Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
6. Aristotle Defines Nature: Five Parts, Nature vs. Art, and Experimental Science
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/3-natural-hearing/006-aristotle-defines-nature-five-parts-nature-vs-art-and-experimental/

[0:00] So let's look now at the first paragraph here of the first reading from the second book of Natural Hearing. Of the things that are.

[0:15] Now, when Aristotle says of the things that are, at this point in philosophy, he's thinking of the things that all of us are aware of in the beginning, the things that are around us in the sensible world. And he says of the things that are, some are by nature, while some are by other causes. Now the only other cause we hear of in this reading is art, human art.

[0:50] But at other places you talk about luck and chance, and whether there is such a thing as luck and chance, and so on. And you might sometimes talk about God, right? But as I look around this room here, it seems like everything I see is either by nature or by art. Most of what I see look around this room is by by art. It's only your nose and your head and your hands that are by nature.

[1:20] Now if I went for a walk in the woods, most of what I see would be by nature, except for some beer cans. Somebody left there or something. Okay.

[1:33] So, for the most part, in the world around us, some things are by nature and some are by art—the natural things and the artificial things. So he wants to separate the natural things from the what, artificial things, and he's going to do so by separating the cause called nature from the cause called art.

[1:57] So he says, of the things that are, some are by nature while some are by other causes. He's hinting that there are other causes besides nature and even art that he mentions later on, but he's not concerned with talking about luck or chance or God or choice or like that. Now he begins to exemplify the things that are by nature. By nature are the animals and their parts, and we'd all say the animals and their parts are by nature, even the child would, and the plants, and the simple bodies are what the Greeks thought were simple, such as earth and fire and air and water.

[2:42] Now, notice, notice the order in which he gives those examples. He gives the animals and their parts first, then the plants, and you could say their parts too, and then finally he goes to the non-living things like earth, fire, air, water.

[3:02] Is there any reason why he he gives them in that order? The examples. Perhaps that is going to distinguish from art. Animals are living and sensitive.

[3:36] That's more different. Oh, yeah. Living to the non-living. Yeah, yeah. The the word nature, although it's going to be applied to non-living things, right, and to their natures, it comes from living things, and especially from animals. I economic Aristotle gives examples or Thomas gives examples, and he'd ask about the order of the examples. It's not necessarily. If I was being a modern Thomist, I wouldn't bother to, you know, ask what what the order of the examples is.

[4:19] Just at random, huh? But with Aristotle and Thomas, there's very often a reason why the examples are given. In the order they are, like those three kinds of examples in the first chapter. You start with the one most known to us, the sensible, composed whole, then the one that is like that, right? And ended up with the one that's closest to what he actually wanted to see.

[4:41] It's very well ordered. And he says, "We say that these and things like them are by nature." Now, when Aristotle says "we," I often say, "Is that the editorial 'we, ' meaning we Aristotle, or is it 'we' the Greek natural philosophers, or is it 'we' men in general?" And what is it here?

[5:06] Men in general. Yeah, men in general. If you ask a little boy or girl there on the streets, you know what things are natural, what are artificial, they will identify the animals and the plants and the stones as natural, and the cars and the houses and as artificial. Okay.

[5:26] Now, what do these seem to have in common? Well, he says, "All of these seem to differ from the things not put together by nature. For each of these has in itself a cause of motion and rest." Now, the Greek word that I translate by "motion," kinesis,

[5:51] sometimes in English you might hesitate and translate by "change" because it's a little broader than the English word "motion." You usually think of just change of place. He goes on to talk about other kinds of change besides change of place. So you might understand motion there somewhat more broadly than we usually do in English. Some according to place. So, for example, if I leave go of a stone, it's going to what?

[6:30] Naturally fall to the earth. Hot air would naturally rise. Some, according to growth and wasting away, that's the animals and even the plants. These things grow and sometimes they shrink. They say we shrink at certain age. I'm probably shrinking now.

[6:52] Until I really shrink away. But you see, these old ladies there, these pious, old ladies at the church, that they're really you know shrinking as the years go by. But I think we're all shrinking after a certain age. Okay.

[7:07] And some, according to alteration. So some things freeze and other things melt, right? Different temperatures and so on. So he's saying that the natural things have within themselves, right,

[7:25] a cause of their change. As we'll see later on, it could be an active or a passive cause. But also, they have within themselves a cause of their own. What stopping to change? Now it's due to something within. Different animals and plants and so on. Not only that they grow, but that they grow to different heights and they'll continue to grow forever. So the tree grows to a greater height than than say a man, but the trees here grow to a lesser height than let's say the redwood trees or the sequoia or something in California.

[8:07] Okay. But bed and clothing and any other such genus there may be. Now, obviously, when he says bed and clothing and such genus there may be, he's thinking of different kinds of what artificial things, right? So he's contrasting the natural things with the artificial things. In so far as they have each of these set of them, and to the extent they are from art, do not have any inborn source of change.

[8:34] Now, let's exemplify that a bit. Suppose I have one of these stone benches that you have in gardens sometimes, and you have, let's say, a wooden chair that you have in here.

[9:05] Now, if I put the stone bench in the fire and I put the wooden chair in the fire, the wooden chair would tend to burn, but maybe the stone bench would what? Resist changing in this way. So they're both in the same fire. But the one is consumed and the other is not. Now, does the wooden chair burn because it's a chair, and the stone bench resists burning up in the fire, resists change, because it's a bench?

[9:44] It's not as bench or as chair that the one what burns and the other doesn't. It's due to the natural material out of which they are made.

[10:02] Now, notice, if, if you put a piece of wood in the fire and you put a stone in the fire, and the wood burned up and the stone didn't, and the little boy asked his mother, "Mummy, why did the wood burn up? Why didn't the stone burn up?" And the poor harassed mother, and I see mothers being harassed by very inquisitive little boys, she'd probably say something like, "Well, it's not the nature of stone of a stone to burn in fire, but it is the nature of wood to burn in the fire."

[10:38] We could say that. Now, you might say, "Well, is she really answering the little boy's question?" Certainly not in a complete way, is she? But does she mean something by saying it's the nature of wood to burn, but not of the stone to burn in ordinary fire? Doesn't she have in mind that it's due to something within the wood and something else within the stone that the one resists being burned by the fire, and the other is consumed by the fire?

[11:12] Because the same fire, the same flames are licking both of them, but the one changes in a way the other doesn't. So it's not due simply to the outside that the one burns and the other. It's also due to something within. Okay.

[11:30] Now, likewise, suppose you have a big rock in your yard, and you have a tree. And as the years go by, the tree grows and gets taller and so on, and the stone stays the same but size? huh? So again, a little uh inquisitive point. Mama, why do trees grow and why doesn't the stone grow? Well, now the poor harassed mother, she says, "Well, it's the nature of trees to grow.

[12:02] It's not the nature of stones to grow." Well, that word "nature" covers maybe a lot of ignorance, but is it complete ignorance? Well, you have the same sun shining on the rock and the same sun shining on the tree. You have the same rain coming down on the rock, coming down on the tree. They could be in soil with the same nutrients, right? Everything on the outside is the same, and yet the one grows and the other what doesn't grow, right?

[12:44] So though the growth of the tree may, in fact, I think it does depend upon the sun and does depend upon water, it does depend upon the soil. It also depends upon something within the tree, and is something else within the stone whereby it doesn't grow but remains at rest. And that inward cause we call nature. We're kind of drawing a circle around nature without really knowing what it is.

[13:12] We'll try to bring it out later on more fully what it is. But it's clear from that example that there's something within. See that? Okay, and that's what's being called nature. He'll spell it out in the second paragraph. This whole circle.

[13:39] Now, sometimes they quote Antiphon. Aristotle referred to Antiphon. Antiphon gave a kind of a strange example at first sight. He says you took the wooden bed and you thrust it into the ground, and it got moist and it sprouted. What would come up? A little tree-like thing, like a twig or something, or a little tiny bed.

[14:11] A twig, yeah. Now, does that show that the the twig is from within, and the bedness of it is kind of imposed on it from the outside? See the idea that the cause within. Sometimes I take a more interesting, a more real example for us, maybe when De Tocqueville came to United States in the 1830s, and eventually wrote the greatest book on America, Democracy in America. But he describes the log cabins that the Americans made.

[14:49] I see a log cabin they're putting up on the road here when I come up, not right here, but further down. Oh yeah. I don't know if you go all the way down there because I see it much more along now with the light signals here. But I don't know. But they're gonna make this. They're gonna be a private dwelling. But the Americans would build these log cabins, and then they would live in them for a year or two, and then they'd abandon the log cabin and they go further west.

[15:16] And he's talking about the restlessness Americans and they're in search of better land or more land or something. And so he would come across these abandoned log cabins. These are very rough houses as you might expect. And nature was taking over yet. You've seen sometimes, you know, tree logs out in the woods that have fallen, and sometimes they like sprout. What comes up is a tree-like thing, a little twig, not another little log, but cabin or the start of another log cabin.

[15:50] So the log cabinness, the thing that was by art, seems to be from the outside, and the the tree character is from within. So he's saying the difference between natural things, like the animals and their parts and the plants and so on, they seem to have within themselves a cause of their own what change, but also their rest. Now it's due to something within the tree, not only that it grows, but that this or that kind of tree grows to a certain height and then doesn't. There's something within you and I that when we eat as a child we grow, but also there's something within us that we don't keep on growing and growing and growing, but that we stop growing at least in the right

[16:38] direction at a certain what age. I guess we grow almost 30, but you know much less at the end there. Do you see that?

[16:53] Sometimes when they're talking about wine, sometimes you'll see in literature on wine they'll talk about say a table wine, a wine that is suitable maybe for dinner or something. But sometimes you see the table wine called a natural wine, and they'll contrast a natural wine with what we would call a fortified wine.

[17:28] Now an example fortified wine would be something like say sherry or port, so on. It might be used as an aperitif, or it might be used as an after dinner drink, or it might be used sometimes in cooking too. But they call these a fortified wine. But a wine like let's say Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot or Chardonnay, they call these what a table wine, a natural wine.

[18:01] Now that's interesting the words there. Now if you look at the alcoholic content which by the way they have to put on the bottle, you'll notice that the fortified wine has a higher alcoholic content, and the fortified wine will be something like maybe 18 to 20 percent alcohol. The natural wine will be something like usually in the range 11 to 13 or 13. 5 something around that range.

[18:30] And why do they call this a natural wine and that a fortified wine? Well, depending upon the sugar content and so on of the grapes, this will kind of start even without man, though man helps it along. It'll start turning into alcohol, but when it gets up to somewhere in this range, it what of its own sort it stops. Why

[19:05] the fortified wine? What they've done is to distill brandy or something didn't brandy, and they add brandy to it to bring it up to 18 to 20 percent, and that not only makes it more powerful obviously, but it makes it less suitable for drinking with the dinner, and but it'll preserve the wine more because of higher alcoholic content. You see. But it doesn't naturally stop at 18 to 20.

[19:33] You have to. It doesn't actually go to that. Right here, it's almost like a certain chemical reaction. It'll go on, and then it'll naturally stop at a certain point when everything is used up, so to speak. So I think the fact that we call this a natural wine even though human art tends to help the thing, reflects what Aristotle is saying: it's due to something within that it goes to this amount, and then stops somewhere in this range.

[20:06] It doesn't do something within go up to this and then stop. No, it stops down here, and then someone adds this and brings it up to that higher alcoholic content.

[20:21] So the idea that nature, the natural things, have within themselves as such a cause of their own change, but also of their own rest.

[20:36] Now, in the second paragraph here, Aristotle spells this out a little bit more, and you can distinguish five different parts to the definition here of nature. But it's a definition in the sense that we speak of it encircling as a definition.

[21:00] So let me put on the board here separately the five parts of the definition, so we can stop at each one and see something of what it means. So he says, first of all, that nature is a beginning. And cause. That's the first part of the definition. Nature is the beginning and cause. No, this is also true about human art. Human art is the beginning of many things, a cause of many things.

[21:41] And then he says, of motion, and I'll put in parentheses change, because sometimes you use the word motion there in English in the narrow sense. of motion or change and rest.

[22:03] Okay. But again, this is also true of human art. So it's due to the art of the bricklayer that the wall gets taller, but also that he stops at a certain height according to the plan for the house and so on.

[22:26] But now the third part of the definition is what begins to separate nature from art, and for the most part, it's sufficient to separate nature from art.

[22:41] In that in which it is. Okay. This is bringing out that nature is the beginning and cause of motion or change and rest, not in another thing, right? But it's inside the very thing itself that is changing or coming to a rest. So the cause of the tree getting taller and it stopped getting taller when it gets to a certain height is something within the tree, but the cause of the wall getting taller and stopping at a certain height is not within the wall or in the bricks, but in the art of the bricklayer.

[23:27] You see that when I put the steak on the grill, I'm a cause of the change of the steak because I grill it. But also I've got to take it off, and I think it's going to still be pink and therefore it's still taste good. Okay. So it's not due to something within the steak. The steak does just jump off the thing when it gets to, right?

[23:54] It'd be nice and handy if it did. But I've got to be there, and if I get distracted by something out there, maybe I'm equipped to eat too much and I'm in for criticism and penance and so on. Okay. So this third part of the definition separates nature from art for the most part. Nature is also the beginning and cause of change and rest, but in something else, right?

[24:24] The cause here of the change of the steak and stopping. its change at a certain point is in me, right? And my my tools there, my grill and so on. Do you see that? Now, notice when he says motion and change, and come back to what we said before. He doesn't mean just change of place, but he means what might be change of quality. It might be growth, and so there are different kinds of change.

[25:00] And in the later parts of the study of the natural world, you study each one of these kinds of. kinds of change in particular. But we're concerned here mainly with change in general. So this third one, this third one, is very important. The idea of being a cause within, and that, as we said, is common to all the beings of nature. You understand nothing of nature if you don't see that.

[25:26] You don't understand what Heraclitus meant when he said, or why he said, nature loves to hide. Now, the fourth part of the definition is first,

[25:39] and that's the part of the definition that we don't have Aristotle with here explicitly explaining. Now, there's a couple of things you might see, though. This is very important to see that nature is what is first in a thing. I talk about that in the in the other sense of nature here, and why this is the first road, huh?

[26:06] In the introduction here, why is the first road the natural road? The minor premise is clear because the nature of a thing, or what it is, is what is first in that thing. A thing must be what it is before it can be anything else. Hence, what is natural thing is first in it. But here he also has the word first. That's very important in the definition of nature.

[26:33] Someone said the one's here, and the other said that's the most important part of the definition. I don't know, it was really very important. Now, when Thomas explains it, this is what he brings out,

[26:50] and let me exemplify here with something that's easier to see. If I step out the window on the second floor, what's going to happen? I'm going to descend, right? Okay. Okay. Naturally, go down. Now, do I go down because I'm a man or an animal? Is it due to my nature as man or animal that I go down? No, no. If you had a sack of chemicals, more or less, so the chemicals in me, and you put it out the window, let go, they go down too.

[27:32] So it's not due to my nature as a man that I go down, or even my nature as an animal. It's my nature as heavier than air that I go down. So nature is what is first responsible

[27:53] for something, huh? Okay. So there can be a certain contrariety of natures, in me, Can't there? Now, if you see me going upstairs, my office on the third floor. Um, am I going upstairs because I'm heavier than air? No, that's why I'm huffing and puffing going up the stairs. See? Now this brings in my nature as a animal, whereby I can, what, use my muscles and so on against the force of gravity and against the very heaviness of my body.

[28:39] If I slip, on it I go by gravity downstairs. Do you see that? So this is the explanation that Thomas Aquinas gives of first there. It's what is first responsible.

[28:59] Okay. Now, a second thing I sometimes point out is that this separates nature from what we call custom. Now, custom is like nature because it internalizes,

[29:25] but we often call custom second nature. So in my fair lady, Professor Higgins singing about Miss Doolittle, she's second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in. That's the way the song goes. Now, breathing out and breathing in is due to nature in the first sense, isn't it? The sense that we're interested in. If people had to think, you know, they'd be dead if they had to think to breathe.

[30:02] But you naturally breathe in and breathe out all day long without even thinking about it. You were doing it all day long, I bet. You wouldn't be here if you hadn't.

[30:12] But custom is like that. He's grown accustomed to Miss Doolittle. She's second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in. But notice that word "second nature." Second, it's not first, is it? So, custom is not nature, because custom is something second, something that's acquired, although it's internalized. But it resembles nature because it seems natural once it becomes customary. So it seems to me natural to speak English, and although I learned a little bit of French, it just seemed like a forced, an artificial way of speaking.

[30:56] English is a natural way of speaking. My my children all studied Latin, and they come home with this joke someday: "Daddy, what was the greatest accomplishment of the Romans?" So I am thinking, you know, it comes down to Romans or law or something. Well, the answer is they spoke Latin. How could anybody speaking this totally artificial language?

[31:28] And when I was in French class in high school, this one kid was having a heck of a time learning his French. And finally one day in class, he burst out, "How do the French kids ever learn this?" And we all started laughing. There is probably some poor little French kid over there. I guess it's even harder for them to learn English than for us to learn French.

[31:48] How do English kids ever learn this? But the point is that you pick it up with your mother's milk, your native language. But not the expression we speak of your native language, English is my native language, and and to speak French or Latin always seems kind of a little stilted and artificial and so on. And so that custom does resemble nature after a while, but it's second nature.

[32:21] So that's at least two things that the word "first" brings out and separates nature, as we define it here, from custom. And it also, as Thomas says, brings out that you have to look at what is first responsible for something. So my going down when I step out the second-story window is due to my nature as heavier than air, not due to my nature as animal man.

[33:01] Am I going upstairs due to my nature as animal, or my having senses is due to my nature as animal? If I was made out of helium, when I stepped out the window, I would go up, right? Your children, you'd have to be worried about yourself going up rather than going down, and you have to be tying your children down and so on. So, my goodness, my child got loose this today.

[33:27] But again, would be you know, due to your nature as man, or then you are going down to do that. Your nature, you are using your muscles to pull yourself down, keep yourself from going up when you when you go up. Okay, so that's the fourth part of the definition. Now the last part he adds, and he gives in the third paragraph the reason why he adds the last part.

[33:56] The last part is necessary to completely separate nature from art. And Aristotle is thinking of an unusual thing, where art is within the thing that it changes. And Aristotle was the son of the leading medical doctor there, and his father was the court physician in Macedonia, and that's Aristotle himself became known to the court of Macedon, and he was chosen to be the teacher of Alexander the Great.

[34:32] Now, the doctor usually cures or tries to cure some patient that comes to see him with some disease. But suppose the doctor himself became sick with the very illness he's been carrying in others, and he used the medical art within himself to cure himself of the disease. Then the change in him from sickness to health would be due to art, but in this example the art is within the thing that is changed.

[35:10] So the art of a doctor who uses his art to cure himself rather than somebody else—that is very much like nature, isn't it? It's a cause of change within the thing that is changing, but yet it's not nature. So Aristotle, the first thing we require of a definition is that it separates the thing you're defining from everything else. So you have to add something to the definition to completely separate it from nature's odd example that the son of the medical doctor comes up with, and that's why he adds his last word. As such, and not by happening.

[35:59] This is a very important kind of distinction, and we talked about a bit. We talked about the first kind of mistake outside of speech, the mistake for mixing up the as such, or the through itself, with the by happening, or the through happening. Sometimes you say by accident, using the Latin word for happening. What he's saying is that it happens that the man who has this disease also possesses the art whereby it could be cured.

[36:31] Or you could say vice versa: it happens that the man who possesses the art that can cure this disease also has the disease, and usually they're not the what same, right? All these doctors are calling in for anthrax, right? They don't have the anthrax, but they're trying to cure it in somebody else with antibiotics. et cetera,

[36:57] but notice, you and I, but also the dog or the cat, we all have certain natural powers of recuperation. So sometimes we get sick, and we don't go to the doctor, we don't even take medicine, but nature cures us. And you know, the simple example there: you get a cut in your finger, and you don't always go to the doctor. You don't even always put something on it.

[37:27] Sometimes the bleeding stops. And when I shave in the morning I get a nick, and well, if it's still, you know, coming off, it's going to get my shirt, you know. So maybe I'll put a little bit stinging stuff on, and it'll stop. But sometimes I notice it stops of its own. And the same when I get other cuts in my body.

[37:52] Now, is that by happening that I have that power to stop the bleeding? No, and I know especially with the male cats I have, they're always coming home as a child with some scratch, even some fight, huh? And so, how could the animals survive if they didn't have some way of, you know, stopping the bleeding? Huh? Since they're always having fights and running through the bushes or something, they'd all what drip, drip, drip, but they can't with a with a hole in it or something, or a gas tank with a hole in it.

[38:36] So he adds this to separate nature from art. If the art of building a house could be put into the lumber, so the lumber built itself into a house, then it would be very much just like.

[38:53] Nature, huh? And that's why Aristotle is hinting at the idea that nature is something of an art, but not of the human art, huh? But something of the art of some mind that has put something of its art into things. Of course, man is trying to do that with the computer, and so he's trying to put something of his art into things. He's trying to imitate nature in that sense, huh?

[39:20] Where you have a cause within. So he adds this last part. He explains in the third paragraph. He explains why he adds that fifth part to separate nature from this strange example of art being a cause within the thing that it's what changing. The art of the doctor being within the what doctor who's cured by his own art. Do you see that? Yeah.

[39:53] Now, you know, I spoke before of the importance of that kind of distinction, and here's an example of the importance of that distinction: understanding what nature is. The distinction between as such and by happening, right, is absolutely essential to completing the definition of nature. I was talking to the students in in introduction there about the definition of the good. The good is what all want, and they said, "Well, this is a good definition of of the good.

[40:27] Aren't bad things sometimes wanted? So how does the definition of good as what all want separate the good from the bad? " Socrates criticizes Meno's definition because it doesn't separate virtue from vice, so the good man from the bad man. Well, you have to see the distinction between nature and art. Distinction between as such and by happening, because the bad as such is not desired. The bad is desired either because it appears to be good, right, or it's desired because the good in it, and you don't see the bad in it.

[41:08] But it's not the bad as such. See, the man who robs the bank does he rob the bank? Not because it's unjust to rob a bank. No, he robs the bank. No, as the famous bank robber says, that's because that's where the money is. That's where you rob the bank. So he's robbing the bank because it's a way of increasing the money in his pocket, if he doesn't get caught, and all the things you can do with money in our society.

[41:37] So he's desiring a good thing for himself when he robs the bank. And the man who drinks a delicious poison does he drink it because it's poisonous?

[41:49] No, but because he sees or tastes it's delicious, and he's pursuing the good in it as such. Not pursuing, seeking to be poisoned. The man who's offered the last drink at the party, the one that makes him sick,

[42:10] does he want to get sick? No, he wants that last drink because it appears to be a way of continuing the good time or increasing the good time. When it's actually a way of ending the good time. See, and even you know these more subtle cases where a man might seem to be choosing bad, knowing it's bad. The famous was it Crime and Punishment? The famous story of Dostoevsky.

[42:37] But the young man is going to to murder somebody, not because he hates or dislikes this person really, and not because he wants this person's money or something, but he really wants to murder somebody to show that he's above the law.

[42:53] Well, notice if if all the rest of you are under the law, and I am above the law, then I appear to be above all the rest of you.

[43:03] So he has a perverted notion, obviously. This is going to put him below everybody else, murder. But I mean, he's pursuing what, out of pride, you might say, a false appearance of superiority. You're all below the law, and I'm above the law, so I'm above everybody.

[43:23] But only a proud man could deceive himself in that way. And eventually, well, you know the story. Eventually, he's broken down, right? And then repents actually, but.

[43:40] So, in order to defend the definition of good, and that's a very important definition of good, you have to see, or add really, that it's the good as such that is desired. And the bad, as such, is not desired.

[44:02] But here he has to make use of that same distinction to complete the definition of nature. For the most part, it's enough to say, like he did in the first paragraph, that the natural things have within themselves a cause of their own change and rest, and the art is a cause outside of the thing is changing or bringing to rest. But then the strange example, right, of the doctor who uses his art to cure not the patient who comes to see him, but himself.

[44:34] How do you separate nature from that? Well, you have to see that the man who has the sickness doesn't belong to him as such to have the art; it happens. Or the man who has the art, it doesn't belong to him as such to have the disease, but it could happen that he has a disease which can be cured by that art. So he adds that last part to complete the separation of nature from art.

[45:08] So a lot of times in an exam, I ask the students, "Now, what is the definition of nature? This cause called nature, " but then I'll follow it up and I'll say, "What parts of the definition separate nature from art? What's not beginning and cause, because nature is a beginning and cause? It's not of motion and rests, because art is also a cause that changes things and stops changing them, and so on.

[45:35] But in that in which it is, ah, that very much separates nature from art, and it's almost sufficient by itself to separate nature from art. But then, because of this odd. Example, he has to add that fifth part as such, and not by happening or not by accident. So the third and the fifth parts are necessary to separate nature from art. Notice how, we're moving from a confused knowledge of nature to a more distinct knowledge of nature, but staying on the very what general level of nature.

[46:18] You go from the name to the definition. You're staying on what the same level of universality. That's why we say the name and the definition should be convertible. One is not said of more than the other. Every square is an equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral, and vice versa, right? But Aristotle is moving from the confused to the distinct here, from nature to the definition of nature, but not definition in the perfect sense, but definition in the sense of the encircling, right?

[46:49] He's drawing the line around nature that separates it from art, the other main cause. Now let's make a little footnote back to experimental science here, because you could say the philosophy of nature is a knowledge of natural things, not a knowledge of artificial things. And you might ask, why did the Greeks see wisdom as more a knowledge of natural things than a knowledge of artificial things?

[47:29] Well, it's because wisdom is a knowledge of the first causes, the first causes of all things, and all things in the beginning of our knowledge are the things around us, and these are for the most part either natural or artificial. But the artificial things seem to in some way depend upon the natural, because the matter out of which the artificial things are made, like the chair out of wood, that matter comes from nature, and the hands of the man who shaped it, right?

[48:03] Those hands are by nature. too. So in some way, natural things are ultimately responsible for the existence of artificial things. So if I found the causes of natural things, I would apparently have found the first causes of all things, assuming that all things are these material things around us. Okay. Later on, when they found out that there are immaterial things, then they realized that wisdom comes meta ta physika, after the books in natural philosophy, after the eight books of natural hearing and the three books about the soul.

[48:41] That's what meta ta physika means. Although nobody knows what it means, This is the word metaphysics, they don't even know what the word means or what the origin of the word is. But if you look, you know, if you have the Aristotle and the Greek, it would be three words: meta ta physika.

[48:57] And it's because it says Thomas says trans physica in Latin. It's after or across or through the natural things that you come to this other thing that is even more wisdom. Now, when you study experimental science, you'll find out that modern experimental science is not a purely natural science. It involves a union of what natural science and technical science, as. Heisenberg says in the Gifford lectures. Then the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a union of natural science and technical science.

[49:44] Sometimes they call it the union of science and technology, but it's a little better to describe it as Heisenberg does: as Heisenberg does, the union of natural science and technical science, of the natural and the artificial, and these two became kind of intertwined and kind of inseparable. Two.

[50:07] Notice right away when you make an experiment: is an experiment something natural or something artificial? Yeah, yeah. So they're already there. They give experiments in mixture. When you start to look at even the most simple instruments, like say a thermometer, and you say the temperature here is 61 today, let's say. Well, 61, the number of a natural thing, like five fingers is the number of fingers on a hand, or two is the number of legs I have, or four is the number chambers of my heart.

[50:47] Have they gone and found 61 things out there in the natural world? No, 61 is a number found on an artificial instrument, and that artificial instrument may be, you know, in contact with the natural air, and the different numbers you get on the thermometer in some way shadow the changes in the natural air, maybe. But it's not directly the number of a natural thing. 61 is it?

[51:23] Like five fingers here is the number of a natural thing. So even with the thermometer, you're not really talking about the number of a natural thing anymore. And that's why the physicists sometimes say, like Eddington and the scientists that I mentioned earlier, that we are shadowing the natural world, but we don't, but contain the substance of the natural world. Yeah.