Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
44. The Importance of the Question of Final Causality: Natural Philosophy and Ethics
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[0:00] for or against. him That's an example of the force of what? Custom, right? He's more concerned, as he says that more than once in the in the apology. He's more concerned about the influence of his anonymous accusers than upon Meletus and Anytus and so on, to try to prove in court. And we get a little bit of cross-examining one of these guys, right? And he could pretty well handle the guy, right?

[0:26] But the anonymous accusers he can't confront, right? And of course, it's particularly difficult, you know, if you say, you know, that I'm innocent of any wrongdoing, but people have been saying, you know, for years I'm a bad doer. See, people say, well, there's smoke, there must be fire, you know, there must be something wrong with you, Socrates. Must be something wrong. We'll hear all these bad things, you know.

[0:48] It's like we hear bad things about some politician being crooked, you know. You didn't know. you may believe everything, or know whether you should believe everything. But if you keep on hearing over and over again about him being crooked, you say there must be something wrong with that guy, right? Okay. But I. But in more generally, I stop with the students and I ask this general question: Which is stronger in our thinking, for the most part, argument or custom?

[1:16] And most students, I think, and rightly, will answer that custom is stronger. And the reason for that is that custom acts on our mind before we're able to really reason. And custom produces a habit. That's like a second nature.

[1:42] So as we accept the customary, as if it were second nature. Especially what's customary from time we were first came into this world, right?

[1:55] And then when we begin to reason, we tend to take as a starting point something we customarily. So that's just influencing, or just you know making more forceful, right? The influence of custom, right? When you take that as a starting point, you're reasoning.

[2:15] So I want to make them aware of the customs that lead men to deny in our time that nature makes for an end or a purpose, as well as the arguments against, right? You

[2:35] often quote Max Planck, you know, father of modern physics, here as he's called. He says, you know, we don't really convince the older generation of physicists the new ideas. He says, but what happens is they die off. See, and the new ones are taught the new ideas, you know, beginning of their academic career. And that's how the new ideas get adopted.

[3:01] That's kind of a striking thing, right? Because the scientists are the, you know, the ones you'd expect to follow the evidence, right? But if even in them, the custom is stronger than the argument, right? What about the rest of us? You know, who are not so disciplined in our mental habits, right? You see.

[3:22] Of course, you can see this. You know, people coming from different, in different ages, say, you know, or different schools or different backgrounds, certain uniformity or conformity of thought, right? I often quote, you know,

[3:40] from the Paston letters, you know, one of the historians writing about the Paston letters are back in, I guess, the 14th century, something like that. They're one, you know, you know, major sources, you know, for, you know, what daily living was like in those days. And in the Paston letters, you read about the one who marries the daughter off to a rich old money bag, see? And she doesn't want to marry this rich old, old money bags, right?

[4:06] And of course, they're beating her every day until she agrees to do so. But, you know, one shouldn't think he says of the Pastons are cruel parents, something like that. What else did you do if the daughter? didn't marry the man you wanted her to marry, right? You know, obviously you beat her, right, until she agrees. Of course, things are going to kind of shock us a bit, right?

[4:28] People in another age, you just take for granted, right? And vice versa, the things we take for granted, right? You know, you crazy, you know. So you see that the force of custom, right? So I want to talk about the customs, of the modern world, right? That influences our thinking on this, right? Maybe even more than the arguments. And I also want to talk about certain what misunderstandings of what this means, right?

[5:00] That lead people to, right? So we don't decide the question by these misunderstandings or by custom, but you have to realize that most people are more influenced by these maybe than the arguments, you know. Okay, but then eventually we look at the arguments for and against, right? And then we weigh the arguments, and then whichever arguments you think, or whichever side you think is stronger, then you have to go back to the arguments of the other side and answer all of them, right?

[5:29] So what I do here is reproduce a Aristotle's text where he argues in favor of nature acting for an end, and I restate his arguments, you know, and expand upon one of them and so on, and I give the arguments against nature acting for an end, right? And then, of course, I agree with Aristotle, so I answer the arguments on the other side, right? Okay. But now, before doing all of this, the first thing I do with the students is to point out the importance of the question, right?

[6:04] Okay, and it's difficult to really exaggerate the importance of this question. Now, so the first thing I talked about is the importance of this question for natural philosophy or for natural science, and then the importance of this for

[6:27] ethics and for the whole of our life, and then the importance of this question for the arts that help nature, like the medical art, art of logic, and so on.

[6:46] Then you see a little bit of the importance of this for even theology, right? Okay, because this should inspire the student to really want to grapple with this question, right? Okay.

[7:03] Now, going back to the very beginning of of our course, there when Aristotle was stating what the goal of natural philosophy was, it wasn't just to know the way natural things are, but to know they're what causes, right? Okay.

[7:24] So, since the end is one of the kinds of causes, this is a question that pertains to the very end and goal of natural philosophy.

[7:38] Is part of understanding natural things, understanding their end or purpose. Now, nothing is more important in any science than its end. So, if the end is to know the causes, and this is a question that pertains to the most important thing in natural philosophy,

[8:04] and I sometimes add to that something we saw today that where the end is a cause, it's the cause of all the other causes. So it has special importance among the four causes.

[8:20] Okay. So would you repeat that last? Yeah, we saw that where the end is a cause, right? Right. It tends to be the cause of the other causes being causes, so it has a kind of primacy among the causes where it is a cause, right? Okay.

[8:38] So in general, being one of the four causes is going to be important for the question of what is the you know the very end of natural philosophy, right? Is this part of the end or goal of natural philosophy to know not only the matter or the form or the mover, right, in the natural world, but also to know ends in the natural world? But this particular kind of cause has special importance, right?

[9:04] Where it is a cause, it's more important. It's the most important cause. Okay, so it's part of understanding the eye to know if the eye is for the sake of seeing,

[9:20] and part of understanding the ear is for the sake of hearing. Is part of understanding the heart is for pumping blood, etc. Right? Or is that irrelevant to understanding what the eye is? Sounds kind of strange, right? Okay. Okay.

[9:48] Then I go to the importance of the question for ethics and for human life. Right. Now the fundamental question in ethics. And for human life, is about the end or purpose of human life, right? Does man have an end or purpose, right?

[10:12] Now, if man is among the things that are by nature, can you answer yes to the question that nature acts for an end, right? As Socrates and Plato and Aristotle do, then you would ask, does man have by nature some end or purpose, huh? And if so, what is that end or purpose, and then how can we best achieve it, right?

[10:41] On the other hand, if you say nature doesn't make things for the sake of something, then nature didn't make man or his parts for any end or purpose, right? And so man has no end or purpose by nature, nor do his parts have any end or purpose, right?

[11:01] And therefore, either man will have no end or purpose, or he'll just invent one for himself, right? So you can see that if that's the most basic thing in life and in ethics, the whole of ethics, the whole of human life, depend upon the answer to this question in actual philosophy.

[11:23] So I tell students, you know, your whole life depends upon this course. So blase, you know. But an attempt to make this a little more concrete, you know, I'll come in one day and I'll say, I think I'll cut off your arm here, huh? My scalpel. Take it up to the lab and dissect your arm I'm a little bit. um, hazy about the structure of the arm.

[11:53] I think I cut your arm off, right? Okay. Now, I'm sure you're going to resist my cutting your arm off, right? Okay. But now is it just a question of who's stronger, you or me, whether I'm strong enough to grab you and cut your arm off, or strong enough to stop me, or would you say that I don't have a right to your arm? See? that your arm is for you and not for my knowledge of anatomy.

[12:18] Of course, they want to say that your arm, what? That's a question of who's stronger. Yeah. Uh, but that the arm is for the sake of you, right, and not for the sake of my knowledge of anatomy. Yeah. Just a minute now. Your arm is not an artificial arm, huh? It's an arm made by nature, right? Now, if you say that nature makes things for an end or purpose, then you might very well argue that nature has made your arm for the sake of you.

[12:51] That makes the part for the sake of the whole, right? But if you deny that nature makes things for an end or purpose, then nature didn't make your arm for an end or purpose. No more for the sake of you than for the sake of my knowledge of anatomy. It's just a matter of whim, right? Whether you do it one way or the other, right? That's really the consequence of that, huh?

[13:19] Or I'll come in and I'll say, now if I come into class here and I set out to to deceive all of you, right, and leave you in deception, right? Am I abusing you in your mind? Am I misusing my mind? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a minute now. My mind is something that I have by nature, right? Now, if nature doesn't make things for any end or purpose, right?

[13:54] It didn't make my mind for the sake of knowing the truth any more than for the sake of being deceived, right? So you know you can't really misuse the mind in that sense, huh? Because to misuse something or to abuse it is to go against its what purpose, right? Okay. So you can't really say I'm abusing your mind when I, is it? Okay. Or I say, you know, suppose I discover that you'd make a good fertilizer for my garden, right?

[14:29] Okay. So I'm going to put you in my grinding machine and grind you up and make a nice fertilizer for my garden, okay? Now I assume you're going to resist my pushing you into my grinder, right? It's just a question of who's stronger, you or me, right? Will I get you in that grinder, huh? Or would you say that you're for the sake of something better and more noble than fertilizing my garden?

[14:57] Well, if you say that man man is something made by nature, if say nature makes things for an end or a purpose, right? You might be able to reason out that man is made by nature as something better than fertilizing the garden, right? But if you say nature doesn't make things for an end or a purpose, right? Nature no more made you for something better than fertilizing my garden than fertilizing my garden, right?

[15:24] So why not use you to fertilize my garden, right? Just a question of you don't like that, you know, but so what? I don't like lobsters, so what? Maybe lobster, you know, it's all right, you know. So I try to press upon them, you know, how everything depends upon the what answer you give to this, right? For the whole of ethics, right? And so men like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, those who follow them, they have concluded that nature does make things to an end or a purpose.

[15:58] So they seek to find the natural purpose of man, and once having found it, they try to see how can we best achieve that end or purpose purpose, right?

[16:10] But some of the moderns who deny that nature acts in her purpose, like Sartre, or somebody in that tradition, right? For them, the end or purpose is something what freely chosen, right?

[16:24] And there's no basis in man, right? That end or purpose. Now, secondly, you could say that I mean, among the things outside of natural science, you can see it's also very important for the arts that what help nature, right? Like the medical art, right? Are the art of logic, huh?

[16:51] Because if nature, if if nature acts for an end, right? Then the purpose of the medical art is to help nature achieve its end, right? To help the woman give birth, for example, right?

[17:06] In a sense, the medical art then is, you know, he gets its parameters from nature, huh? But if you say nature is not making things to sake of anything, then the medical art now becomes completely what? Open, whatever you can make something out of something, right? The same way for the art of logic, you know, some of the modern logicians say that the rules of logic are arbitrary, like the rules of monopoly or some other game, right?

[17:32] If? You want to play with the rules, you can. If you don't want to play with the rules, that's okay too, you know. But for Socrates, who said he was an intellectual midwife, right, comparing himself to medical art, for Plato and Aristotle, logic is an art that helps nature achieve its what? It Helps reason, right, achieve its natural purpose, huh? And then the rules of logic are not arbitrary, right?

[17:55] They are designed to help nature achieve its natural end to know the truth, right? So when he when he when he study like the syllogism, right, and see when the conclusion follows and when it doesn't follow, right, that's for the sake of of knowing the truth, right? Not being deceived now by bad argument and so on, huh? But if you say that our reason being made by nature has no purpose, right?

[18:26] Then logic becomes something really arbitrary, huh? Now, of course, this is obviously important for theology, right? Because if nature makes things for an end, and nature doesn't have a mind, as you might eventually conclude, right? Then it points to a greater mind, like Anaxagoras and others have talked about, right? So it's going to have consequences for for theology.

[19:08] So it's extremely important question, then first of all for natural philosophy, but secondly for ethics and the whole human life, and then for those arts that help nature, and even for theology, right? So it's hard to really exaggerate the importance of this question. In some ways, it's the most important question for them in their life.

[19:34] How does reading thirteen prepare us for that? or? Now, reading 13 is Aristotle's arguments for saying nature acts for an end, right? And he has five arguments there, right? Okay.

[19:54] Then, starting at the bottom of page three, I give the three main arguments against nature acting for an end. And then I restate the arguments of Aristotle, not doing justice to them, of course, but taking his third argument, dividing into two arguments, and then after weighing them, I reply to the what arguments against nature acting for Okay. Starting with the middle of page six and going to the end there, right?

[20:27] Okay. Now maybe before we go into that, that's what the rest of this reading is. I want to emphasize the importance of it, you know. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about some of these other distinctions that Aristotle makes about causes, right? Okay. A little bit next time, first, you know, before we go into this, right? And then talk about Aristotle. You know, gets through with that.

[21:03] He talks about luck and chance, which are these obscure causes, right? And we want to talk a little bit about that, you know, a little bit about that, and and then we want to talk about the misunderstandings, right? You know, we start to approach this in the custom before we start to look at the arguments. I mean, as far as determining by reason the truth of this question, the arguments for and against that are the meat of it, right?

[21:33] But as far as why people, you know, incline anything to the negative side, right? The arguments are perhaps less important than the influence of custom or the influence of misunderstanding, right? So I want to talk about those first, huh? Yeah. Okay.

[21:57] Stop it's about five o'clock right Yeah there's a grandchild here if you haven't seen them yet. is that moved by God? see, You know I said, well, eventually in wisdom, right, or in theology, right, you would see that in some way even the intellect is moved by God, right? Even these active abilities are moved by God, right? See. But when you're studying the third book on the soul, the contrast is between the active intellect and the what possible intellect, or whatever you want to call it, right?

[22:37] You know. And there, they're like agent is to matter, Aristotle says, right? You know, if you brought this other thing in at that point, you'd be confusing the what the student, right?

[22:51] Um. Just like when Aristotle was in the philosophy of nature, there. He distinguishes between natural philosophy and mathematics, and doesn't bring in wisdom at all. See, it's not until the sixth book of wisdom that he distinguishes all three of them.

[23:14] And it's because at that point the distinction is what not necessary, right? Natural philosophy. Yeah, yeah. You don't even know that there are material things that they've gone through natural philosophy. You see, yeah.

[23:40] It's a little bit like you know, you know, it's like you know, bringing in a discussion of what creation is as opposed to change, right? You know, when you're doing natural philosophy, which you may come at that point, right?

[23:58] See, you should come in when you're in theology or in wisdom, yeah, talking about God's causality. This is kind of you know kind of prudence there, right? Now suddenly, in Thomas' commentary, you bring these things in, like the beginning of the commentary on the physics, he'll distinguish the three sciences, right? But the commentaries are to some extent written, you know, for the teacher, right? Gone through them, and now you want to see things in a more universal way, right?

[24:24] But for a beginning student, no, it would confuse them at that point, right? Too much, too much too soon. Yeah, but your brother Mark, I started reading the commentaries when we were doing. Yeah. And he told me not to. Just he said that the outlines are the helpful part, but the commentaries he said are really for someone who's already been been through. it Mr Confucius says too much is as bad as too little.

[25:42] Mr Confucius says too much is the one who said that. Acts for an end, or whether end is a cause in actual world. Let's say a few more things about causes that come up after the distinction of all kinds of causes that we saw before.

[26:07] One distinction that Aristotle makes, and we see it touched upon a bit already, is distinction between the cause as such and the accidental cause.

[26:35] The cause to itself in Greek kath' hauto and happening or by happening kata symbebekos in Greek. That's one very important distinction to talk about.

[26:54] Another distinction is that within each kind of cause you can distinguish a cause before or after, huh, or if you like latin, prior and posterior. Okay. So

[27:14] if the locomotive is pulling a car, and that's pulling the car behind it, right? And that's pulling the car behind it, right? You have many what movers, right? But in a certain order, right? And if I go to the drugstore for the sake of getting aspirin, I get aspirin for the sake of taking medicine, aspirin, and I take aspirin for the sake of getting rid of my headache.

[27:43] I want to get rid of my headache for the sake of studying. I want to study for the sake of knowing. You have many ends in a certain what order, right? And in the last books of Natural hearing, the seventh and the eighth books, Aristotle argues, right, that such a series doesn't go on forever, right? That not every mover is a moved mover. eventually comes an unmoved mover.

[28:16] We're in the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, right, he argues that not every end is for the sake of some further end, but there must be an end that is first.

[28:30] You could also have this material cause, right? So to use an example from modern chemistry, maybe the proton and the electron are the matter out of which the atom is made, right? And the atom is the matter out of which the molecule is made, and so on, right? So you have to work your way back ultimately to the first cause, huh? Each kind of cause, and in the second book of wisdom, Aristotle shows that there are first causes in each kind of cause.

[29:03] But in the other parts of philosophy, you sometimes see this to be true about one or another particular kind of cause. So about the mover in natural philosophy, or the end in ethics, or the form in logic, and matter again in natural philosophy. That's different from what was exemplified before, where you have before and after not in reality, but a more general, more particular understanding, and one and the same cause in reality.

[29:36] So the obstetrician delivered the baby. The medical doctor delivered the baby. The man of art delivered the baby. Right? Not two different men in reality. Right? Okay. What he calls the genus of these things of these things. Right? This is made out of oak. This is made out of wood. This is made out of matter. to be. Very general, right? Okay. You can speak that way too, but it's more important to see this other one, where you have an order, not just in our mind and understanding, more generally or more in particular, one the same cause, but in reality you have many causes.

[30:20] Okay. So, in a sense, the Pietas was made by what? Michelangelo, right? But he might have used a hammer and chisel or something, right? And so they are, in a sense, causes too of the Pietas, insofar as they were what moved by Michelangelo's hands, which may be moved by something else inside of him. Okay. So we speak of causes then before and after, right? And Thomas will distinguish those two in his commentary there, before and after, simply in our knowledge, right, of one the same cause, or before and after in reality.

[31:07] That's much more interesting, that second one. Okay. So why did I hit you? Because I was angry with you, right? Well, I was angry with you? You can try to work your way back to the first cause.

[31:25] Now, the other distinction that's very important is between the cause as such and the accidental causes. And sometimes they will distinguish the accidental causes

[31:43] by in two ways, huh? Or into two they would distinguish them. When something happens to the cause as such, right? What happens to the cause as such is also sometimes said to be a cause of the effect, huh? So, for example, if the house builder, the man who possesses the art of building houses, if he builds a house, the house builder is the cause as such of the house, right?

[32:19] Or is the cause, as it says in Greek, kath' hauto in Latin per se, through itself, huh? What does that mean? It means the house builder through being a house builder, right? Through possessing the art of building houses is a cause of the what house, right? But now, if the house builder happens to be the pianist, huh?

[32:44] If to be a pianist is something that happens to the house builder, right? And it doesn't even belong to him as house builder needs to be a pianist, right? But he could happen to be a pianist, right? I could say that a pianist built my house, but that be false.

[33:06] No, no. But you'd have to say that the pianist is an accidental cause of the house, right? Because the pianist who built my house in this example is not as pianist that he built the house, right? It's not through being a pianist, to use the other way of speaking, huh? It wasn't per se, okay? It was through being a house builder It was as house builder that he built it.

[33:37] Okay, so that's accidental, right? On the side of the cause itself, right? Now to take the stock example, right? If I'm a gardener, right, and I'm digging in the ground, right,

[33:58] in order to plant, huh? Digging a hole for a plant, right? That's what gardeners do, as such, right? They know how deep to dig the hole and so on, right? Okay.

[34:20] But suppose in digging a hole for a plant, hits something, says, "Oh, one of these darn rocks that you always have in the soil," right? And he starts to see how big a rock it is. That's not a rock at all. That's something else. That's a what? Looks like an old chest, right? Why not that is? Huh? Wonder who buried that there, right? And so he gets out his crowbar or something.

[34:43] He forces open the chest. Hey, maybe this is worth something, right? And let's say he's got a what? Treasure there buried by some pirate or somebody years ago, right, huh? But now you can say his digging a hole was what? The cause of his becoming wealthy, right? But was digging a hole in the ground to plant something as such a way of becoming a millionaire and so on?

[35:17] No, no. It's something that happened, right? And furthermore, you can say it doesn't happen most of the time, let alone all the time, right? Otherwise, people would be digging in the ground all the time, huh?

[35:35] And this is the kind of cause that we have in mind, the kind of accidental cause we have in mind when we talk about luck or chance, huh? Okay.

[35:53] It's a cause of what happens, what? Rarely, right? As a result of an action done for some end or purpose, right? When something happens accidentally, right? Okay. When I was in Quebec, I was going across the Café de la Ville for the sake of eating a meal in the Montcalm restaurant at that time, which had a student reduction. I think they lost money on us. And as I'm crossing in front of the cars and stopped there, somebody yells out Professor Somebody hadn't even seen him in ten years right years, right?

[36:32] Okay. Well, he had come to Quebec with his wife for a little mini vacation, and was I going to the Café de la Ville there to meet him? No. But by going to the Café de la Ville for my dinner was the accidental cause now of my encountering this man, okay?

[36:54] And so, something that we call an accident, right? You're going through the intersection, you got the green light, it's in your favor, and so on, right? And you're going to the grocery store, and somebody comes plowing through, right? You're in the wrong place at the wrong time, as they say, right? So, you're going to the grocery store as a cause of you're getting what? An accident, huh?

[37:19] It doesn't happen most of the time. You go through the green light, and somebody plows through, right? Okay, not all the time, say. Yeah.

[37:33] Now, the difference between chance and luck, huh? Chance is a little broader in meaning than luck. Luck is chance in human affairs. And sometimes you see a Latin word too, fortune, which is chance in human affairs. But you can have chance even in the what? Natural world. And the stock example is that of the mother lion, or whatever it is, has lost her kitten, her cub, right?

[38:10] And she's chasing some other animal for her dinner. And that other animal happens to run by where the little cub had wandered off. So she recovers her little one, right? Not that most of the time you do that when you chase another animal. And that wasn't done for the sake of recovering her little thing; it was done for the sake of dinner, right? But her chasing the other animal was the cause of her finding her little one.

[38:38] So that's an example of chance in what? Nature, okay. The English word. To make a little footnote here, the English word "happiness," right, actually comes from the word "hap," meaning what? Luck, huh? Happy go lucky means almost almost synonyms originally, huh? Happy go lucky,

[39:13] and that corresponds to what you have in Latin, where they speak of bona fortuna, good fortune, right? And they have a similar word in Greek, huh? Aristotle uses in the book on the Poetics eutuchia, okay? But it kind of reflects a popular understanding that happiness is a matter of being lucky, right? And if people think, you know, that

[39:56] that's the right place, the right time, that's where I got a good job, or I got the right job. Thing you know, but I guess how happiness really is, right? But the origin of the word it comes from hap. You can see that in Shakespeare's *The Two Gentlemen of Verona* that used the word hap going back. Now, but the original use of the word,

[40:27] So hap and hap they're actually etymologically related, right? Related to the word for word for luck. Now, there's another kind of accidental cause, which is quite different from luck or chance, but it's also on the side of the effect.

[40:48] But here, there's a kind of necessary order to what happens, huh? And the stock example, of course, is that of this pillar holding up the roof, right? Okay. Now, if I knock the pillar down, what happens? Roof falls down. Yeah, and you'd hold me responsible for the roof coming down, right? Am I really the cause of the roof coming down as such? In this case,

[41:20] no, no, no. It's something else that brings the roof down, right? What did I have to do with it? Well, the pillar was impeding or preventing, right, the roof from coming down. And so, this kind of a cause is called the Latin *removens prohibens*, right? The one removing or taking away what prevents something, huh? Okay.

[41:52] But notice, son, if I'm out, let's say, practicing with my gun, right? We've got a target out there in the backyard, and so on. And I'm shooting at the target, right? And you're out for a walk, you know, and you're thinking of philosophy and not paying too much attention where you're going. And you happen to end up walking there on the other side of the target, right?

[42:16] And I shoot, and you drop down from behind the target, you know. Would you hold me responsible for your injury or even death? No.

[42:30] You happen to be behind the target, right? Didn't know you weren't even thinking about anything about philosophy. You weren't thinking about where you're going. See, so are you responsible? Am I responsible for for your death in this case? We'd say it's bad luck, right? Huh? You happen to be behind the target, right? Huh? But if I Samson or somebody, if I knock the pillar down and the roof comes down, you'd probably hold me responsible, right?

[43:02] That's interesting. Now the word "responsible" means what? It means tied with the word "cause," as I mentioned in Greek, right here, right? So here's an accidental cause where you're in a way held responsible for what happens, huh?

[43:17] Suppose you park your car on the hill there. The brakes aren't too good, so you put on the handbrake, as people do sometimes, right? And I reach inside your car and release the handbrake, right? Your car goes rolling down the hill and into the into the lake, huh? Well, I think you'd hold me responsible for your car being ruined there in the lake, huh? See? But did I pull your car down the what?

[43:45] Hill? Was I the cause of such of your car going down the hill? No. But I am the causa removens prohibens, huh? The cause removing what prohibits or prevents, right? Your car from going down. And so you'd hold me responsible, right? Still, it's considered to be a what? An accidental cause, huh? But it's much different from the kind of accidental cause of luck or chances, huh? When they define luck or chance, they say it's a cause of what happens rarely, right?

[44:26] As result of an action done for an end, right? And it's not intended, therefore, right? In the case of the causa removens prohibens, it doesn't happen rarely, right? That the roof falls in when the pillar is removed, right? If that's what's holding it up, right? And so I'm responsible much more for the roof coming down or your car going down the hill than I am for you getting shot behind that thing.

[44:59] Do you see? Doesn't seem to be accident in the same sense. I mean, it's not an accident of pushing up a thing like like Penelope's next in a house building. Yeah, yeah. See, this here, this here seems to be, in some sense, is very accidental, right? See, because the art of playing piano doesn't seem to in any way contribute to the building of the house. See, here my digging in the ground for

[45:37] to plant something, right, has something to do with the discovery, obviously, of the thing, right, that was buried under there, right? Okay. But still, I didn't know it was buried under there, right? I wasn't digging for the sake of that, right? And most of the time, it's not going to happen if you dig in the ground, huh? Okay. But here, yes, something accidental where the connection is seems to be necessary, right?

[46:06] Yeah. And we saw something like that back in the first book of the Natural Hearing. You are necessarily ignorant before you learn, but the ignorance as such is not a cause of your what learning, right? You see that? So the accidental there can be in some way what necessary, right? Seems to be less accidental in that sense, right? But still not as such what's making the car go downhill.

[46:47] If you you know stopped your car, you jump out of the car and try to put the brake on, and all of a sudden there it goes. You see

[46:57] something other than me, right? That's really causing to go down the hill as such, yeah. But that brake was preventing it from doing what it would tend to do, right? Okay.

[47:13] You know people don't usually intend the the bad as bad, right? If I rob the bank, I don't rob the bank because it's unjust to rob the bank. Is that what they rob the bank? No. They rob the bank because as this one famous bank robber said, that's where the money is.

[47:42] So when Thomas is is discussing in the in the commentaries in the Epistle of Saint Paul, the way in which pride is a cause of deception, right? See, well, man doesn't intend to be deceived, does he? No. But he says that pride causes a man to be deceived. There's a cause of deception in two ways, and one of the ways he mentions is that it makes us not want to what believe or listen to another man, right?

[48:24] Even a man who's wiser than we are, right? So listening to Thomas or Aristotle or somebody like that prevents you from many mistakes, right? Or even calls you back from mistakes that you might have fallen into.

[48:42] And as a teacher, said, you know, when you explain something in class, you know, the students automatically, somebody's going to get it wrong, right? You see how prone we are to to make mistakes without a teacher, and so

[49:00] pride. Removes what would prevent you from making a mistake. So that's kind of a necessary order, right? Almost to what you're being deceived, given the weakness of our mind. Okay.

[49:30] Now the other way that pride is a cause of deception resembles more this other way here, but it's different in a sense. Thomas says that the proud man, overestimating his ability, right, will apply his mind to judging something he's not able to judge, right, and therefore he's apt to make a what mistake, right? Okay. But again, is he intending to be deceived and applying his mind to some great question?

[49:58] No, he's what seeking the Excellence of being the judge of these matters, huh? But in sense, he's seeking the excellence in something that he's not capable of. Is it seems like an accidental cause in some way? If it's being what deceived, huh? Okay.

[50:23] So the consideration of accidental causes is important for many reasons, huh? And it's important, as they say, for understanding luck and chance, which is one kind of those causes. But it's very important for understanding the causes of the bad.

[50:42] Those are some of the things that Aristotle takes up. He takes up luck and chance, you know, and they seem at first to some people to be simply names for ignorance, right? Well, no, they're not simply names for ignorance. There really is such a thing as luck and chance, and some things do happen by luck or by chance. But luck or chance are obscure because they're a kind of accidental cause, huh?

[51:09] And if you go someplace, you know, all kinds of things could happen to you there, right? Sarah Mack went to Florida to make his peace with what President Roosevelt, right? Because he had opposed him in the convention, right? And he got the bullet intended for Roosevelt.

[51:29] Okay. So I think it happened to you. Going for some, he didn't go to see Roosevelt to what? Get the bullet intended for Roosevelt, huh? He went there to make peace because he had opposed him in the convention. This guy now had the nomination, right? So he better cozy up to him, right?

[51:50] Instead, he got the bullet that you know happened to be between the man with the gun and the got the bullet. You see, something good or bad could happen, right? When I go to the store, who knows what's going to happen when I go to the store today, right? I might get a bullet. I might, you know, drugstore in Centertown one number of winters ago collapsed, till the roof fell in, you know, and so you never know what's going to happen when you go to the drugstore.

[52:19] So I might be robbing the the store, right? Huh? You see, we might meet an old friend, or you might, you know. There's a story in the paper. What I always tell the students about, where the the guy, you know, hit a car in accident, huh? And this is before no fault insurance. And so the person he hit, you know, sued him, right? Well, she was a woman, he was a man, and they had to see each other an awful lot before the thing came up because these things were so long.

[52:49] They fell in love. They were engaged. with the time. I said, to the guy, I wouldn't recommend it. you see a nice girl in a car, you want to marry her. Don't go and smash into her car. I don't think that's the That's that's such the way to get her, her favor, right? But so I mean, anything can happen, right? You know, one thing can lead to anything, huh?

[53:11] So when they talk about you know the sin there of Adam and Eve, right, huh? Some say that they wanted to what be able to what avoid these accidental things, right? By their own reason, you really depend upon God, right? For those accidental things, huh? Because there's an infinity of things could happen, right? So it escapes our mind, huh? Anything could happen, really, as a result of something that you're aiming at.

[53:45] May I ask, is St. Thomas the one who goes into that particular point about what they want? They want to avoid the accidental. One of the fathers, go speak about that, or can you think of? Well, I think both of them would talk about it. I mean, the fathers would talk about it to some extent, but Thomas, you know, knows very clearly, explicitly about what luck and chance are, right?

[54:10] And the other accidental causes that Aristotle talks about at different times. So that's important when you talk about the bad, right? Okay. So there's then there would be like a broad on the side of the effect. Many things would be accidental, but they wouldn't all be by chance or luck. Yeah, they distinguish they distinguish these two, right? The chance or luck on the one hand, and the cause, right, removing the what prevents something, right?

[54:51] Okay. Because there you have kind of a necessary order, right? So, so Samson, right, when you push the pillars down, right, it's kind of a necessary order between that and the roof falling in, right? Okay. But it's not really the what the move of the pillar that pulls the roof down. Something else causes the roof to to go down, right? But the pillar was preventing that from happening.

[55:17] And so if you remove that, and therefore this happened, huh? Okay. Say like I built the house, and it was the the fifth house on the block.

[55:33] Yeah. But I didn't intend to build the fifth house. But that one, you said that was even by chance, or it wasn't luck, luck, or. Well, if people would talk about muchness, it's something good or bad happens, right? Yeah. Um, but notice in Shakespeare's play, there Romeo and Juliet, huh? There's a lot in there about luck, huh? Or fortune is the word used, huh? And so Romeo says, "I'm what."

[56:04] I am fortune's fool. See, you know he marries Juliet secretly, right? And he wants to be therefore friends with her family, right? And there's a squabble between what Mercutio and Tybalt, right? And he goes out to try to what stop the fight, right? Kind of you know putting down Mercutio's sword and then Tybalt

[56:30] stabs, right? So what he intended didn't happen, right? See, in fact something terrible happened, right? As a result of him trying to you know restore peace or make peace between his family or his relatives and Juliet's, right? He's now what the unintended result was the death of Mercutio. Then Romeo loses his head and he he kills Tybalt and now he's exiled and so on, right? And I'm fortune's fool.

[57:06] So a lot of references to fortune there in those plays, huh? Let's come back now to the question here about whether end is a cause in the natural world, huh? And just review for a second the importance of the question, right? And I say this question is important first of all for natural philosophy

[57:40] because what's most important in anything is its what end or purpose, right? And the end or purpose of natural philosophy is to know the causes of natural things and that there are four kinds of causes and this is a question now about one of the four. So it's a question that pertains to the very end and goal of natural science. It's part of understanding natural things to understand their end or purpose, huh?

[58:15] It's part of understanding, for example, the eye to know this for the sake of seeing, right? Or the ear is for the sake of hearing, or the teeth in front for the sake of biting, and the teeth in back for the sake of chewing, and the heart for the sake of pumping blood and other things, right? Or is that not part of understanding, right? So it's most important for natural philosophy, right?

[58:40] Because nothing is more important than the end or goal of a science, right? It's just part of the end or goal to understand natural things, which means know their causes, huh? Okay.

[58:54] And you can say secondly that among the four kinds of causes, this has a special importance. This kind of cause. Because where it is a cause, it seems to be the cause of the other causes being causes. It seems to be primary, right? So sitting—it's for the sake of sitting or having something to sit on—that the carpenter makes the chair, right? So the carpenter's making of a chair, his causality as a maker, depends in a way upon sitting, doesn't it?

[59:35] And the carpenter, in turn, by shaping the wood, is a cause of the matter becoming the matter of a chair, right? And therefore being a cause in the way of chair. And he's also responsible for the form, which makes a chair to be a chair intrinsically, getting into the wood, right? But he does all this for the sake of sitting. So the end. is the causa causorum as they say in Latin.

[1:00:03] The cause of the causes, right? It's the cause of the other cause being causes. So, even among the four kinds of causes, this has a preeminent importance, Where it is a cause. It's the most fundamental cause. So, it's an extremely important question then, huh? For the natural philosopher to know whether this is a part of his goal, part of his

[1:00:30] understanding of natural things. Now, after natural philosophy would seem to be most important for ethics, right? And, in fact, for the whole of our life, right?

[1:00:52] Why? Because man and his parts are by nature, right? And the fundamental question for human life and the fundamental question for ethics is: What is the end or purpose of man? What is the end or purpose of human life?

[1:01:18] Now, if you answer that nature does make things for an end or purpose, then you might ask, well, does man then have an end or purpose by nature? And if so, what is that end or purpose, right? And then later on, how can we best achieve that, right? As individuals and as families and even as nations, right?

[1:01:46] On the other hand, if the answer to this question is no, right, then neither man nor any of his parts have any end or purpose, because they're all by nature, and nature doesn't make things for the sake of anything, huh? If you take the negative position here, right? And then either man and human life have no end or purpose, or we simply invent one now, but it's a free invention in our part, which it could be anything, right?

[1:02:14] That's the position that someone like John Paul Sartre, right, would have, huh? Okay. Why for Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, who answer yes to this question, then they look for the natural purpose of man and even the natural purpose of his parts, right? And then they try to see how those can best be what achieved, right? So, all our thinking about life, all of ethics depends upon the answer to this question.

[1:02:44] They tell the students, "You don't know what to do with yourself until you answer this question." You know, you pull a ballpoint pen and say, "If it's on the purpose of this, you don't know what to do with it, right?" Like a little baby might put in his mouth, doesn't know what to do with the thing, right? You don't know the purpose of man. You don't know what to do with yourself.

[1:03:03] You may think you do, but you don't. Not any more when the baby does what to do with ballpoint. Okay. And I was mentioning it last time, you know, trying desperately to make this importance of this kind of concrete for them. You know, I stand next to student and said, you know, my knowledge of what anatomy is kind of hazy. You know, I think I'll cut off your arm, take you over to lab and dissect it and improve my knowledge, huh?

[1:03:35] I'm kind of interested in the brain too. So I'm going to cut your head off and take it down to the lab and dissect it. I say, now I'm sure you're going to, you know, oppose me trying to cut your arm off or cut your head off. But is it just a question of who's stronger? You know, whether I'm strong enough to cut your arm off, you can stop me, right?

[1:03:56] Or would you say that I don't have a right to your arm? That your arm is for the sake of you? What do you say? Yeah, they want to say that their arms for the sake of them and not for the sake of my knowledge of anatomy. But I go on to point out your arm was made by nature, right? Now, if you say that nature makes things for an end or purpose, you can give a good argument to say that nature makes the part for the sake of the whole.

[1:04:27] Okay, and therefore that your arm is for the sake of you. But if you deny that nature makes anything for an end or purpose, your arm was no more made for you than it was made for my knowledge of anatomy. Just a matter of opinion as people say nowadays, right? You know, a question of whim, really, right? You see? I say, thank God people don't act always in accord with their ideas, huh?

[1:04:55] You know the famous what's that novel there? Brothers Karamazov, right? Where the older brother, you know, comes back from university and is all tanked up with these wild ideas, right? And his younger stupid brother, right, acts on them, and I guess he kills the father, right? Because it seems quite allowed, right? Given the fact that there's no God there's no morality and so on. And of course the older brother is shocked by the fact that he's killed his father, but he's already acted on the ideas of the sophisticated brother, huh?

[1:05:32] See? And sometimes it takes something like that, right, to say, gee, I should be examining my ideas. That this is what what it means, right, for people to act on my ideas. Or the other example I take is, you know, if I find out that you would make a good what a good fertilizer for my garden out of you, right? And so I'm going to shove you into my grinder and grind you up and so on and spread you over my garden and get a good crop this year.

[1:06:03] Ah, you might, you know, resist me trying to put you into my grinder, right, huh? Just a question of might here, huh? Or is a question that I don't have a right to grind you up, right? That you're for the sake of something more important than fertilizing my garden. Well, again, you, you are made by nature, right? So if nature doesn't make man for any end or purpose, then you were not made for anything higher than fertilizing my garden, right?

[1:06:36] I said, you would fertilize my garden. Well, why not? You see? Or another example I give is I come in class and I say, now if I come in class here with the intention of deceiving you, right, and leaving you in deception, right, would you say that I'm misusing my mind and abusing your minds, huh? Yeah, yeah, of course. But again, your mind is something you have by nature, right?

[1:07:08] And if nature doesn't make things for any end or purpose, then it didn't make your mind for knowing the truth any more than for being deceived, right? So whatever, you know, I enjoy deceiving. So why not? Doesn't make any difference anyway, right? No. In other words, you can't really misuse somebody or abuse somebody if it doesn't have any inner purpose, huh? In sense, to misuse something

[1:07:40] is to use in a way that's contrary to its innate purpose, huh? So I'm trying to impress on their minds that this question is of absolute importance, the whole of ethics and the whole of their life, right? And all our thinking about what we should do or should not do depends upon that, huh? Okay.

[1:08:12] Now