Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
7. Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wonder Fulfilled, Iris Daughter of Thaumas, and Learning from Predecessors
Class of 2005-01-13
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7a-wisdom-2005/007-metaphysics-i-proemium-wonder-fulfilled-iris-daughter-of/

[0:00] Aristotle has a little second thought here, but he said that philosophy begins in wonder, right? Huh. Okay. Now, by wonder, you mean this desire to know the cause, huh? Ah, then that wonder is going to disappear. Right, once you come to know the cause, Now you've got to be careful because when Aristotle gets to God in the twelfth book, and he talks about the excellence of God, right?

[0:33] And then he says the excellence of God compels our wonder, right? Is he contradicting himself here? See, no, it's a different kind of wonder, right? Because the wonder that is the beginning of philosophy is a desire to know what you don't know, right? And so that wonder is going to disappear once you come to know what you don't know. Just like my hunger disappears once I I've eaten, right?

[1:02] And satisfying that, right? But there's another kind of wonder, kind of an awe you might say, right? But the excellence of something that comes not so much from ignorance but from seeing the excellence of something, okay? It's kind of like the wonder you have when you see a beautiful statue or a beautiful painting or something like that, right? It comes not from your ignorance of the painting or the statue, but from your what knowledge.

[1:30] But don't be deceived by the mistake of mixing up two different senses of wonder. Okay. Sometimes people try to get a synonym for each, and they'll say, "Well, one wonder is kind of like what they call curiosity, although curiosity, it says, a bad sense, right? " And the other wonder is kind of more like what we call admiration, right? Okay. I admire you because what I know about you that is good in you, right?

[1:53] Okay. But I'm curious about you that I don't understand you. I don't know what you really are, right? I'm curious about what happened, you know. Okay. But since curiosity's taken for the vice, you know, being interested in things that are unimportant right? What's everybody doing all the time?

[2:13] My wife, when she first was teaching, was teaching out in one of the small towns here in Massachusetts, you know. And of course, everybody knows everybody else is doing in town, you know. You can't go anybody's house without being known, you know.

[2:26] Okay. So he said it's necessary ever to place the possession of this, of wonder, in the opposite for us of the searches in the beginning. For all begin, as we have said, from wondering if things are thus, as about things that happen wonderfully by chance. Of course, the philomythos is present with those things, right? You know how Friar Lawrence sends the word to what Romeo that Juliet has just taken this potion that makes her appear to be dead, but the messenger never gets there because of the plague.

[3:04] Remember that? See, so terrible things happen by chance, right? Yeah. Or about the turnings of the sun, right? The sun seems to go up the sky and down the sky during the year. What's going on here?

[3:20] Or the incommensurability of the diagonal. This is a very famous example from what? Geometry, right? In a square, you can't find a line that measures the side of the square and the diagonal of the square. It's impossible to do so, no matter how small thing you take.

[3:43] Now, Thomas in his commentary here doesn't exemplify, doesn't unfold fully the the importance of that example of Aristotle. But I found texts elsewhere. Thomas refers to this example and brings out something that the commentary doesn't bring out. Our wonder is aroused most of all,

[4:11] not just when we don't know the cause of something, right? But we don't know the cause of something that happens contrary to what we expect. Okay. So, if I left go of this glass here and it fell to the ground, you would not be surprised it fell to the ground, right? But do you really know why it falls to the ground? No. But you expected to fall to the ground, wouldn't you?

[4:36] If I let go, okay. But now if I let go of it now and it went up, why did it go up? See? So when something you don't expect takes place, right? Then you especially wonder why. Okay.

[4:52] And I remember when I think I told the story before, but I got out of college, my old teacher, Basurko and said said, "Get a copy of Euclid, Dwayne, and read it." And I said, "Why?" He says, "Get a copy of Euclid, read it." Okay. So I went out and got a copy of Euclid and read it. And my politician friend said, "What are you doing, Duane?

[5:12] I'm studying geometry. Well, that's. You know, it's high school stuff, you know, you know." And so I kind of went into this theorem there in book. Three of Euclid, right? And Euclid shows there that if you have, say, a line drawn at right angles to the endpoint here, right, it's going to touch the circle at just one point.

[5:37] And then he goes on and shows that you can't draw a straight line between the circle and that straight line that is what tangent. And therefore, that the so-called horn angle is smaller than any rectilineal angle.

[5:56] Now, I was talking to my friend in his graduate said, you know, what a rectilineal angle is you know, an angle formed by two straight lines meeting, you know, okay. Now you could make that smaller and smaller and smaller, couldn't you, right? Like scissors, you know, folding, closing up, right? Yeah. So could you make two lines meeting? It would be smaller than any rectilinear angle. Well, no, you couldn't because you can always make rectilinear angles smaller as small as you want, right?

[6:23] Okay. And especially here because in between this line and this line, there's open space all the way down to that point because they touch only at a point. So it seems from that point you could draw a straight line, right? It would be closer to this than this is, right? But Euclid shows it's impossible. See, but that that aroused my my politician friend's wonder, right? Huh? Because it's contrary to what you would what expect, right?

[6:55] I know myself that if I'd never seen the theorem of Euclid, and someone said can you draw a line from that point, yeah, because there's open space all the way up. See. So it seems contrary to what I expect that a curved line can be a straight line at an angle less than any rectilinear angle. How small you make those rectilinear angles, huh? I don't want to know why that's so.

[7:17] Right? Okay. So Euclid, yes, you see. But Aristotle takes us in a more famous example there of the incommensurability of the diagonal, right? And I remember when reading Einstein on Einstein's little autobiographical sketch there in the Harper edition there of Einstein, philosopher scientist, you know, just many essays by other people, right? The Einstein's applying to them, right? Giving a little sketch of his life, but he makes that same point that Thomas makes, huh?

[7:49] That one's wonders aroused when something contrary to what you expect, right, takes place, huh? Okay. You don't expect God to become man and die for us, would you? No. So the wonders aroused. Why did he do this, right? It's

[8:20] interesting thing in Thomas's commentary there. It gets to the words of of Matthew. The only words that Matthew has on the cross is "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Right? You know, the usual explanation of this is that brings out the reality of Christ's suffering on the cross and so on. Right? You know, but Thomas gives a number of reasons why he says this.

[8:43] Right? The one reason is what? Why should God have done this? Kind of wonder, right? Did His own Son suffer this way, right? Interesting.

[9:03] So he says it is necessary, therefore, to finish in the contrary of wonder, and the better, right? It's better to know than to want to know, right? According to the proverb, just as in these, when they have learned, for the geometry had wondered nothing so much as if the diagonal were to become measurable. How did that happen? Okay.

[9:28] But notice, Aristotle doesn't reason this way, but you could, I think. You could give us an additional reason why philosophy or wisdom is the knowledge of the first cause: the fact that it begins in wonder, right? Because a man who wonders wants to know the cause, and if the cause has a cause, know the cause of the cause, right? And so wonder eventually makes you look for the very first cause of things.

[9:59] So, because philosophy began in wonder, it had to end in some kind of what? Wisdom, right? Some kind of knowledge of the first cause, huh? That had to be the goal of philosophy if it began in what? Wonder, yeah. Now, in this great dialogue called the Theaetetus that I mentioned before,

[10:32] Socrates, when observing that philosophy begins in wonder, then he makes the kind of strange statement there. It wasn't a bad genealogy, he says, the man who said that Iris is the offspring of Thaumas Okay, have we mentioned that before? Yes, way back when. Yeah. Now, Thaumas is the Greek word for wonder, right? Thaumazein The Thaumas is like wonder personified, right? So Socrates saying, and again this refers to a passage in the great poet Hesiod, right?

[11:06] Hesiod says that Iris is the offspring of Thaumas which is wonder. Let's say personified. Now, who's Iris, right? Well, Iris appears, for example, in Homer, right? Iris. Two things are said about Iris in the poets. One is that Iris is the messenger of the gods, or Zeus,

[11:49] and Iris is the rainbow personified. Now, is it by chance that Iris is both the messenger of the gods and the rainbow personified? Is there some connection between those two things that the Iris in Homer? Between heaven and earth. Yeah, yeah. The rainbow unites heaven and earth. Okay. And the messenger of the gods unites the gods with man, right? The gods having their place heaven, right, and the men begin earth, right.

[12:31] So it's not by chance, I think, that Iris is those two things. I mean, they're connected, right? Now Shakespeare in the play where he talks most about wonder, the his farewell to the stage, the tempest, huh? You have a vision there where Iris appears, right? And someone reads, you know, hail, many colored messenger. Well, many colored messenger, right? Huh? The Shakespeare does this. So, what is the meaning?

[13:03] What does Socrates say? Doesn't explain himself there at all. He doesn't explain, right? It wasn't a bad genealogy, the man who said that Iris is the offspring of Thaumas I guess I say to the students, maybe. Plato stuck that line in there to see if you'd wonder about it, to see if you were something of a philosopher. See, if you were going to ask the question, why the Socrates thinks this wasn't a bad genealogy, can you answer that now?

[13:35] What's he saying? Because the rainbow is it. It arouses wonder. It's. Yeah. But he's saying, if Iris is a messenger of the gods, Iris in a way unites man with God, right? Just like the rainbow unites the place of man, the earth, with heaven, which is the place of God, right? So to say that Iris is the offspring of wonder is to say that wonder, in a way, what?

[14:14] Unites to God. Yeah, yeah. On the side of our what? Reason. Reason, yeah. Because wonder makes us look for the cause, and if the cause has a cause, to look for the cause of the cause, right? And so on until we come to the first cause, and the first cause is God, right? So wonder unites man with God, right?

[14:38] On the side of his reason, at least, right? And therefore, it makes not a bad genealogy to say that Iris is the offspring of what? Thaumas. It's beautifully said, as the poet. It's beautifully there, right?

[14:59] But as I say, another way of putting this is to say that because wonder is the beginning of philosophy, then the end of philosophy had to be the goal of philosophy had to be a knowledge of God, right? A knowledge of the first cause, with the first cause being God, is that it will be the end. And then the first cause being God is that it will be the

[15:30] So, if someone asks you what is wisdom, you might say, "Well, wisdom is a knowledge of God In both senses. and I'll say what you mean, but stop and think, right? Just as the definition of reason is a knowledge of reason in both senses, right? But you start to see how the now the definition of reason is a knowledge of reason in both senses, right? And how a knowledge of the of the soul, the de anima, is a knowledge of the soul in both senses, right?

[15:58] And you kind of see that the way that that phrase can have those two meanings. What about the the definition of definition? It's a knowledge of definition by definition, right?

[16:36] But since logic arises that way, because it is a thinking about thinking, right? We don't begin by thinking about thinking, right? But logic arises because we can think about thinking. I couldn't think about thinking to be no what,

[16:59] be no logic. Now, at the end here, at the bottom of page five, Aristotle has a little epilogue where he recalls the thing he's just done here in the third reading, and then the thing he did in the what first two readings, huh? So, what is the nature of the knowledge sought? Then has been said. It's looking knowledge, right? It's liberal knowledge, opposed to servile, free. It's not a human possession, right?

[17:40] But it's the best and most honorable knowledge because it's the most divine knowledge, right? And what is the goal that the investigation? And the Greek, word there is zetesis, right? What is the goal that the search, right? And then he uses the Greek word methodos, which means what knowledge over a road, right? Must reach. And what is that goal? It's a knowledge of the first cause, right?

[18:18] And also, I emphasize is more. That wisdom is a knowledge of the first cause, than it's a knowledge of what is said of all things. Right? That might seem to be kind of vapidness, right? But it's not really going to get into it, but

[18:38] but notice he reasons from wisdom being about the first cause, right, to its being the best and most honorable knowledge. He doesn't reason from it being a knowledge of what is said of all that it's the best and most honorable knowledge, doesn't he? Okay. And yes, something like that earlier in the

[19:04] first reading, right? When he didn't reason that science or art is superior to experience from its knowing universal, right? In fact, he reasoned from that first difference to its inferiority as far as doing is concerned, right? But, he wanted to reason from art or science being superior in knowing and in being wise or being like wisdom to or experience, right? He reasoned from its knowing the what cause, right?

[19:39] Do you see that? And now he reasons at the end of this second part that wisdom is the most honorable and the best knowledge, not because it's about the most universal, but it's said of all, but because it's about the most universal cause. It's about the very first cause. This is about God, right? Okay.

[20:05] In some sense, we recognize the excellence of wisdom, what it is, more than that. That's important when you get later on to what I call the great turnaround, right? Okay. So, any questions now about the Aristotle's proemium so we can take our breaks. We can relax a little bit here and see any question about the proemium And sometimes, even an introduction to philosophy, I'll give them this proemium right?

[20:42] Because, because what is the end and goal of all this philosophical study, right? This gives you a little bit of a clue as to what that is, right? One, one would be just this geometry question. I still don't understand this commensurability of the diagonal. Oh, I don't want to try to demonstrate that. That's down back in book ten, I guess. Euclid, right? On book ten. Yeah, but what you find out about the side of a square and the diagonal, right?

[21:31] Is you can't take any line, no matter how small you make the line, that would measure both of those. It's impossible to. I'm sorry. Try this again. Take one side. If you take any side of a square, right? Right. Sure. And you take the diagonal of the square, right? You can't find a line, no matter how small you make it, that would measure both of those. And what do you mean by measure?

[21:54] Then that would go evenly, yeah, fit exactly. Okay. Yeah. No matter how small I make it. Okay. That's kind of amazing thing. You would kind of surprised by that, right?

[22:07] Now, this theorem that I like in in book two, proposition five, book two of Euclid, right? Um, I kind of changed it around a little bit, you know, to with a certain tragedy, as Aristotle says, to arouse more wonder, right? huh? One thing that Euclid is showing by that theorem number five is that you can have a rectangle with less perimeter but more area. Okay.

[22:47] In other words, you and I could fence off a rectangle, right, for our kids to play in. And I got more room for my kids to play in than you do, but use less fence than you did. I guess you know the legend is said that the crooked geometers of ancient times, right, they would buy and sell land by perimeter, and so you're getting a piece of land with more perimeter.

[23:19] Yet a smaller piece of land than I got. Into a rectangle as I'm using rectangle now to include square as well as oblong, right?

[23:31] Okay. Now sometimes you use rectangle for an oblong as opposed to a square. But using rectangle in the broad sense, which is you know quadrilateral with four right angles, it's possible to have more perimeter but less area. Isn't that kind of contrary to what you expect? I see. Yet Euclid's shows

[24:01] in that theorem that a square with the same perimeter always has more area, and the closer rectangle comes to the same perimeter, the closer it comes to a square, the more area it has. In fact, the difference in area is always the square of the difference in the what?

[24:28] Length of the sides, huh? Let me just exemplify that. I'm going to try to prove the theorem, the beautiful theorem. But let's just exemplify it here.

[24:42] You see, you have a square five by five, so perimeter is what twenty, right? Right. Five, five, five, twenty, right? Okay. Now, if you depart a little bit from the square, it runs a little bit longer. Let's say four and six. Your perimeter is still what twenty, right? Okay. Now, if you depart even more from the square, and you have us say three by seven, your perimeter is still what what twenty?

[25:20] And now you go even further. Away from the square and you get two by eight, your perimeter is still 20, okay. But notice you're descending. The area here is 25. Here it's dropped to 24. Here it's dropped to 21. Here it's dropped to what? 16, right? So using the same fence amount of fence to surround this area, right? But this guy's got only 16 feet square feet. This guy's got 25, right?

[25:52] You see? Now the difference between five and six, or five and four, either one is one, and one squared is one. That's the difference in area, right? The difference between seven and five, or three or five, either one is two, and two squared is four, and that's the difference between the two. See? The difference between eight or two and five is three, and three squared is nine, and that's the difference, right?

[26:21] So it's a beautiful theorem, right? But you'll show that it'll differ by the square and the difference in the fence. So you can have the same perimeter and what? More area. See? But then you realize because of that difference, right? You could actually have more perimeter and less area. Let's take a simple example here. Let's say you have one that's two by ten. Well, now the perimeter is what?

[26:52] 24. 24. So it has more perimeter than the square, right? The area is two by ten or 20. So it has more perimeter than this, but less what? Area. Yeah. That's contrary to what we'd expect, right? See? This is a beautiful thing. And of course, yeah, something like this in modern mathematical science and nature, as the father of modern physics. said, I mean, Max Planck. He says when he discovered the quantum, right?

[27:31] He believed and he still believes that the simpler a mathematical law is, right, the more extensive it is, right? Okay. So the more things you can deduce from it, right, the simpler it is. It's a little bit anticipated in this sort of thing, right? You see? You cover more area with less what? Perimeter. And it's something like that with words, right? Because as Shakespeare says, brevity is the soul of wit.

[28:06] Brevity is the soul of wisdom. Shortness is the soul of wisdom. So how can that be? How can the wise man doesn't he have more to say than other people? But he says more. With what less words? Why the Bible says in the Sapiential books, the fool multiplieth his words, right? So he says less with more words, right? The wise man says more with less words. That's kind of a paradox, right?

[28:38] Now, of course, you go all the way up to God, and God says it all with one word, right? You see, He says more with less.

[28:49] But it's like this, son, that what you say is to words, about what area is to perimeter. So just as you can contain more area with less perimeter, so it's possible to say more with less what words, huh? I told you when I was at Laval there, and I was going to face the board at one of the things of the department there I was going to face four professors, right?

[29:16] And this is this is just on your coursework, you know, and they're four different courses, right? And one guy I didn't think much of you know, but I just had a course from him, and I thought he'd go back to the course they had the previous semester because uh, you just, you just examined us and we used to stop. So I said, "You know, what are you talking about the last semester?"

[29:39] My cousin said, "I got all here on index card." He used this guy's whole semester, and so I looked over and got down the phrases, you know, and that came in to take it, and the guy said, "Am I going to go back the first semester?" "No." And I snowed him with the index card? Yeah said right, But he could say, you know, with far many fewer words than he had used, he had to say in that course.

[30:14] So. So the wise man is going to say more with fewer. What words? You hear my little poem, huh? What? God the Father said it all in one word. No wonder when that word became a man, he spoke in words so few and said so much. with brevity and soul wit. My little poem. Is the vice curiositas? Is that in large part? Is that when people pursue a knowledge of the singular over the universal?

[31:03] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You see, curiosity in Thomas Curiositas, right? Is the vice opposed to wonder, right? And the curious man is pursuing things that are unimportant and not, you know, it's a disordered desire to know. In other words, right? You know, they want to know things that are not important to know or don't need to know, and so on, right? That's like the singular, mostly. Could be that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[31:34] So I mean, I say every time I go into the supermarket, there you know, there's always magazines there, you know, and Prince Charles really killed Princess Diana. It's most. Or this, you know, one kind of thing you have to know, like that, you know. It's just it's kind of funny sometimes the titles of things they come up with, you know. But I don't know who ex-biting, but they're all there, you know.

[31:54] And then, then there's, uh, and people are curious about other people's private life and so on, you know, want to know it. See, the problem is there's so many things you have to learn before you can really acquire wisdom. That if you don't stick to the straight and narrow, so to speak, you never get. Oh, you never get there, yeah. Yeah. Um.

[32:30] You know, you talk to an historian, right? And you know how they say, you know, they're learning more and more about less and less. Yeah. Remember one time talking to a historian from Worcester State College, and he says, "You know, you go to historical meetings, and they'll say, 'What's your required history again? ' Well, you can't say American history. That's just too vast, right? You know, you can't say 19th century American history.

[32:52] You know, which decade do you work in? No, you know, and what aspect of the decade are you working on? You know, so you could you could spend you know your lifetime doing you know 1870 or something, you know.

[33:08] No. It's wonderful about 1870. You spend your lifetime. Or you know, you get these biographies. You know, of famous men. You know, and people have spent 10, 15 years working on this, the definitive biography of. Henry Clay or somebody like that. Well, if you're curious about this person for some reason, there you know, you know, you might read the book in a day or two, but but spend ten, fifteen years, you know, trying to know the details of Henry Clay's or you

[33:45] could spend the time that way. Yes. So, in order to know something about the soul, though, you know. Yeah. Sometimes it's good to put yourself back in Aristotle's shoes a bit, right? Okay. And just put you know from the proemium right? After premium. You know that wisdom is the best knowledge there is. It's the most desirable knowledge there is, right? Okay.

[34:27] And therefore, you want this knowledge, right? Okay. Now, what's the next thing you do? Yeah. But stop and think for a moment. There's two ways to get knowledge you don't have.

[34:53] One is to discover that yourself, right? The other is to learn it from someone who already has it. If there is someone who already has it, right?

[35:04] And these two possibilities are true for geometry as they are for what? Yeah, for natural philosophy, for ethics, right? Okay. Now, if there is someone who already possesses this knowledge, right?

[35:23] Should I try to discover it all by myself, or should I try to learn from the person who already knows it? What do you think? Try to learn. Yeah. Now, is that reasonable? Is it? Pretty much so. Yeah. But isn't it more glorious to discover it by yourself?

[35:46] So shouldn't I try to discover it by myself? Because it's it's assuming that you actually get there and not fall into a pit, a slimy, muddy pit. Yeah, yeah, that's that's part of it. See. But even if I could discover it by myself, right? Which you know is a question, you know. Okay. Um.

[36:08] Should I do that for everything I don't know? Would I get there as soon as if I, you know, Um. If nobody learns from anybody else, there would be any art or science we develop?

[36:36] See what I mean? Mm-hmm. We don't get very far. So you might say that if there are some who already have looked for the first causes, right? And if they have succeeded in in coming to know them, isn't it a reasonable thing to do to try to learn from them, right? If you didn't want to learn from them, but want to discover it by yourself, wouldn't this be a matter of of that thing we call pride before, huh?

[37:15] Is it? Because is the knowledge which you discovered yourself better than the knowledge you learn from another? It's the same. It's the same answer. Yeah, yeah. You might say there's more honor attached to discovering yourself, right? But you're a lover of honor of knowing, right? Right. You're seeking more honor than knowing. If you seek to discover everything by yourself, because you're not going to get very far in knowing,

[37:56] you're going to have more honor, less knowing. Is it? And so you're a lover of honor more than a lover of knowing. So maybe you should look at those who have been involved in this search for causes before you, right? And if they have, you know, made progress, maybe you should learn from them rather than try to discover it yourself, right? On the other hand, if they have failed, right, Mm-hmm.

[38:28] To achieve the goal, right, maybe then you have some need to try to discover if you can yourself, right? So Aristotle, in in Book One, after the premium, right, will go back and look at what his predecessors said about causes, right, and why they said it, right, and then he will examine whether what they said about causes was sufficient for our purposes, right? And only if he finds it. Insufficient.

[39:04] Will he have to make investigation himself, right? Even in that case, maybe not without their help, right? Maybe he has something to do himself, right? Okay.

[39:18] Aristotle didn't write in geometry because it had already gone pretty far without him, right? You see? Okay. Aristotle does something like this in the politics in the second book of politics, right? Because at the end of the Politics, he's going to talk about the best government, the best city, and he says

[39:44] in talking about the best city and what he thinks is the best city, he doesn't want this to be attributed to vanity in his part, right? He should talk about these things, but that the cities that are actually praised, right, like Sparta and so on, have some defects. he really thinks, right? And even the cities that have been proposed in words, like that of Socrates in the Republic, he thinks they have defects too, right?

[40:10] And that's why he's going to present what he himself thinks, right? But first, he's going to show that the you know what do you think is defective about the secret public? and that's something neglected in the, I think, in the modern philosophers, that they will often say something contrary to what Aristotle said, without recalling what he said and why he said it, and then showing why what he said and why he said it is deficient, right?

[40:45] You know. Of course, now there's many books you can't possibly read them all and do that, right? But I mean, it was kind of mistake in the first place, you know, to to multiply. Yeah. And to to do your own thing, right? Huh? You know. Um. Okay.

[41:16] So, but especially when you get to something like political philosophy or like wisdom, which are the highest parts of the two kinds of philosophy, looking philosophy and practical philosophy, Aristotle is especially concerned with showing that he's not trying to discover something by himself out of vanity, right? This desire for honor, right? But because there really are defects in the thinking of of those who have gone before, huh?

[41:43] That's kind of interesting, right? You get to a man like like Thomas Aquinas, and what does he do, for example, in in logic, right?

[42:06] Does he set aside the works of Aristotle and logic, the father of logic, and set out to write his own logic? Right? No. What he does is to comment on Aristotle's logical works to help us understand them. Right. But because he thinks that Aristotle has many thought out these things, right? Yeah. Thomas, you know,

[42:28] wrote the great commentary there on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, right, which is kind of the standard text. You know theology there at the time, and you know for a number of centuries it was kind of amazing, you know. And and hey, then when Thomas was going to

[42:49] do work in you know theology as a whole there later on, his first thought was to redo the thing on the sentences, right? Oh. And then he started to strike out, you know. And I think he orders things better than than as you know, maybe a little more proportioned to the beginner and so on. But

[43:10] for for the parts of philosophy, for ethics, Thomas didn't try to do much on his own, you know. Yeah. I mean. So. Kind of the the simple question that arises, you know, is

[43:34] given how desirable wisdom is, that's the most desirable knowledge of all, is the most divine. Then the question arises: How do you get it? Right. And and that actually involves a lot more than you realize at first. But he said the very simple answer: Right, there's two ways of getting what you don't know. And one is to learn it from another, and the other is to discover it yourself, right?

[43:56] And then the question is, which which do you do here, right? And he kind of got to decide that first, right? If you can learn it from another. Then to some extent your problems are solved, right?

[44:09] If you read this guy carefully, you know frequently inference and so on. But if you can't learn it from another, then you've got additional problems about how to acquire this knowledge, right? And that'll come up in the second book, starting now. Okay. But but the rest of Book One or Book One after the proemium is really concerned with can we learn it from these guys before, right?

[44:36] Okay. But at the same time, he's going to give you in the rest of Book One something positive to come away with, apart from the negative conclusion, I mean. That the distinction of the kinds of causes that we had in natural philosophy is what

[45:05] sufficient, right? Distinction of the four kinds of causes: matter, form, mover, and end. Okay. So you come away with kind of a when he narrates the opinions and the reasons for the opinions of his predecessors, he raises that question, or you mentioned that second usefulness, of this, right? Not only does it set the stage for examining what they said was sufficient, right? But also we can look at what they said to see if they touched upon any kind of cause other than the four kinds that we we had, right?

[45:40] So you go away from the rest of Book One with the conclusion that there are indeed just these four kinds of causes, right? But that your predecessors have not fully understood them or explored them fully, right? Or sufficiently, right? And then you go on from there, right? Okay. It's

[46:05] kind of interesting, if that's the end of Book One, Book Three now. Give you a book second. Book Three begins with Aristotle talking about how discoveries are made. You know, there's a direct link between the end of Book One, right? That his predecessors have not. You can't say we learned from them, in other words, right? And then how do you how you discover the beginning of Book Three?

[46:31] But in come in between them, Book Two, I said in there. So you try to you know anticipate a bit. What's going on in Aristotle's mind, right? He's very careful writing, you know, and but I'll look a little bit at the Greeks, the early Greeks again, you know, and see what they said about the causes. See a little bit of their their thinking. Hi, this is Lucy.

[46:57] Lucy, good for you. Hi, Lucy. Lucy the redhead? Very power. Very demanding. Come on. she's very demanding. Yeah, she wants in there. She'll tell you about it. Look, the downstairs sounds like, they put their mice down there. What do they do? Yeah, something they like a lot. Yeah, they like to eat cobwebs. Explore. She'll just keep the other cat's not up there. See? Let me down there.

[47:35] Go to my cell and she'll just sit at my door. Yeah, I want in. Yeah, I want in. And then she scratches, kind of like. Yeah. And just keep looking. Me, open the door.

[47:50] Must be good to go through this again. and I'm thinking about it. Yeah, yeah, so the that's great. But you see, they're all looking for causes. you know. you see kind of things. Yeah.

[48:01] I see the wisdom of going over things again and again now. Yeah. yeah. Finally, sink in.