/Why can’t a series of causes go back forever? Berquist takes up Aristotle’s “middle term” argument in Metaphysics Book II, chapter 2, beginning at 994b, tracing it through moved movers and through means sought for the sake of ends. A train of pulled railway cars and a chain of desired means show why a series without a first term collapses into contradiction, and why Aristotle treats matter’s causality differently from the efficient, final, and formal causes. Leaning on Aquinas’s commentary, he digresses into how Greek and Latin causal language compares to modern scientific talk of “law” and “quantum jump,” and to Heisenberg’s remarks on elementary particles as bearing on prime matter.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/036-roads-of-reasoned-out-knowledge-the-unmoved-mover-as-good/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/036-roads-of-reasoned-out-knowledge-the-unmoved-mover-as-good/Berquist works through Physics VIII, guided by Aquinas’s commentary, on whether the “downward” series of causes—prime matter through the elements to composite bodies—could proceed to infinity. He distinguishes two senses of “coming to be from”: imperfect developing into perfect, and reversible change like hardening and softening, showing neither allows an infinite regress. Student questions then push the discussion toward the unmoved mover of Physics VIII and Metaphysics XII, the difference between an immaterial first mover and God as Good and final cause, and how Aristotle and Plato grasped divine substance versus operation—with a tangent on Pseudo-Dionysius and Orthodox “energies” theology against divine simplicity.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/037-metaphysics-ii-reading-4-why-there-must-be-a-first-end-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/037-metaphysics-ii-reading-4-why-there-must-be-a-first-end-and/Berquist takes up the fourth reading of Metaphysics II, tracing Aquinas’s exposition of Aristotle’s case that neither the end (final cause) nor the form (formal cause) can proceed to infinity. He walks through Thomas’s four arguments showing that denying a first end abolishes the good and purposive action itself, then follows the parallel argument that definitions cannot regress infinitely either, drawing on Porphyry’s Isagoge and the genus-species-definition scheme to show a highest, undefined genus must exist. Digressions on wisdom as architectonic knowledge, geometric illustrations, and connections to Euclid, Boethius, and the Nicomachean Ethics fill out why end and form are the causes proper to the wise man’s inquiry into being.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/038-metaphysics-ii-reading-5-the-roads-in-our-knowledge-and-the/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/038-metaphysics-ii-reading-5-the-roads-in-our-knowledge-and-the/Berquist closes out Aristotle’s argument that causes cannot regress infinitely—showing how form limits matter’s “unlimited” character and dismissing the idea of endlessly many kinds of cause—while using Aquinas’s commentary to explain why there are exactly four causes. He then opens the next stretch of Book II, on the “road” or modus procedendi proper to reasoned knowledge, distinguishing the natural order running from sense through memory and experience to understanding and wisdom from the private paths of particular sciences and the common path of logic. Examples range from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well to Heisenberg and Einstein.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/039-the-three-roads-of-knowledge-natural-common-and-private-ways/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/039-the-three-roads-of-knowledge-natural-common-and-private-ways/Berquist asks how a science advances in knowledge, distinguishing three “roads”: the natural way, the common way of reason as reason, and the private way proper to each discipline. He anchors the second road in Thomas’s division of the three acts of reason, using Euclid’s Elements to show how geometry moves from simple to composite. Reading closely from his handout on Book One of the Physics and from Aquinas’s commentary, he then opens the third, private road, showing how a science’s own way of defining terms, establishing principles, and ordering its subject—natural philosophy toward matter, metaphysics toward the immaterial—differs from one discipline to the next, a comparison he promises to continue next time.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/040-custom-and-method-aristotle-on-fitting-the-way-of-proceeding/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/040-custom-and-method-aristotle-on-fitting-the-way-of-proceeding/Working through the final reading of Book II, Part III of the Physics with Aquinas’s commentary, Berquist asks why thinkers as different as the Pythagoreans, Descartes, and the Romantic poets each insist their own preferred way of presenting knowledge—mathematical, sensible, or poetic—is the only legitimate one. He traces this back to Aristotle’s claim that habit, not nature, fixes such expectations, and that a sound methodos must instead be fitted to the degree of certitude proper to its subject, descending from mathematics through natural philosophy to politics. He ends by suggesting that modern philosophy’s rejection of revealed theology left an emptiness some thinkers unknowingly tried to fill by demanding theology’s certainty from philosophy itself.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/041-likenesses-for-method-tools-senses-food-and-fiction-learning/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/041-likenesses-for-method-tools-senses-food-and-fiction-learning/Berquist opens with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, book I, arguing that certitude and enjoyment belong to their matter, as a craftsman’s tool suits his work, the senses suit their objects, and a cultivated taste in wine, food, or fiction suits what it savors—with asides on the Poetics, C.S. Lewis, and Fielding. He then traces how the Metaphysics first fixes its subject, being as being, before Book VI can treat the proper method of defining it, drawing on Boethius’s De Trinitate and the “before and after” of the Physics and Metaphysics Book V. He closes with Gregory of Nyssa on the “order” and “way” of providence.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/042-custom-the-modern-world-and-the-mercantile-city-mathematical/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/042-custom-the-modern-world-and-the-mercantile-city-mathematical/Berquist begins with how custom shapes what we can even think, invoking Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and Socratic irony, before turning to his own account of what made the modern world modern. He traces three sources: the mercantile city, contrasted with the aristocratic Greek polis through William McNeill’s world history; the mathematical fusion of natural philosophy and mechanical art into “technical science,” via Aristotle’s Physics, Thomas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics, and Heisenberg’s Gifford Lectures; and the democratic revolutions Tocqueville analyzes in Democracy in America. He argues philosophy should be divided into Greek and modern, not ancient-medieval-modern, based on its relation to revealed theology, then turns toward Tocqueville as the class closes.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/043-tocqueville-democratic-customs-and-the-influence-of-science/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/043-tocqueville-democratic-customs-and-the-influence-of-science/Berquist opens with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and asks how democratic customs bend imaginative literature toward prose, future-oriented settings, and practical concerns rather than the past-facing forms of poetic tradition, and toward pantheistic tendencies in religion. He then shows the same currents running through science fiction, detective stories, and horror, and into philosophy itself, where Adam Smith and Marx make economics central and Kant, in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, redescribes knowledge as an active “making” that puts experimental questions to nature. Against this, he reads Heraclitus’s “Royal Fragment” and turns to a passage in DHB Volume I on the first philosophers to recover an older, more receptive model of learning, one in which the knower stands as a student before a teacher rather than an interrogator before nature.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/044-freedom-equality-and-the-moderns-nature-as-measure-self-rule/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/044-freedom-equality-and-the-moderns-nature-as-measure-self-rule/Berquist asks what happens to political philosophy once thinkers stop measuring liberty and equality against nature, as the Greeks and medievals did, and instead make freedom or equality themselves the highest standard. He follows this move through Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Sartre, then turns to democratic culture’s demand that everyone “think for themselves.” Using Anaxagoras’s fragment describing Mind as unlimited, self-ruling, and unmixed, and the Socratic method’s insistence on separating the known from the unknown, he argues most people claiming equal rights to opinion have not actually achieved self-rule. He closes by challenging Stanley Jaki on Christianity, determinism, and the incarnation’s role in science.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/045-philosophy-of-looking-and-doing-and-the-proemium-to-wisdom/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/045-philosophy-of-looking-and-doing-and-the-proemium-to-wisdom/Berquist begins the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, read through Thomas Aquinas’s commentary, starting from the opening claim that all men by nature desire to know. He sets this text alongside the Nicomachean Ethics, comparing how each work opens and closes, and locates both within the larger division between speculative and practical philosophy. He then walks the natural road of human knowing—sensation, memory, experience—toward wisdom, using examples like reading novels, watching a ball game, and a cat learning to avoid a hot stove to show that knowing is sought for its own sake.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/046-from-experience-to-art-and-science-knowing-why-architectonic/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/046-from-experience-to-art-and-science-knowing-why-architectonic/Berquist works through the opening pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book Alpha, chapter 1, following the ascent from sensation and memory to experience and then to art or science. Drawing on the Nicomachean Ethics and Plato’s Gorgias, he lays out Aristotle’s two distinctions between experience and art: singular knowledge versus universal knowledge, and knowing that something is so versus knowing the cause why. Experience, he shows, can even outperform art in practice, yet art is judged wiser because it grasps causes and can be taught, a point he illustrates with everyday and autobiographical examples. He closes by opening Aristotle’s ranking of the arts themselves, distinguishing those serving necessity from those serving leisure, with Egyptian mathematics as an example of science born from leisure.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/047-the-six-marks-of-the-wise-man-and-the-universal-said-of-all/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/047-the-six-marks-of-the-wise-man-and-the-universal-said-of-all/Berquist asks what kind of causes and principles wisdom studies, taking up Aristotle’s six commonly-held opinions about the wise man—knowing all things universally, knowing difficult things, having greater certitude, being able to teach causes, being desirable for its own sake, and being architectonic. Reading Aristotle alongside Aquinas’s commentary, he shows the first three marks pointing toward wisdom as knowledge of the most universal, the “said of all,” and the last three toward wisdom as knowledge of first causes, the “cause of all.” He uses this distinction to expose confusions in Hegel and Plato, and draws on Aristotle’s Physics and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to illustrate how hard it is to rise from sensible, material knowledge to genuinely universal understanding.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/048-certitude-the-first-causes-and-which-philosophy-is-most-like/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/048-certitude-the-first-causes-and-which-philosophy-is-most-like/Berquist works through why wisdom—knowledge of the most universal things and of first causes—must also be the most certain and most architectonic of the sciences, drawing on the Posterior Analytics’ comparison of arithmetic and geometry to show how degrees of certitude differ across disciplines. He then runs a dialectical exercise, asking in turn whether logic, natural philosophy, or political philosophy best satisfies each of the six attributes of the wise man from the Metaphysics proemium. The exercise clarifies how “philosophy” gets applied analogically to these other disciplines, and why, despite the resemblances, metaphysics alone truly earns the name wisdom.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/049-doubting-well-before-understanding-well-aristotles-metaphysics/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/049-doubting-well-before-understanding-well-aristotles-metaphysics/Berquist begins a new reading on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, following his commentary through Thomas Aquinas’s exposition after two earlier sessions on the proemium. He takes up Aristotle’s claim that genuine understanding requires first working through the aporiai, the doubts and difficulties a question raises, and argues that doubting well beforehand and resolving that doubt afterward are really one act of discovery seen from two sides. Using Anaxagoras’s fragment on nous (read from “The Royal Fragment”) and Heraclitus’s account of strife as productive of progress, he draws parallels to later figures—Bohr and Einstein in science, Augustine and Aquinas’s disputed questions in theology—showing how apparent contradiction pushes the mind toward a deeper, previously hidden harmony.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/050-metaphysics-book-three-the-fourteen-questions-around-platos/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/050-metaphysics-book-three-the-fourteen-questions-around-platos/Berquist takes up Book III of the Metaphysics, the book of aporiai, where Aristotle lays out fourteen questions that must be settled before an inquiry into first causes can proceed. He shows the deliberate order behind these questions—whether principles are universal or particular, whether causes exist apart from matter, whether corruptible and incorruptible things share principles, and whether unity and being are the same as substance—many turning on Plato’s claims about separated universals and mathematical objects. Using examples like letters composing words, a typist, and the sun’s causality, he clarifies the hard notion of a “universal in causing,” distinct from a universal merely predicated of many things.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/051-books-two-to-four-truth-dialectic-being-as-being-and-the/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/051-books-two-to-four-truth-dialectic-being-as-being-and-the/Berquist follows Aristotle’s Metaphysics from the dialectical puzzles of Book III to the science of being as being in Book IV. He traces how the fourteen questions of Book III converge on whether mathematical objects exist separately, using the “through itself/through another” argument against Plato’s separated forms, with Descartes’ reduction of substance to extension as a foil. Turning to Book II, he shows why wisdom’s grasp of first causes makes it the science most concerned with truth, then follows the move into Book IV, where metaphysics as the study of being qua being must defend first axioms like non-contradiction against sophistical attack. Euclid, Shakespeare, and Aristotle’s own Ethics and Physics supply the comparisons.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/052-the-great-turnaround-the-order-of-the-sciences-and-preview/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/052-the-great-turnaround-the-order-of-the-sciences-and-preview/Berquist asks why Aristotle treats wisdom’s three objects—first causes, being as being with the one and the many, and the axioms—in a different order across Books Four through Fourteen than the order in which the proemium and Book Four first establish them. He argues the reversal follows Aristotle’s habitual movement from what is more known to us toward what is less known to us, and checks this pattern against the Nicomachean Ethics, Euclid’s Elements, and Aristotelian natural philosophy. Turning to Book Nine’s treatment of act and potency, he connects it to Aquinas’s account of divine pure act in the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae. The handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom” and DHB Volume III, The School of Aristotle, supply the texts under discussion.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/053-aristotles-proemium-wonder-liberal-knowledge-and-the-most/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/053-aristotles-proemium-wonder-liberal-knowledge-and-the-most/Berquist continues his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics proemium, tracing the four marks Aristotle gives to wisdom: it springs from wonder rather than practical need, it is pursued for its own sake rather than another’s, it lies beyond man’s full grasp given his many servitudes, and it is the most divine science, being knowledge both about God and of the sort God himself has. He turns to Plato’s Theaetetus on wonder as philosophy’s origin, and to the pre-Socratics—Democritus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Socrates—on humility before divine things, with anecdotes on how leisure makes such pursuit possible.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/054-wonder-curiosity-and-the-proemium-q-a-on-providence-free/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/054-wonder-curiosity-and-the-proemium-q-a-on-providence-free/Berquist traces Aristotle’s proem to the Metaphysics, where wonder at chance events, celestial motions, and the incommensurability of the diagonal starts philosophy—and is meant to dissolve once its cause is grasped, unlike the higher, non-privative wonder of admiration owed to God. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary alongside examples from Shakespeare, Einstein, and Euclid, he separates wonder rooted in ignorance from wonder rooted in excellence, then works through Aristotle’s epilogue recapping the proem’s two aims. The class closes with a discussion ranging over divine providence, chance, free will, and Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 4.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/055-poetry-scripture-and-wonder-philomuthos-vs-philosopher-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/055-poetry-scripture-and-wonder-philomuthos-vs-philosopher-and/Berquist asks what Aristotle means by calling the philomythos, the lover of myth and wonder, kin to the philosopher, and why the poet—named by antonomasia as “maker”—is neither. Working through Metaphysics Alpha and Lambda alongside the Poetics, he distinguishes the wonder that starts philosophy from the admiration that follows knowledge of excellence, as with God’s self-understanding in Lambda. He tests the distinction against devotional poems, the Adoro Te Devote and St. John of the Cross, asking whether prayer differs from imitation-as-likeness, drawing on Aquinas’s Summa I, q.1 and the Scriptum on the Sentences. He closes on history’s grasp of the singular versus philosophy’s and poetry’s hold on the universal, using anecdotes about a historian colleague.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/056-why-dialectic-comes-first-contradiction-right-questions-and/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/056-why-dialectic-comes-first-contradiction-right-questions-and/Berquist asks why Aristotle insists that wisdom cannot begin its work until it has first worked through dialectic: a systematic airing of contradictory opinions, or aporiai. Following Aristotle’s own four reasons, with help from Aquinas’s commentary, he brings in Heraclitus, a passage from Matthew, Meno’s paradox, and Heisenberg on quantum theory to show what is at stake in genuinely not knowing where to start. He then argues that the doubt raised in Book III is universal, unlike Aristotle’s ordinary piecemeal dialectic elsewhere and unlike Descartes’ willed doubt, because it questions the very starting points of wisdom itself. He closes by beginning to lay out the roughly twenty-three questions—about what wisdom studies, substance, and causes—that will govern the inquiry through Books IV to XIV.https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/057-the-nine-questions-on-what-wisdom-is-about-causes-axioms/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/057-the-nine-questions-on-what-wisdom-is-about-causes-axioms/Berquist continues reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book III, the collection of dialectical puzzles that set the agenda for the science of wisdom. He asks whether a single science can treat all four causes, whether it must also defend the axioms of demonstration — non-contradiction chief among them — against sophists and against Heraclitus, and whether wisdom’s subject is material substance, immaterial substance, or both, one or many, and substances alone or also their per se accidents like sameness, likeness, and priority. He brings in Plato’s Republic and Protagoras and Heraclitus’s fragments along the way, pointing ahead to how Metaphysics IV, VI, and VII–IX will settle these puzzles through being qua being and act and potency.