Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
21. Metaphysics III, Reading 1: Tying and Untying the Knots — Doubting Well and How Discoveries Are Made
Class of 2005-03-17
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7a-wisdom-2005/021-metaphysics-iii-reading-1-tying-and-untying-the-knots-doubting/

[0:00] They'll come back. Okay. They'll wander back. They'll wander down. Now we got to situate ourselves again here. Unfortunately, we can go back to my likeness of. go to Athens. To the no, to Romeo and Juliet. Oh, that would be lovely. Remember, I was saying the the first division of of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is into what two parts? Two parts of prologue and the rest of the play.

[0:31] Yeah, the prologue and not the rest of the play, the play, right? The play. Yeah. The prologue and the play, right? Okay. Now the prologue is very short, but it prepares the way for the what play, right? It situates you with respect to the play. Now, like that, in every work of Aristotle's, just about, you have a proemium, as it's called, right, and then the main part of the work, right?

[0:57] Okay, the treatise, as they call it, the drawing out. Mm-hmm. I mentioned how the verb has a proemium, right? If you look at the Latin, which they mistranslate sometimes introduction. It's not introduction; it's a proemium. Then you have, I guess, the chapters there, you know, which are the the the treatise itself, right? Okay. Do you see that? Yeah. Okay. Now, in the rest of Book One, right, and in Book Two that we just kind of finished looking at, I didn't make any comparison to Romeo and Juliet today.

[1:32] Okay. But now we can use something that we used before, where Aristotle says that the philomythos is something of a philosopher, and the comparison he made between the philomythos and the philosopher in the proemium, right, was that the philomythos is filled with what wonder, right? He wonders about the myths, right, and

[2:05] that the child's white-eyes, listening to daddy reading the story. what's going to happen to the red riding hood. And in that respect, he's like the philosopher, because the philosopher wonders, but in a more universal way and deeper way. But now, muthos as you mentioned, I think before, means originally myth, and then in general story, and then it takes on the precise meaning of plot. Mm-hmm. And it seems to me you could say the lover of plots is, in a way, philosopher.

[2:40] Okay. Now Aristotle divides plot sometimes into two, sometimes into three. He praises Homer for teaching the Greeks that a plot should have a beginning, a middle, and end. But sometimes Aristotle divides a plot into two: the tying of the knot or the tying of the knots. And then the what Untying, right, and it's that comparison I want to make to that likeness, huh? That just as a plot has two parts, huh?

[3:16] The tying of the knot or knots and the untying of the knot or knots. So books three through fourteen, all the remaining books now, are like a plot. In that, in book three, he ties all the main knots of wisdom,

[3:36] and then in books three through fourteen, he unties those knots. Okay. What he does in book three is to raise the main questions of wisdom, pertaining to wisdom, of which there are about twenty-three.

[3:58] And there are questions that are disputed questions, you might say, that thinkers think differently or give different answers to. And there's reason to think this and to think something else, right? So they're all kind of problems, right? And so you hear reasons on one side, reasons on the other side. Your mind is kind of tied into a knot, as he says. And then, as I say, starting in book three, he'll start to what untie the knots, huh?

[4:32] Okay. Now, usually in the play, of course, you spend more time tying the knots and untying them. Here, you spend maybe less time untying them. I mean, tying them, you do untying them, huh? Okay.

[4:53] Um, but an interesting comparison, I think, too, in this regard, Aristotle is talking about the the the poet, the makers of plots. He says that the young poet or the imperfect poet, they're better at tying the knots than untying them. And that's even more true in philosophy. Most philosophers can tie themselves into a knot and maybe other people into a knot, but they can't untie them. And that's what we admire in in Aristotle, especially, in Thomas too, that they can untie these knots, huh?

[5:34] Um, it's another beautiful comparison between the two. Um, now this kind of is a footnote. Some might say, well, in your comparison to Romeo and Juliet, you left out the rest of book one and book two.

[5:55] And if you want to make a certain comparison, when you read one of these. Thorough editions of Shakespeare and like the art of Shakespeare, something like that has a lot of notes. You know, most of which aren't of too much value, but they pick up a lot of odd little things. And one thing they notice about Shakespeare's plays and so on is that usually there is some antecedent for the plot by somebody else, and Shakespeare will take the plot over, and then he'll maybe change a few things and improve the characters and so on, and make a masterpiece out of what was kind of dull or unexciting.

[6:42] Ah, and if you go back and read the original one, you see how Shakespeare has improved it. That in a sense, the other guy has kind of marred the plot, or or not characters. That's kind of interesting from from a practical point of view of writing stories. My brother Richard was an actor. He was a leading actor in high school, and he was in numerous performances and so on.

[7:10] Interest in the stage, um, and he tried to write some stories and so on. He had some of these books like you know, 101 plots used and abused. Every one of the books he had on himself. Well, there is

[7:31] something like that, right? That Shakespeare had read these earlier stories, where the rudiments of the plot are there, right? But you see how Shakespeare has improved it; just done the right thing, you know. And how the characters suddenly blossomed; there was there was kind of you know folded in and had no no particular piquancy to them, and how they suddenly unfold in Shakespeare, you know. Well, in a sense Aristotle is doing that in Book What One after the premium, because he criticizes the what thinking of the thinkers beforehand.

[8:03] He's not the first guy to have looked for the first causes, but these other guys have kind of marred the job, or they haven't quite arrived, right?

[8:12] And the other thing you would be analogous to in Shakespeare to this to the second book now, right? Someone might say, you know, well, people who have written these plots before have marred them. How do you write a good plot? You know, what is fiction all about? And you find Shakespeare, you know, like in Hamlet, especially where he gives his views about fiction should be. He really understands what it should be and how it should proceed, and so that's a little bit like he does in Book Two, right?

[8:46] So anyway, books three through fourteen, which are the remaining books of wisdom, they are proportional. The division of them is proportional to the division now of the play from beginning to the end, into the tying of the knots in Book Three. In the untying of the knots in books three, or four rather, through fourteen, you see the person there.

[9:16] Okay, that's one thing. Just get a kind of a bird's eye view of what's going to come up. Now, a second thing here that's kind of leading into the first reading here.

[9:28] The first reading is most of all about how discoveries are made. Okay, and how discoveries are made. We have something more difficult than geometry. Okay, how discoveries are made where men are apt to disagree,

[9:58] and that way it ties up with the. End of Book One. Remember how we said Book One after the premium. You get through the premium, you know what wisdom is aiming at. You know it's the most divine knowledge, right? It's therefore the the best knowledge, the most desirable knowledge, and so on. Now you really want this knowledge, right? Then we said there's two ways of getting what you don't know.

[10:26] One is to learn it from somebody who already knows it. The other is to discover it yourself, right? And if it's someone who already knows it, it's more convenient to learn it from him than try to discover it all by your lonesome self, huh?

[10:49] Now, in the rest of Book One, after the proemium Aristotle recalled what his predecessors had said and then examined its efficiency. And what you see by the end of Book One is that they have not arrived adequately, let alone fully, at the knowledge of the first cause or first causes. They haven't even got an adequate knowledge of what the kinds of causes are, and therefore you must, to some extent, discover these things yourself, right?

[11:28] And what does he talk about in the first reading here of Book Three? How discovery. How to do that? Yeah, how discoveries are made, right? Okay, and he says some very interesting things about how discoveries are made. And

[11:45] what he says about how discoveries are made was taken over by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, and by some of the great physicists in the 20th century, huh?

[11:57] So some people thought that Book Two was just what intertwined by chance, you know, or by some somebody else between Book One and Book Three, because you see. But as Thomas explains, when he gets into the questions of Book Three, the order of the questions is determined by what he said at the end of the second book.

[12:22] In other words, there'll be some questions concerning what is wisdom about, which is necessary to understanding how you should proceed in wisdom. Other questions are about the things themselves, you see, and that the first group of questions I mentioned is before the second one shows that same order, right? So the fifth reading of Book Two explains the division of the questions of Book Three and the order of them, right?

[12:52] But the first reading of Book Two. Which talked about the difficulty of knowing, right, due to the thing, or due to the weakness of our mind, right?

[13:04] And that's the reason why natural philosophy is more difficult than geometry, because of the things you are trying to know, and wisdom is more difficult than geometry because of the weakness of our mind.

[13:18] Well, what he's going to say here about discovery in this first reading, is not so much about discovery in geometry, but in wisdom, or for that matter, natural philosophy. You see that there is a difficulty of discovery there that there isn't in geometry, although it's difficult in either way.

[13:43] But you see, in geometry, before we discover the proofs of these wonderful theorems, for the most part, there are some famous exceptions, but for the most part, we would all guess the same thing. Now, let me give you a simple example of that.

[14:05] Take theorem five here in book one. It says in a triangle if these two sides are equal, then the angles at the bases here will be equal, right?

[14:22] Now, before you see the rigorous proof of that, before you find your discovery for that, what would you guess? You would guess that. Yeah, wouldn't you? Yeah, and even use that theorem to prove, you know, that equilateral triangle, where all three sides are equal, right? That the three angles are equal, right? Even before you use that, which had to prove first to prove this, right? That all these three angles are equal.

[14:52] Wouldn't you guess that? You would have some people guess they'd be equal, some that they're not. Would you? So, for the most part, in geometry, men would not guess differently before they know. You see,

[15:13] there are a few exceptions that are interesting in geometry, but I mean for the most part, right? But in natural philosophy and in wisdom, and in fact, in ethics and political philosophy, men regularly guess differently before they know. In some cases, they don't go any further than their different guesses, right?

[15:34] So that's because the reason why men guess differently is because of the difficulty. One reason is because of the difficulty, right, that natural philosophy has that geometry doesn't have, and the difficulty that wisdom has that geometry doesn't have. Although the cause of those difficulties, we saw. In book two, a different right, okay. But this is kind of Aristotle doesn't say it. He's talking about something that's necessary for discovery in wisdom and in natural philosophy, but not in geometry, right?

[16:10] And that's connected with the greater difficulty of knowing and the greater difficulty of discovery then in wisdom and natural philosophy over geometry. You see, so that's another way it just ties in and presupposes, I should say, book two as well as what book one, right? Okay. Although someone you know not seeing Aristotle sees right, might think you know at the end of book one, let's how do you discover and go to that right?

[16:40] But there might be something about discovery in those more difficult sciences that you don't have to observe in geometry, right? Now, another thing about that too, as Monsignor Dionne taught me, huh? Imagination is very important in discovery, right? Okay. And which science is the closest to the imagination of these three? Math. Yeah, yeah, and that's kind of a sign of that, right? Is the fact that we tend to all guess the same thing about those, right?

[17:22] It's very close to our imagination. Why these natural things, as Heraclitus, the great Heraclitus said, nature loves to hide, right? And we say God, he's the hidden God, right? Ad ... us, but he's truly hidden, right? You see, while the kind was not hidden in that way, you know, playing geometry means superficial, right? It's on the surface of things, right? You know, see, proportion to our mind, yeah, yeah.

[17:51] So we guess by our imagination, and imagination is much more adequate to this. In geometry, in a sense, you have to see in your imagination, you know, and imagination is quite insufficient and actually deficient, right? Especially in wisdom, but also to some extent in natural philosophy. So there are ways then that that book two illuminates book three, right? And the fifth reading illuminates the division of the questions, right?

[18:26] The difference between the questions in reading two and reading three, in our other kind of division, and but the first reading of book two on the difficulty of knowing, right, and other things. Illuminates this first reading here. You see that.

[18:50] So let's look then at the first reading, huh? He says it is necessary. No. It's a strong word, right? Necessary to achieve this goal, right?

[19:09] For the reasoned-out knowledge sought, he's not saying for all reasoned-out knowledge, is he? Because geometry is a reasoned-out knowledge, right? And geometry is the clearest example for us of reasoned-out knowledge,

[19:25] a syllogistic knowledge, and so on. But it's necessary for the reasoned-out knowledge sought, which in this book is wisdom, right? That we go over first those things about which one should first raise questions. Now, what things are those? These are both questions of which some have taken up different positions. So, if there's some question to which the great thinkers before Aristotle have given opposite and different answers, right?

[19:59] There clearly You have a question to be discussed, right? Okay. A disputed question as the Middle Ages are called. Now, when you look at Thomas's works, so many of them are questiones disputatae, right? And you look at the at the famous Summa Theologiae as kind of a contraction of each article is a contraction of a question disputata, right? You know, maybe three or four objections, you know, as opposed to fifteen or twenty, you know, but it's basically the same, same method, right?

[20:32] And also, whatever else has been overlooked. So Aristotle may raise some questions that his predecessors have not explicitly disagreed about, right? About which he has seen, right? But notice he mentions first those that they have given a different answer to, right? Okay.

[20:56] Now he's going to give four reasons here, right? In the next four paragraphs. To doubt well, he says, "Bene dubitari," says in Latin. To doubt well beforehand is necessary for those who wish to discover. Now he's emphasizing the importance of this for discovery.

[21:26] Now, notice the expression there to doubt well, right? Thomas says in the commentary, "To attain well to those things which are truly doubtful." Now, when you see a good reason for thinking it's this way, and a good reason for thinking it's that way, then you are doubting what well, right?

[21:50] Now we had a good example of that in in in our discussion of the great fragment on the mind. Remember that? The second thing that the Anaxagoras said was that the mind is self ruling, right?

[22:05] And I give a good reason to think that that's so. A good sign, at least, of its being true that there is a science whereby the mind directs itself. Namely logic, right? Which I've taught most of my life. So the mind is self ruling, right? There's an art or a science whereby it directs itself, right? But then we learned that the greater mind can't be mixed up with the material world because the ruler must be separated from the ruled.

[22:39] Yes, sir. We see separation in the army, right? That those who command and those who obey must be separated, huh? And we saw, you know, how I'd obey my father like that when he came home, right? I was getting, you know, a bit out of hand with my mother, right? But she was mixed up with us kids, right? With us all day long, right? My father comes home; it's a different story, right?

[23:01] You sit in that chair and you don't move until I take. And my mother would be amazed at this command. But I imagine if the father stayed home all day with the kids, and the mother went out to work, it would be a little bit of the reverse.

[23:20] There seems good reason that the ruler must be separated and distinct from the ruler. How can the mind rule itself? Then it's it's not separated from itself, right? I see. Well, now I am what doubting well, right? See, I have good reasons for thinking that the mind can rule itself, and a good reason to think it can rule itself, right? Okay, and I am doubting well. Now I oppose that to say what Descartes does.

[23:54] Descartes says, "Oh, I've been deceived sometimes, right? " So I am going to doubt everything. Well, is he doubting well? Right? See, it's more an act of the will, right? Than it is an act of reason. Seeing reasons to say it is so and is not so, right? So these are very, you know, important to see what he means by to doubt well.

[24:20] But he's saying to doubt well is necessary for those who wish to discover to uncover something, for the discovery afterwards. Is an untying of the difficulties seen before,

[24:38] as I tried to show you in that great fragment of Anaxagoras. That the untying of that difficulty that we had because of those opposing arguments was the discovery of how the mind does direct itself. Remember the solution of that, right?

[25:01] The mind directs itself in what it does not know, by what it does know, and it directs itself. In what is less known to it, by what is more known to it, and unless you separate. What you know from what you don't know, and also what is more known from what is less known, you can't use what you know to know what you don't know. And use what is more known to you to know what is less known, and then, as we learned from the life of Socrates, right, most men have mixed up what they don't know with what they do know.

[25:50] And therefore, they don't have the separation of the ruler and the ruler, right? So there is a separation. of mind and the world. That's a little different than two different men, right? Or two different parts of something, huh? But the mind is ruled by what it doesn't know, by what it does know. I'm going to buy each of you guys a coke. Well, how many guys are here, right?

[26:22] And multiply that by the cost of a coke, right? So I'm using the numbers I know to come to know a number I don't know, right? And when you, you know, if you add up the things that you're buying in the store, you come to know what you didn't know by numbers you didn't know, right? Okay.

[26:44] So this is a very key thing in the history of human thought. For the discovery afterwards is an untimeling of the difficulty seen before. Einstein in his book, The Evolution of Physics. I don't know if you ever seen that book, but it's the nearest thing to a little kind of history of the main ideas of physics from from Galileo down to his own ideas. But Einstein says that every, you know, essential idea in science was born in this way.

[27:15] It was a time, right? Okay. But the difficulty here is a contradiction, right? Like an example he's giving, right? Ah. Now, Max, I mean, Niels Bohr was in some sense even more influential than Einstein in terms of the men he influenced individually as a teacher. Niels Bohr says the same thing.

[27:49] Heisenberg says the same thing, you know. So some of the great scientists say these things. And of course, the Middle Ages, the Quaestio Disputata was the kind of main way there in theology.

[28:04] Many of the fathers and so they. Yeah. Explain the scripture too. Yeah. It's interesting the way Augustine, you know, the way Thomas takes over Augustine's reasons for the incarnation, right? No, and look at some of the ones there, kind of a little disputatio almost. In the Sum, you know, Thomas gives ten reasons for the God becoming man. He says, "Well, God can make infant reparation, right? But He didn't sin.

[28:36] Man has sinned, but He can't make sufficient reparation. Got a problem there, right? Well, how do you solve it? God became man, right? Okay. Or he says God should be followed, but He can't be seen. Man can be seen, but He's not a perfect model to follow. No solution, right? Well, there is a solution to it, but unusual one. God became man, right? And therefore, we'd have a perfect model to follow.

[29:05] But about see right, so a little bit of that is that way Augustine's mind works, huh? But Augustine says you know heretics are necessary for the development of theology. They contradict some article of the faith, and it gives some reason for you know doubting it, either drawn from philosophy or drawn from scripture. Sometimes, right? And the untying of that knot is where you make a discovery of something in theology you had not had before.

[29:36] Yeah, yeah. Now he says it's impossible to untie without considering the knot. Okay. Now I know he's making comparison, right? He's saying that contrary reasons or reasons leading to contradictory statements kind of tie the mind into a knot. Just Like when the feet are tied together and they can't go forward, right? If I want to go forward, I got to examine the knot and find the loose end and then unravel it, right?

[30:09] So he makes that comparison. The doubt of the mind shows this about the thing. For in so far as it doubts, it undergoes something like those tied up. In both cases, it is impossible to go forward, right?

[30:25] Hence, for these reasons, one should have considered before all the difficulties. So you have to examine these knots in Book Three before we can untie them in Books Four through what, fourteen, right?

[30:41] And we were stopped; we can't go forward until we untie these knots. But at the same time, the untying these knots will be the discovery of something that was hidden to us, hidden from us to begin with, huh?

[30:57] Okay. So that's the first piece that he gives, right? Okay. That's kind of a double reason, but the difference here is one reason. Now Einstein uses a little different metaphor. He speaks of the wall of contradiction that blocks the scientific progress, right? But you have to break down that wall of contradiction before the mind can go forward. What's the same idea that Aristotle has here, right? And

[31:32] he says every essential idea in science is born in this conflict down. Einstein says, in dramatic conflict, right? It's a comparison to the mufassal I was talking about before, right? Because that involves that, huh? I put a quote here from Twelfth Night here from Shakespeare. Sorry, I don't know if you know that play at all. But Viola is shipwrecked, right? And she disguises herself as a man, and she goes into service of the Duke there, and she falls in love with the Duke, right?

[32:06] She and everybody's good, correct, and so. But the Duke is in love with some woman in the town, right? Who's not giving him the time of day, right? So he uses Viola as a messenger to this woman. Well, Viola disguises like a man, right? And so the woman falls in love with Viola, thinking she's a man. So you can see the knot that you're in, right? Viola loves the Duke who doesn't even know she's a woman.

[32:32] She's disguised. The woman that the Duke loves loves Viola, thinking she's a man. And Viola loves the Duke, right? We tie knot. So she says at the end of the second act about, "Oh, time thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie." Okay, the ten syllables do it that way, tie, tie. Okay.

[33:03] Aristotle in in the Nicomachean Ethics, you may recall, in saying that you know that time is a good what helper in untying these knots, and sometimes it takes a long time before the knots can be untied.

[33:17] So that's the likeness of the plot, right? The lover of plots, in a way, is a lover of of wisdom, right? Because in a sense, wisdom consists in what seeing a knot and then untying it. Okay. Now the second and third reasons kind of go together because they are two sides of a coin. Aristotle is saying if you don't see in some way the difficulty, you don't know where to go.

[33:47] And then the third reason reason you don't know when you're right. When you can untie the knot, you know you've arrived. So seeing the knot in a way tells you in what direction you have to go. It tells you

[34:06] you have to go in the direction of untying that knot, right? But when you succeed in untying the knot, now you know you've to some extent arrived at what was unknown before, right? And because those investigating without having first considered the difficulties are like those who do not know where they ought to go.

[34:30] And in addition, they do not know if the thing sought has been found or not. For the goal is not clear to this one, but it is to the one who has brought out the difficulties before.

[34:43] Reminds a little bit of the of Mina's objection there in the dialogue, right? Where Socrates says he doesn't know what virtue is, and Mino doesn't know what it is, as we know from the conversation about it. And Socrates says, "Let's put our heads together and try to find what virtue is." Mina says, "Well, how can you investigate what you don't know? Know what you're looking for. How would you know if you'd found it, right?

[35:09] It's like if I should say, you know, you go and get one. Well, you know, by chance you could get, you don't know what you're going to get, right? And how would you know you had found what I wanted? You know what you're looking for, right? Okay. Well, you can in a way know what you're looking for. You're looking for the solution to this problem, right? To this knot.

[35:31] And when you untie that knot, you kind of know that you arrived. Which. You didn't do before, right? Okay. So just think back of the example there with the problem there in Alexander.

[35:46] Um. Now, make a little comparison here again to to Heisenberg, right? Heisenberg in the Gifford Lectures, huh? Heisenberg, my second favorite is probably Heisenberg. Greatest scientist after Einstein, huh? He's Mister Einstein, anyway. Heisenberg is the man who formulated the greatest change in modern physics. Huh? He's responsible for many things. Huh? He's the first guy to say that the nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons. Huh? First guy to say that.

[36:22] Um, it was after the you know experimental discovery of the neutron, right? That he said insight that there is neutrons in the very nucleus. Yeah. He's responsible for many things, but he's most famous for the principle of indeterminism, as I mentioned before. Anyway, the Gifford Lectures,

[36:45] in the lecture on the history of quantum theory, right? He's giving the history, right? And when they begin to make progress, right? And begin to make progress when they ask the what, right question, right? Okay. And Heisenberg makes the interesting statement that to ask the right question is often to go more than halfway to the what, the truth. Now I try to emphasize this point to my students, so I say, let's represent by a straight line here

[37:23] the distance between what ignorance and knowledge or something, right? And by the straight line, I'm representing the time, right? And the effort necessary to get from ignorance to knowledge, right? Now most people, if you ask them,

[37:52] where does asking the question, right, come along here, right? First percent. Yeah, right down here. There's a question right here, right? Now if I draw a little line here in the middle of this thing, it's halfway down, right? Where would the right question be? Probably people put on this this half over here somewhere, right? Heisenberg saying, no, to ask the right question is often to go more than what halfway.

[38:20] So let's put it down here somewhere. The right question. This is Heisenberg, right? That's a very interesting thing, right? Um, now it's been my experience as a philosopher that I spend more time, right, and effort before I ask the right question. Then after I ask the right question to get to the truth, right? I think I mentioned that time I was doing my doctoral thesis, and I had a problem that came up.

[39:01] Actually, a problem I had thought about when I was an undergraduate, you know, but I couldn't answer, and the cert couldn't answer, and so on, right? And I was at Laval at the time, and it became essential to my my thesis in some way. And I was listening to what Diane said, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, I asked the right question, and all of a sudden, I asked the right question.

[39:21] Bang! I was there to the answer. So sudden, I said, "Gee whiz, am I right or not?" So I had that has for ten years, always this question, but not even thinking about it constantly for ten years. But all of a sudden, I'm there. You know, after nine years, I say, I asked the right question, and then boom, I'm there. And so I went down to see Professor Diane to think about it.

[39:42] And so I put the right question to him, right? He says, "Dwayne," he says, "I know where you're going." I said, "Well, damn it, can I go there anyway?" He said, "Yeah, but you get me, you know. You see, I say my own experience of philosophy is something like that, right? That I see this."Problem in in in in other philosophers, right? That they haven't asked the right question, and when they don't ask the right question, they don't get anywhere, right?

[40:09] See. So that in itself a very interesting thing that Heisenberg is pointing out from his own experience as a physicist. And if you go back to this great dialogue of Plato, the Meno, some of you know the Meno. But in the middle part of the Meno, there, Meno questions the slave boy, right? And he's trying to show Meno that the slave boy already knows geometry. And the way he tries to show this is by bringing out a theorem of geometry, the way to double a square, and the way to double a square comes out of the answers of the slave boy.

[40:58] Answers the slave boy himself volunteers, right, to the questions of Socrates. So if the way to double a square comes out of the knowledge of the slave boy, as you hear those answers, then slave boy must have known already, just fetching back something he's kind of temporarily lost contact with, right? Well, I don't think Socrates is being altogether accurate in his assessment of what's going on here, right?

[41:28] Because when he first asked the slave boy how do you double a square, the slave boy says you double the side. So not only did he not know how to double a square, he was mistaken, right? See. But Socrates is asking all the right questions, and if he asks the right questions, someone seems to what? To get the answer. Yeah, yeah. But this is what what

[41:59] we say sometimes about discovery and learning, right? From another, that learning from another should imitate discovery. Now maybe you you shorten, you know, some of the dead ends that are involved, and you're trying to discover, but kind of the essential steps, right?

[42:21] Involve going back the way the discovery is actually made in the first place, and that's kind of the best, right? And as I tell students sometimes, we don't usually learn very well because we get knowledge second hand, third hand, fourth hand, who knows how many hands, and we don't know how the actual discovery was made, right? You go back to the man who made the discovery, and he'll bring this out.

[42:55] So what Socrates, in a sense, is showing there in the example of the slave boy is the slave boy can come to recognize his mistake out of things he doesn't know already, right? And he can come to know what he doesn't know out of things he knows already, right? But it's Socrates' questions that help the slave boy to recall and to put together for the first time in his lifetime things he knows already, and then comes this something he didn't know already, yeah.

[43:22] So a lot of truth to this this marvelous observation of Heisenberg, right? This marvelous statement. Um, but now why did I bring that at this point here? Well, he said at this point he says the physicists begin to ask the right questions, and then he makes that statement. And to ask the right questions often to go more than halfway, right? Well, what were these right questions? He says practically all of them.

[43:53] He says had to do with the strange apparent contradictions between the experiments. Okay, that's interesting, right? Strange apparent contradictions in their experiments. It's the contradictions they saw, right, or at least apparent contradictions between the experiments that led them to ask the right questions, and therefore to go more than halfway to the end, right? Okay. Now, compare with what Aristotle is saying there, right? Every investigation goes in the direction of the questions asked.

[44:41] Okay, that's why when you're on the witness stand or on the you may not like the way the investigation is going because the questions are asked of you, and you see how it's going. Okay, but if every investigation takes the direction of the questions asked, then to ask the right question is to go in the right what direction? That's the second point he makes, right?

[45:10] Now, if seeing these contradictions or apparent contradictions enables you to ask the right questions, then it enables you to go in the right direction, which is the second reason Aristotle has here, right?

[45:32] And then to know when you've arrived, because reconciling contradictions. And you see you'll find the physicists saying the same things, right? They knew they had arrived because the contradictions start to what disappear. You see,

[45:54] but notice that that third reason Aristotle gives is starting to. Touch upon not only discovery, but the judgment that I've arrived—that this is the truth, right? As the difficulties, the contradictions, or apparent contradictions begin to disappear, this is a sign that you've arrived at the truth. And so, it's not just discovery, but also the judgment that what you discovered is is true, right? And the fourth reason he gives here is, as the words themselves indicate, in terms of judgment, right?

[46:31] He makes a beautiful comparison. Moreover, the one who has heard all the reasons of those disagreeing, like that of two parties in a lawsuit, is necessarily better prepared to judge. So, if you are on the jury in the courtroom and you heard one man trying to prove he's guilty and give reasons why he's guilty, another man trying to prove he's not guilty, right? You are in a better position to judge whether he's guilty or not if you heard just one of both of them.

[47:01] Okay, and it's like that, except that in the courtroom you are arguing about a contingent individual affair, but in philosophy you are talking about a universal thing,

[47:15] and it's going to be necessary eventually. But if you heard the men on both sides, you are better able to judge what the truth is if you heard just one side.

[47:27] So those are the four reasons Aristotle gives, right, for examining the reasons pro and con in the great questions of what philosophy, right? Okay.

[47:45] Now, the great questions of wisdom could be divided into three parts, but to begin with, Aristotle divides them into two parts. Okay, and in what is the second reading here? The questions

[48:11] are almost all about what is wisdom about. Okay, and as you go through these questions, I'll give you something of the doubtfulness of them, although it's fairly obvious that men have thought-differently about them. There are a couple questions in the second reading that are not about what wisdom is about, right? But they're involved in those questions, right? Okay.

[48:40] And we'll see when we get to those questions. But the third reading, right, is a group of questions, right, about the things themselves that wisdom is about. It's not about what wisdom is about; it's about the things themselves, right? And mainly about what causes, right? Okay.

[49:00] So, we're going to go through each of these questions and see what the question is, but also indicate something of the difficulty. We're not going to go through the whole dialectic of the rest of Book Three because that would be a whole course in itself. But we'll stop each question and point out some of the difficulties and why you'd think this and why you'd think that and so on.

[49:21] Right? Okay. So we want to stop now at 4: 30 or not about that. We'll begin with the second reading, but think about this first reading. You know.