Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
15. Leucippus and Democritus: Determinism, Atoms, the Void and Man as Microcosm; Why Book Two of Wisdom Begins with Truth
Class of 2005-02-24
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7a-wisdom-2005/015-leucippus-and-democritus-determinism-atoms-the-void-and-man/

[0:01] Okay, let's say our little prayer. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angel, strengthen the lights of our minds, ordain and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, and help us to understand all that you have written. Name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. amen. Okay, we've got to look at Leucippus and Democritus, the last two thinkers here.

[0:35] and they share a lot of thoughts apparently together. So we kind of take them together. Kind of strange now that in the Greek fragments, they only have a few on the natural world here from Democritus. Although when Aristotle talks about Democritus, he says that he lived in a greater familiarity with nature than all, and he must have written more. But almost all the fragments are in ethics or domestics or political philosophy.

[1:02] That you know, the first quotes, you know. So let's look at Leucippus here first. Nothing happens at random, he says, but everything comes to be from reason or by reason and by necessity.

[1:23] So he's what we'd say in modern world is a believer in determinism, right? Complete determinism, complete necessity, And perhaps Leucippus and Democritus here are Leucippus in particular is already influenced by the mathematical science of nature. There's an interesting text in I think it's the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says there are four causes, and one is nature, and one is man, right, his will and so on.

[1:57] One is luck or chance, and one is necessity. And of course, nature is a cause you would think is appropriate to natural things and choice and so on to ethics and so on, and luck and chance can be applied in both because neither one of them are 100% achieving their results. But necessity might refer to what you have in geometry, right? It's not nature there; it's not choice.

[2:26] Pythagorean theorem is a matter of necessity, and so someone who's accustomed to this mathematical knowledge could come up with this opinion that all things are what necessary, huh? Now, in modern science, they often state this principle in terms of

[2:51] be past and future, and say the past necessarily determines the what future. And this fact is found in Galileo and Kepler, Newton. And they always quote Laplace there in the 19th century, saying that if you knew the position, the momentum of every particle of the universe at any moment in time, and you had a super calculating mind, you could predict the whole future course of the history of the universe—a complete necessity.

[3:17] Ah, there'd be nothing, nothing at random. Well, you might say that determinism, the principle of determinism as it was called in modern times, which is being stated here already by Leucippus, that that principle was the absolute principle of modern science in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, and to some extent the 20th century until quantum theory in modern science, when Heisenberg formulated the principle of indeterminism. Ah. But the reason for saying that that was the quote absolute principle of modern science is in the oldest part of modern science, which is the most mathematical of the physical sciences.

[4:13] You get this partly from mathematics, but when the other things like biology or psychology or something try to be more scientific, they would think of determinism right away. And one famous work we used to use sometimes in philosophy of science was a book by Claude Bernard, the French physiologist in the 19th century, who made important contributions to physiology and so on. But he also wrote a book called An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine around the 1860s, I think it was.

[4:51] A book which was to encourage biologists to be more scientific. And the book has three parts to it. And the first part is a description of the scientific method in general. The second part is a description of the experimental method in biology in particular. The third part is very concrete with examples from his own research using that method and illustrating it and so on. Now, if you go back to the first part, we're describing the scientific method in particular.

[5:28] I mean, in general, rather. He has a very good understanding, in some ways, of the probable character of the scientific method, ah. And he makes the famous statement that doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method. That no matter how many times a theory or hypothesis has been tested and confirmed, it can still be tested again, right? And may still be what overthrown, right? And if you know a little bit of elementary logic, huh?

[6:08] You know that the confirmation of a scientific hypothesis is not a syllogism. You're saying, you know, if my hypothesis is correct, then there'll be an eclipse of the sun today, right? Well, there is an eclipse of the sun the time I predicted, right? Therefore, my hypothesis is what confirmed. But is that a form of reasoning? A syllogism? You're saying if A is so, then B is so.

[6:40] But B is so. Does it follow necessarily that A is so? You've heard my example in logic, huh? If Burke was dropped dead last night, they say, then I predict you'll be absent from class today. But he is absent from class today. Therefore, he dropped dead. I tell them that's wishful thinking, but it's not logical thinking. See?

[7:16] And notice, huh? Day and night follows from what? The sun going around the what? Earth, right? As well as from the earth turning on its axis, huh? So there could be what? The same prediction made by different hypotheses. And so, if the prediction made by one of those hypotheses comes true, does that mean that hypothesis is the correct one?

[7:46] And Einstein, huh? Says that Newtonian physics had been so phenomenally correct in its predictions that they begin to think it must be true. And one kind of very striking thing, I guess, the 19th century, when they were, you know, always precisings things, they found out that some of the planets didn't exactly go in the paths they should have according to Newtonian physics. But Newtonian physics can't be wrong.

[8:20] There must be planets we don't know about, right? And their mathematics so exactly predict where those planets were. That's how they found some of the last planets. That's shows a amazing thing, right? And so, as Einstein says, some people came to conclusion that Newtonian physics must be the truth, huh? The only truth and nothing but the truth. And then Einstein, the Einstein himself, that the, with the two theories of relativity, show that he could predict the same things that Newton predicted with a different hypothesis.

[8:55] Plus, he could predict some things that Newtonian physics did not predict, right? And then Einstein says, became perfectly clear to them, right, that a scientific theory is never known in the strict sense to be true. The more predictions you make and the more exact they are, the greater probability you might say for your hypothesis. But by the very form of the reasoning, it's not a syllogism. That is to say, the conclusion doesn't follow necessarily.

[9:25] If A is so, then B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, M, P will all be true, and they're all so. It doesn't follow necessarily that A is is what so.

[9:37] Well, Claude Bernard, they say, sees that, right? And so he says, doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method. But despite all that understanding, he says, but you cannot doubt determinism. He says, to doubt determinism would be to doubt science. He says, so he excludes determinism, the principle of determinism. Which is being stated here by Leucippus already. He's excluding that from this doubt that he sees quite correct in the fallacies.

[10:13] And in the 20th century, it's in quantum theory that Heisenberg saw this consequence. and so he formulated the principle of indeterminism, and this was quite a shock to the physicists. And the this was part of what was called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, because it was situated around Niels Bohr at Copenhagen and people like Heisenberg who were very close to Niels Bohr. And you know, you get all kinds of descriptions of the of the big meeting of the physicists from around the world, the famous ones, at the Solvay Congress in 1927, I guess it was.

[10:58] And Einstein didn't want to go along with the rejection of what determinism, huh? So Einstein would come and would present what we call thought experiments, right? Trying to break down the Copenhagen interpretation. And Bohr would stay up at night, you know, and come back next day and refute Einstein's objection, right? And finally, Einstein produced his final objection at the conference, and it was quite, you know, convincing to everybody there.

[11:29] And they have actually seen a photograph of Einstein and Bohr leaving that session, right? Einstein walking out, kind of, you know, kind of cocky a little bit, always, you know, and and Bohr's, you know, kind of walked up, looking kind of worried, you're like, you know, Einstein's fighting. Well, Bohr would stay up, of course, another night, huh? And he discovered a a mistake in Einstein's argument, a mistake that was due to overlooking the applications of the relativistic theory itself, Einstein's own theory.

[12:04] Well, that was the last time Einstein publicly tried to what overcome it, huh? You see, but shows you how strong entrenched that thing was, right? So even if if Heisenberg is right and and and this is not true, you could say that Leucippus here is stating what was the absolute principle, right, of modern science in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, huh? That when they try to make something like biology say more scientific, right, the thing they saw as being indispensable is this determinism, huh?

[12:40] Or the same way, like in psychology, right? When Freud or someone like that is trying to make psychology more scientific, right? What they see as fundamental is determinism, right? And kind of an obvious example of that is dreams, right? See, now if anything seems to be not by necessity. And not by reason; it's some of the dreams we have. And my cousin Donald used to have these crazy dreams, and he'd tell them to us in the morning, and we'd laugh about them.

[13:16] I remember one dream, you know, where he was being chased by a tiger. He's running away to escape from the tiger, and so on. And he finally runs down one street, and it's a dead end, no place to go, right? So he turns around to face the tiger, right? As the tiger comes up, the tiger says, "How would you like to buy a raffle ticket?"

[13:41] So we laughed and laughed about that. see, There's a reason why you dreamt that last night, huh? You had to dream that last night, right? And it tells us something about you. You see, so it's kind of like a working, you know, principle there, right? Huh? You don't dream simply at random and by chance. And of course, there is sometimes something in our dreams. It does tell something about us, right?

[14:13] And but you can see that what Freud is saying, even something apparently irrational and contingent as a dream, if it's going to be scientific, you know, psychology, it's got to have determinism, even what there.

[14:30] Aristotle will reject this idea of determinism. We'll see some of that later on in the sixth book and in the ninth book of Wisdom, right? But insofar

[14:49] as the natural world is concerned, Aristotle will be doing so partly by his understanding of the potency or ability of matter. It's interesting that when Heisenberg rejected it, he said that quantum theory introduced a version of the potency that Aristotle talked about. So

[15:10] again, here you have sometimes in history what I call a spiral, right, as opposed to a circle, where you come back to the same place but at a different level of experience. So let's say in the ancient Greeks, there they began, like we saw a little bit in in Empedocles especially in Anaxagoras, the only kind of change is change of place. Only gradually they realize another kind of change.

[15:35] And that same thing takes place in the level of more particular experimental science, where change of place seemed to be the only kind of change, and then you get to quantum theory, then you begin to force to see there's other kinds of change in the world. And so, same way here, you begin with this determinism, then you give it up at a different level, maybe of experience.

[15:58] Let's turn now to these fragments of the Democritus, and. These are the ones that are dealing with the natural world, but I have other interesting ones that he's dealing with ethics and domestics and so on. What did he say, Democritus, you shouldn't, you shouldn't generate children. You don't know what you are going to get. He says, you should adopt children. Kind of a rationalist. It's like a modern novelist, doesn't he?

[16:31] Take what the good Lord sends you, right? Yeah. Moderns don't want to. They call them designer babies. Yeah, yeah, it's the same idea. Yeah, but for him, not having all that technology, the idea was, you don't generate you don't know what you're going to get anything, you know. You go and you pick one out there that seems to be.

[16:51] But other interesting fragments like there is one where he says, "Don't try to understand everything," he says, "lest you become ignorant of everything." That would be a good good

[17:06] advice to the moderns, right? We try to understand everything, and we end up understanding nothing. Now, sweet exists by custom, the bitter by custom, the warm by custom, the cold by custom, color by custom. None of these things really exist. None of the sense qualities, huh? What truly exists are the atoms and the what? Empty.

[17:37] Now, this is very common among the modern philosophers and even the modern scientists to say that these sense qualities don't really exist, and just the way they appear to us, or something of that sort.

[17:59] This could be also influenced by mathematical studies, right? Because in mathematics, there is no what sense qualities, huh? It's interesting. In mathematics, there is no substance either, and no purpose. So, if you are accustomed to think of the world mathematically, and this is the only way that wants to think about the world, then the world seems to have no sense qualities, no substance, and no purpose. Just like the way the moderns kind of think, yeah.

[18:43] But now, what truly exists are the atoms, he says, and the empty, huh? Now, let's look at that from. Let's look at the word atom. Now we have two common words in even modern science in English now that come from that same root, T-O-M. We have the word atom.

[19:07] You have the word anatomy. Okay. In both of those words, you have the root T O M. Right. What does that mean in Greek? Huh? T O M.

[19:25] What means? Okay. But now the prefix in these two words is different, right? In anatomy, "ana" means up. So anatomy means cut up, huh? And so Aristotle's biological works, more particular ones, where he cut up animals and looked their parts to try to figure out the order of them and so on. He. calls that in Greek, that's anatomy. That's how you get through it, right? Okay. So if you take a class in anatomy in a college or medical school or something, you will do what?

[20:11] Cut things up. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But now the prefix a is just the negative, right? So active means literally I'm cut, okay. Just like amoral means without morals, right? See, agnostic, I suppose, huh? A is a negative, and gnosis, not knowing, right? You see. Um.

[20:40] But in the account that we have from Aristotle of how he arrived at the idea there be atoms, it has a sense not only of uncut but uncuttable, right? Okay. Now Democritus apparently did what Einstein would call a thought experiment, right? An experiment conducted that is to say, in imagination, right? Which helps you to clarify certain things. And so Democritus says, imagine the bodies around us, our own body for that matter, cut up in every way it can be cut.

[21:21] Right? Okay. What would you have left? Well, you couldn't have nothing, right? Pieces. Because, as Einstein would say, you can't cut something up into nothing, right? Can you? Because the thing is cut up into what it's made out of, right? So if when the bodies around us, our own body, was cut in every way they could be cut, if you had nothing left, then these things would have been made out of nothing, which is obviously absurd, right?

[21:54] So therefore, when these bodies are cut in every way they can be cut, there must be something uncut left over, right? But given that this is what's left, right? Uncut when you cut it in every way you can cut it, these are uncuttable, right? Okay.

[22:16] Now there are some passages in Aristotle when he discusses this position of Democritus, where the atoms seem to have some size, right? They're very small, but they can have a shape and things of this sort, so they have some size. But you just can't cut them, right? Um. There are some passages in Aristotle where he almost speaks as if the atoms were of Democritus were like points, huh?

[22:50] Well, it's interesting, huh? If you're in in mathematics, huh? In pure mathematics, as you might call it, in geometry, the only thing uncuttable is the point. A line, as long as it has any length, it can always be cut again, right? So you're thinking of quantity as we do in pure math. Then you say, well, the uncuttables would be points, huh?

[23:17] But there are other places where Democritus speaks as if the atoms have some kind of shape and so on, and if they have some size, and therefore maybe he's kind of anticipating something that Aristotle himself will say, and that is that natural things can't have just any size, right? That they have a size that is connected with their nature,

[23:43] but that's something other than just considering quantity abstractly, right? Could be cut forever, right? And the only thing that's uncuttable would be a point. So there might have been a little hesitation in his mind, you know, how to understand the atoms, huh? But basically, arrived at them through this thought experiment. Imagine your body and every other body in the world cut up and cut every direction and angle the thing could be cut at, right?

[24:11] You must be left with some uncut things, right? And that's what atoms mean. Now, of course, what we call the atom in modern science should not have been called an atom then. The atoms, what we call atoms, were uncuttable by chemical means, but then there are other means of cutting them that we discovered, right? So as Heisenberg said, if you want to compare the thinking of Democritus with us, don't compare what we call an atom with what he called an atom, right?

[24:43] It'd be better to compare our, say, our elementary particles with what he called atoms, or if there's something smaller than that, right? Compare that to the atoms, huh? Okay. But this word "atom" was taken over by some of the early modern scientists and became familiar, right? It's taken over from Democritus.

[25:07] Now, what about the empty, huh? Well, I think we mentioned before when we talked about Empedocles saying the empty does not exist. But Democritus said the empty existed, and apparently the reason he gave was that bodies couldn't move unless there was some empty space for them to move around in. If nothing was empty, we'd all be packed completely tight, like sardines in a can, or your clothes in your suitcase when you had to sit in the suitcase to close it, right?

[25:44] There would be no give at all, and so in order to save the reality of change, he thought there had to be the empty. But what is the empty, right? Well, it's nothing, right? So now you're saying that nothing is, which is absurd, says Empedocles, huh? But Democritus seems to be willing to admit a contradiction that nothing is, in order to save what change? And all the way down through history, men trying to understand change, like we saw in Heraclitus a bit, right?

[26:25] To hold on to reality, change, they will sometimes deny the impossibility of something both being and what not being. Okay. The next little quote here from Democritus: "Man is a little but cosmos, a little universe." The Greek word would be like make one word out of that: micro, small, right? Cosmos. That's a very interesting saying, and even people other than Democritus might agree that there's a lot to that.

[27:13] And if you look at the material world and then the immaterial world, which world am I in? I got a foot in the material world, my body, obviously, with my understanding and will. I've got a foot in the what immaterial world, right? The stone is only in the material world, and the angels are really in the immaterial world. But man has got a foot in both: his body and what soul.

[27:44] And sometimes, you know, when they're talking about the incarnation and why it was appropriate for God to assume human nature, right? They'll refer to this idea that man, in a way, is a microcosm. So God is taking, in a sense, the cosmos back to himself, because man is a little bit of the material world and a little bit in the immaterial world, and not just purely material or purely what immaterial.

[28:17] That's kind of interesting, huh? To see the long life of this. Of course, other ways, I suppose, man is a little universe, huh? Like in the third book on the soul, when Aristotle's got through talking about sensing, right, and understanding. Well, by sensing, I can what take on the colors of all things around me, right, and the sounds and the smells of things around me. And by understanding, I can take on the natures of all things around me.

[28:50] So he says, the soul is in some way all things. Now that's a microcosm, right? It's kind of a universe in miniature. And some of these people, you know, they talk about, oh, gee, we as man is only a tiny part of the universe, you know, and so on. But, but yet we have a science called cosmology, you know, where man takes in the whole universe, right, inside of himself, right, inside of his mind.

[29:16] So, a lot of truth is to man being a little what universe, a microcosm. Now, in this last one, in a kind of piquant way, he emphasizes the great truth that man is the most imitative of the animals, right? And we imitate what nature, right? Now, sometimes the reason why we say we imitate nature is that our knowledge begins our senses, and we sense these things, and then we what

[29:54] make something like them, right? So the sun is too bright; I get under the the tree there, at least in the. summer and got a little bit of what protection, right? Or it's raining hard to get under the tree, and you know, don't get rained on so much. Well, then I make an umbrella that goes up over me like that. I can walk around my tree over me.

[30:15] But I imitate these things, right? But the other reason is that our mind is what made to the image and likeness of God. So our mind, even when it hasn't seen something yet in nature, right, sometimes makes something like what is already out in nature, and then we find it later on in nature, right? I have a collection of articles from Scientific American there in my office, and one article is about how the birds fly, right?

[30:45] And the biologists are pointing out that there are some things about how the birds fly that we didn't notice in the birds until after we succeeded in making an airplane. Then realized we put in the airplane something that was already in the bird, but didn't realize it was in there. Okay, so that's that's interesting, huh? It's kind of funny that this one quote that they often do for Einstein, you know, where he says the most difficult and the most puzzling thing to understand about the universe is that it should be understandable.

[31:18] But if the universe is the product of understanding, right, and we're as Anaxagoras says, every mind is somewhere the greater and the lesser, and is not as puzzling as it is Einstein that the universe should be what understandable, but they're kind of amazed that it is.

[31:37] But with the truth, often becomes clear. That's a little bit of what Aristotle does in Book One of Wisdom. After the proemium that we saw,

[31:56] he recounts what his predecessors said about the causes and why they said them right. Partly for reason to see if what they said was sufficient, right? We're not going through all his critique of these people, but also to see if they touched upon any cause other than the four kinds of causes that we spoke of: matter, form, mover, and what end. So the one comes away not only at the negative conclusion that his predecessors have not gone all the way in knowing the causes, but also an affirmative conclusion that there seems to be only these four kinds of causes.

[32:39] And in the second book of Wisdom, among other things, we'll see that there are reasons to think that within each of these kinds of causes, there are the first cause. Okay.

[32:53] So let's put ourselves now in Aristotle's position on, you know, they say, put on his shoes or his feet, you know. And you say, well,

[33:09] we know from the proemium to wisdom that this is a godlike knowledge, right? It's the most desirable knowledge there is, right? But also, it's about things that are difficult for man to know.

[33:26] So, although it's very desirable, it's not easy to obtain. Now, there's two ways to obtain a knowledge that you don't but have. One is to discover it or find it yourself, and the other is to learn it from somebody who already has it, if there is such a person, right?

[33:52] But the critique of these early philosophers, right, indicates to Aristotle that he can't simply learn wisdom from those guys. He has to, to some extent, discover it himself, right?

[34:12] Maybe with their help in some way, right? But nevertheless, he has to make some kind of discovery himself. Now, at this point, with my pygmy mind compared to Aristotle,

[34:32] what would be the next thing to do? See, what would occur to your mind? Right, you have this very desirable knowledge, right? But those before you who tried to get this knowledge didn't get there exactly, right?

[35:00] So, what would be the next step to take? Kind of good to stop and think a little bit about that, and and see what what Aristotle did, but you think would be the next thing to do, right?

[35:19] Back to nature. Well, yeah, yeah. But suppose you know, take a take a simple example here. Suppose you knew it was extremely desirable to get to Boston, right? Suppose you knew that, okay?

[35:41] But you know, secondly, that all those who before you tried to get to Boston had failed to get there. What would be the question to ask and try to answer? Why didn't take it? Yeah, but. You're not primarily interested in understanding why they didn't get there, and getting there yourself. Yeah. Yeah. How do you get to Boston, right?

[36:15] You see, that'd be kind of a natural question, right? Um, how do you get to wisdom? What's the way of getting to wisdom, right? Want to use that concrete word the Greeks like to use? What would be the road to take to wisdom as opposed to Boston, right? Do you see? That's what it kind of occurred to my mind if I kind of stopped and think. I don't know what's it, you know.

[36:42] The heaven knowledge is very desirable, right? But you can't simply learn it from those who have pursued it before you, right? Because they didn't get there. But you realize how much more desirable this knowledge is than the other. Well, how do you get there? What's the road to take, right?

[37:08] Aristotle doesn't really put aside that question. In fact, he does take it up, right? But maybe not fully until book six. I say, well,

[37:28] is there something else that should come before this? He's reviewed what went before. Yeah. Yeah. Examine his own experience. Yeah. But is there some question that needs to be asked and and tried to answer it before you ask?

[38:05] What road should we try to follow to wisdom or in wisdom? What is it? What is that road? No, what is wisdom? Well, we kind of answered that a bit in the in the premium, right? You have an idea of what wisdom is is in some way, but seeming at the kind of knowledge it is, right? And we know that there's men before us who have wondered and pursued this knowledge, but they didn't get there, right?

[38:34] Okay. Well, what one thing, as I say, that might occur to you is is is the question already asked, right? Was any question before that? Okay.

[38:50] Now another question is related to that one. It's a well. I can't simply learn from these guys. I got to discover it myself. So, how do you discover things, right?

[39:09] Test experiment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, when you turn to the beginning of Book Three, Aristotle will talk about how discoveries are made. But that's beginning of Book Three. We got a whole book here in between, you know.

[39:29] Um. So there's two things that occur to my mind, right? Um, how do you discover something? And and what roads do I take in wisdom, right? Okay. Aristotle does take up those questions, right? But he seems to take them up and answer them later on. So, what's this book two doing here? It's kind of funny in the Greek text there. You know, they call book one in Greek kind of they use the same letters, the alphabet.

[40:11] So book one would be called book alpha, and book two beta, and so on. Instead of calling this book two in in the Greek, they call it alpha the lesser. Kind of so the lack of appreciation for it, you know. Well,

[40:38] there is a more general question, right? That would seem to come before the question of what is the road to follow in wisdom, right?

[40:51] Because you could ask a question like that in geometry, right? Or you could ask a question like that in natural philosophy, or a question like that in in ethics, right? You know, what road should we follow in geometry? What road should we follow in natural philosophy, right? What road shall we follow? What in ethics, huh? What road should we follow in politics? What road should we follow in wisdom, right?

[41:22] Okay. Just like there's a question like you know, what road should I take to to Boston? Like the question, what road should I take to Springfield? What road should I take to New York? Right. You see similarity to these questions, right? Okay. What means? Yeah, yeah. But notice, um,

[41:51] how do you find the road to Boston or the road to Springfield or the road to New York? Where do you start? Yeah. Yeah. Because. That's a difference from from somebody else. Okay, but in our society,

[42:09] you get a map, right? Okay. Now, if you don't know how to read a map, you got a problem, right? Okay. Um. So the question, how to read a map,

[42:24] in a way, is before the question. What is the road to Boston? What is the road to Springfield? What is the road to New York? Right. And if I can answer the question, um, how how do you read a map, right? Then I can. That's going to open up the way for me to what find not only the road to Boston, but the road to Springfield, the road to New York, the road to my house, and all kinds of roads, right?

[42:52] You see. So. Maybe Aristotle, you know, was wiser than us, and he looked before what we saw, right? And he saw that before the question of what is the road to follow in wisdom, right? Or what is the road to follow in geometry or in natural philosophy and so on? Is the question how do you determine? How should you determine the road to follow? Right. You see, a more general question.

[43:26] Okay. Now, some might say, "Well, but isn't that general question and its answer presupposed to determining the road to follow in geometry as well as the road to wisdom?" Right. Is there any reason why that more general question, right, would be appropriate here in second book of wisdom?

[44:05] I mean, in terms of the map, you might say it's kind of indifferent, right? Is it the guy who wants to get to Boston who should figure out how to read a map, or is it the guy who wants to get to New York who's figured it out? Well, it doesn't seem to belong to one guy more than another, right? Okay.

[44:23] So, it's a man who wants to know the road to follow in geometry. The man wants to know the road to follow in ethics. So the man wants to know the road to follow in natural philosophy. The man wants to know the road to follow in wisdom. Is there any reason why one of these guys more than another should consider how you determine the road to follow?

[44:50] Yes all of them What? Well, it's relevant to all of them in a sense, isn't it? Right. But notice, huh? The man who teaches you how to read a map is going to direct the man who wants to get to Boston, and the man wants to get to Springfield, the man who wants to get to New York, and so on. Right. He's directing all those guys, isn't he?

[45:20] Okay. So there is one over the whole thing. Yeah. There is one knowledge over everything. Yeah. Yeah, the wise man, right? Remember the sixth attribute of the wise man in the second reading, right? And he knows what was it. He directs others, right? He's the most architectonic, architectural, so to speak. He's the chief artist, huh? So the man who considers

[45:55] how. The road of each reasoned out knowledge should or should not be determined. Since the same knowledge of opposites, that man in a way is directing everybody, and it's most appropriate for the wise man, therefore, to talk about that, right? Even though it isn't relevant to anybody, right? Okay. Um. Now Aristotle in the end of book two, the fifth reading, right? The fifth reading will be about how the road of each reasoned out knowledge, whether it be geometry or natural philosophy or ethics or wisdom itself, how it should and should not be determined.

[46:39] That's what that fifth reading is about, right? And that's in a way presupposed, right? To answering what is the road to follow in in wisdom. Do you see that? It's appropriate for the wise man to do that because he's the one who more than anybody else directs everybody else. Do you see that? Okay. Um.

[47:09] Now Aristotle is very brief in that fifth reading, and he talks about this also in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, right? And to some extent, he's a little more expansive there, right? Even though it's more appropriate to wisdom here. Um, I don't know if you ever had a chance to read Boethius's De Trinitate there, but in there Boethius distinguishes natural philosophy and mathematics and first philosophy or wisdom.

[47:43] He talks about the roads of these things, right? And he quotes Aristotle from the Nicomachean Ethics. Thomas has a famous commentary on that. Um, kind of expansion what Aristotle does later on in book six here, which distinguishes the sciences and their their methods. And it's interesting. He refers to the ethics rather than the. It's kind of because it's a little more concrete, a little more particular there, a little more expansive, you know.

[48:13] But it's really, nevertheless, what's most proper to the wise man, right? Okay. So notice you're not mistaken in thinking, hey, before I can acquire wisdom, I have to know what road to follow in wisdom. But before I can really answer that question, I have to really have answered the general question: How should one determine the road to follow? Not just in wisdom, but in any science, right?

[48:42] Do you see that? And that, in a sense, is appropriate to the wise man. Does that make sense? So I'm trying to sneak up on the guy, you know, from what occurred to my mind, and then he says, "Well, this is before that, right? Okay. " You know the famous story of the. The cat that was terrorizing the mice, and we're going to do about this, you know?

[49:05] And finally, some bright mouse says, "Well, we'll hang a bell on the cat's neck, right?" And then when he comes, we hear the bell ringing. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! And then someone says, "Yeah, who's going to put the bell on the cat's neck?" You see, you know, before that, you know, there is like a sticking before, right? You see, and

[49:27] yeah, he's a wiser, right? He's a little wise right He's no more thoughtful. Okay, now we say that general question presupposed to determining the road of any reason out knowledge is at the end of book two, right? Well, something before that Aristotle says, right? Okay,

[49:58] and in the very first reading. Right. Okay. Now, what is that? See something before that? Be appropriate for the wise man to talk about. Somebody heard to say this and so on.

[50:59] Well, what Aristotle is going to take up in the first reading is this: how man is towards knowing truth. Okay. Well, in the fifth reading, right? You might say, "Why use the word truth?" Right? You'd say,

[51:35] "How should the road to truth in any reasoned out knowledge be determined?" Okay. How man is towards knowing truth, and how should the road to truth in any reason out of knowledge be determined? Which of those questions is, or how, is more general?

[52:13] First. Yeah. Yeah. And is there reason not only for seeing that before you see the second one, right? But also a reason why the wise man, rather than the natural philosopher or the geometer, or the moral philosopher or the political philosopher, should answer that question: How man is towards knowing truth?

[52:51] Yeah. Very beginning. So. Aristotle, actually, it's in the beginning of the second reading that he'll give the reason why it belongs to the wise man, right? Why it's appropriate for the wise man to take up this very general question. He'll direct everything else. Yeah, that's part of it. Yeah, but also he'll he'll point out, beginning the second reading, that the consideration of truth belongs most to all the wise man.

[53:28] Okay, You can get very good reason for that. Um. Now, notice that this in a sense is more general than that because is the only truth that we know is the truth we can reason out. No, sense knowledge. Okay. Um. If all truth was gotten by reasoning to it, what would we reason from? Right. Um. See, we reason to a conclusion, which is a statement from what other statements, right?

[54:16] Okay. Now let's let's go back to the our teacher here, Democritus, right? And Democritus says that we imitate what nature, right? And so Thomas Aristotle and Thomas will say often that art imitates nature, or even more generally, that reason imitates nature, right? Now,

[54:47] what gives rise to a dog in the natural world? Another dog. Yeah. Another dog. Two dogs, right? Okay. What gives rise to a cat? Two horses. No, two cats give rise to a cat, right? What gives rise to a horse? Horses. Yeah. Um. So what gives rise to a statement?

[55:15] Two statements. Right. Yes. See, see, you're imitating nature, right? Huh? Dogs give rise to a dog, cats to a cat, horses to horses, and statements to statements. Right. It's kind of a famous passage there in the British astrophysicist, where he is. Eddington, right? You know, he's talking about you know the equations of the scientists and so on, right? And all these numbers he has and so on, right?

[55:42] And he put numbers in. What do you grind out? More numbers, you know. If you add two numbers, what do you get? Numbers. Yeah, you see, you see how it's imitating nature, right? Okay. So. If you come to know that a statement is true, you're going to have to come to know it through other what statements, right? And so, if you didn't know any statements to be true before you reasoned, you'd have nothing to what reason from, right?

[56:14] Okay. So, man's is towards knowing truth. That's kind of a broader perspective on on the mental state of man than just his reasonable knowledge, right? You can see how this is more general than that, right? Just as this, in some ways, more general than what road should I follow in geometry? What road should I follow in in wisdom, right? Do you see that? Okay. Because I say Aristotle gives reasons why the consideration of truth belongs most of all to wise man.

[56:48] In the beginning of the second reading. Um. Now, um. Perhaps this general question too is related to the other thing we said, right? We said there's two ways of coming. You know what you don't know. One is to learn it from a man who already knows it. The other is to discover it, right? Well, they're talking about different ways of coming to know the truth, aren't you, right?

[57:21] So maybe as a background to that, this of how man is towards knowing truth is is relevant, right? Why there should be those two ways of coming to know, right? Do you see that? Okay.

[57:38] See how smart Aristotle is, right? Kind of already on the road to wisdom, just to ask the question. Yeah, yeah. And these are the main things wisdom is about, but they're important things that wisdom does talk about, huh? Okay.

[57:57] Um.