Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
Lecture 9: Reason as Large Discourse Looking Before and After

Transcript
================================================================================

We quoted with atheists before that a thing is singular when sensed, but universal when understood. Now you can say that universal, in a way, covers a large area if you want it to, right? It's said as many things. So if I have a discourse about odd numbers, let's say, and even numbers, how many things does odd number cover? Fifty, yeah. And when I make a statement like, no, odd number is even, I'm in a way of making a statement about an infinity of things, right? Okay? So it covers a very large discourse, right? Okay? Now the other sense of large is large as opposed to small, as in small talk. Small talk means what? Talk about little things, unimportant things, right? Okay? And the opposite of large, then, would be, in that sense, would be great things, right? Okay? So it can discourse about great things, huh? Now, notice, reason can also discourse about the singular, right? It can also discourse about little things, right? But Shakespeare doesn't define reason as the ability for a small discourse, even though reason is more capable of a small discourse than a large one, in this sense. But you wouldn't understand the full ability of reason, right? Okay? I can not only talk about the little things that happened today, but I can talk about, what, the soul, the immortality of the soul, the order of the universe. I can talk about God himself, right? See? So reason is capable of a discourse about great things, huh? And it can talk not only about the singular, but it can talk about the universal. And in wisdom, we talk about the, what, most universal. Now, generally speaking, the discourse of the philosopher will be larger than other men in both of these senses, with the possible exception to the theologian, right? Okay? But then you decide to be the theologian from one, huh? You can see this in wisdom itself, right? We saw that description there, the sixth part. The description of the wise men. He talks about what is said of all things. So his discourse is most large. It's the largest of all in this sense here. And he talks about the first cause. The first cause is God. So he talks about the greatest thing. So the discourse of the wise men is the largest discourse there is for an actual reason, huh? Now, you could also say that, or call the discourse of reason large because its limit is large, huh? Now, limit is said both of the, what, beginning and the, what, end, right? Now, you'll find very often that reason arise at one universal and simple truth by a large induction, right, huh? Okay? So it makes an induction from many singulars to one universal thing, huh? So that, I see that expression sometimes in other authors even, a large induction, right? See? That means you took it from many things, right? But you went from many, that was your beginning, right? To one simple truth, right? Okay? But likewise, reason sometimes sees one simple but very basic truth, something very universal, and then it sees many, what, consequences of this, right? Or it makes many applications of this, right? Okay? I can see that also in the equations of the physicist, right? From one equation, how many things did he deduce? Force equals mass times acceleration. By plugging in different forces or masses, you can, what, calculate an infinity of different accelerations, right? The axioms, right, are used in almost every theorem, right? So from one axiom, there are many, many, many different things that are, what, seen, right? Okay? And again, perhaps the wise man, his discourse is the largest in both of these senses, huh? Because he has the most universal, what, he has the largest, in the sense of induction, huh? Because in what he'd be on point out, he needs an experience, not just of many signatures, but an experience of all the particular parts of philosophy before he can see this thing universally, huh? He sees principles, right, that can be applied everywhere. So, he's capable of a large discourse in these two senses, too. Now, the third way that we speak of a discourse as being large is because in some way it's long. And again, there's two ways we speak of a discourse as long. One would be if it goes through many, what, steps, right? Now, if you start to go through, say, book one of Euclid, you have to go through many steps to arrive at the later theorem, so if someone comes to me and says, Berquist, show me the Pythagorean theorem, and I say, well, the only proof I know is proposition 47 of book one of Euclid, so you have to go through 46 things, you know? And that's when the king is supposed to protest it, right, you know? And he wanted a shorter road, right? Euclid's supposed to have said, you know, there's no royal road to giant, right? You know? Anybody who is a king or a commoner, right? A slave, he's going to know the particular theorem, he's got to go through all these steps, right? And notice, again, when we see that the reason is capable of doing that, it's the Euclid's capable of doing that, right? We don't mean that it's as easy for a reason, to go through a many-step argument than it is one that has just a couple of steps, right? In fact, when it's a couple of steps, he's more capable of, right? But you don't fully understand the ability of reason unless you realize it can go through these, what, many steps, huh? And perhaps in a sense of geometry, arithmetic, more than the other part of philosophy, you have a long discourse in the sense of many steps, huh? Okay? Now, the other way you can speak of a discourse as being long is that it goes between things that are very, what, far apart, right? Okay? Between things very far. You probably heard of the first proof of the sense of God, right? Which goes from motion all the way to what? To God, right? When you study motion, you'll find out that it's hardly actual, right? It's hardly there. See, when I'm moving here, right, part of my motion has gone by, and part of my motion is to come, right? Mm-hmm. And the part that's gone by doesn't exist. The part that's to come doesn't exist yet. And how much motion is ever actual? Mm-hmm. No part of motion is ever fully actual. So you go from motion, which is the least actual of acts, right, all the way to God, and you find out that God is what? Pure act. It's university perfect. That's going as far, almost as you can go, right? Mm-hmm. And sometimes Thomas reasons from matter, which, but the furthest, even further away, away from God, and he speaks of matter has in some way an ability to be able to do different things, right? Mm-hmm. And he goes from that to God's infinite ability, right? Mm-hmm. You know, that's a tremendous, what, distance, right? Okay. We see that, too, in Scripture, when you speak of God metaphorically, right? The Lord is my rock. Mm-hmm. Well, quite a distance, everything. Mm-hmm. You know, a rock in God, right, huh? You know, even further apart than the soul in God, right? The rock in God, right? But we're, in a sense, going from the rock to God, right? That's going an awful long way. Do you see that, huh? So, again, that's a difficult reason to do, but it's capable of that, huh? And, of course, the wise man especially goes, you look at the books in wisdom there, the 11th through the 14th, especially 11 and 12, where Aristotle arrives at the first cause. He starts in the most imperfect of all things, huh? The most imperfect beings. He goes up towards the more perfect beings, to be finding the rise of God, you know? That's the longest discourse that your mind will make in this sense down here. So, but maybe in mathematics we make a longer discourse in this sense here, right? But at least in five of these six senses, the discourse of the wise man is the largest of all, right? But even in other parts of philosophy, and again, in actual philosophy, the discourse is much more universal than it is for the experimental scientist. We get into ethics. In ethics we talk about all the goods of man. As in Socrates and the Finians, we disagree about the order of all the goods of man. So, I mean, it's very universal compared to the art of cooking, the medical art, or these arts that deal with one particular good, right? And ethics talks about the purpose of man, right? Of course, in natural philosophy, we talk about the soul. That's a very great thing, right? It's not as great as God, but it's... So, you could say in general, the discourse of the philosopher is larger than other men, but what does that mean? In almost all these senses, his discourse is larger. So, Shakespeare was saying an awful lot, right? When he says it means there's ability for large, what? Of discourse, huh? But he doesn't stop there. Now, the next word that Shakespeare adds is the word looking, huh? And let's look at that word by itself before we look at what he adds to that, before and after, right? Let's just take the word looking, huh? Now, if we tried to define looking, how would you define that? Trying to see. Yeah, trying to see, right? Now, to see has three meanings, huh? And the first meaning, of course, is the act of the eye, right? That's really the only name for that act, huh? The second meaning of to see is to imagine, right? So, the first meaning is the act of the eye. It's to imagine, huh? And you see this in the beginning of Hamlet there, huh? The friends of Hamlet have seen the ghost of his, what, father walking the ramparts there at Elsinore, right? The castle, and they see it with their eyes, okay? And they're going to tell Hamlet about this, and before they have a chance to tell, Hamlet says, I can see my father now. And they're looking around, and they say, you see the ghost, right? And he says, in my mind's eye, right? Okay? But then he means what? He can picture his father in his imagination, right? Later on, he sees him with his eyes, right? Now, the third meaning of to see would seem to be to understand, right? No, it's just an order there. The word to see is an example of what the philosopher calls a word equivocal by reason. Equivocal means it has more than one meaning, huh? Now, sometimes a word has more than one meaning by chance, but other times it has more than one meaning by reason. And then it's going to be some kind of before and after, an order among the meanings, huh? But as Thomas points out, we name things as we know them, as we become aware of them. So the order in naming follows the order in knowing. And of course, the basic order in knowing is the road from the senses into reason that we talked about. So obviously, you name what is closest to the senses, right? And that's because of the act of the eye itself, right? But imagining is more like seeing with the eyes and understanding this. And the sign of that is that in a dream, we think we're seeing with the eyes and we're actually imagining in a dream. It's not until we wake up and have the use of our eyes and recognize that we're imagining rather than seeing, right? But even in a dream, we don't confuse understanding with what? Seeing, right? With the eye, do we? But sometimes people mix up imagining and, what, thinking. I imagine that's so. I think that's so, right? And you see the English philosophers like Locke and so on, Barclay, they use the word idea. Sometimes they mean an image, sometimes they mean a thought, and they can't tell the two apart. But the image is always something singular, right? But the thought is basically something universal. But notice how in the imagination, we try to imitate a little bit something like what reason does. We can take, you know, two images and kind of form a, what? A new image, right? So I remember one of the fairy tales when I was a child where there was a glass mountain. Do you remember that one? And how can the prince get up there with his horse in the glass mountain, right? See? Who knows? We've seen with our senses a mountain or a hill, right? And we've seen with our senses and felt glass and so on, right? And then we imagine a, what, glass mountain. Or you imagine a golden mountain or something, right? And it's a little bit like what you do with the discourse of reason, the sense that you're getting a new image by putting it together, right? Two images, right? It's not really time to know one thing to another, huh? But it resembles more of that, huh? So, when Shakespeare says, looking, huh, trying to see, what sense is he using the word to see? The third sense. The third sense, right? Okay. Now, why has he added this, right, huh? Why has he added this, huh? Why is he not satisfied with saying reason is the ability for large discourse, huh? That's one thing that you can go through all the steps, but unless you come to a conclusion, you don't understand it. Yeah. But unless you, if you think about something but never come to understand it, there's something incomplete, right? Okay. And when reason is thinking and reasoning, it's trying to what? Understand, right? Because this motion of reason is not for the sake of motion, but it's for the sake of understanding, right? You're thinking and reasoning, your mind is in motion, but it's sort of coming to rest in the sense of understanding. So he wouldn't really be telling us completely what reason is if he says it's the ability for large discourse, because you might think that discourse is the ultimate thing that reason is aiming at. No, it's trying to, through its discourse, to come to, what, understand, right? Okay. So you see where he adds that word, right? Sometimes Aristotle calls philosophy a theoria, which is a Greek word for looking, right? You're looking at things and you're trying to understand them, right? But in the end, philosophy, as we said before, will be a reasoned out understanding of things. Now, he adds to the word looking now, the words, what? Before and after. Before and after, yeah. And it's interesting how, if you look at most prepositions, if not almost all of them, their first meaning usually is tied up with place in some way. So the first meaning of in is, we're in this room. The second meaning, heart in a hole. The other meaning is they're fairly moved. The first sense of before, it's that I'm before you now, right? The first sense of under, right, is spatial, right? What's interesting here is that the word understand is taken from under, which actually doesn't say, you know, the ability for large discourse, looking under. How about you could say that, right? But he says looking, what, before and after, right? That's very interesting, huh? Interesting, huh? That we have two different, you know, spatial images, but leading to the same thing, right? To give you exactly what I mean here, we think of the cause. ...cause as being before the effect, right? Okay. Now, that's not the original sense of before, which is, like, I have before the table here, right, but not the cause of the table, right? Okay. Or yesterday is before today, because I mean the cause of today, right? But we do speak of the cause as being before the effect, don't we? But we also speak of the underlying cause, right? Okay. So we use two different words, right, with a different spatial image originally, right, to signify the same thing in a way, huh? Okay. The effect follows upon the cause, right? It's a result of the cause, right? So we think of the effect as coming after the cause, huh? Okay. We also speak of the cause as if it were, what, supporting the effect, huh? And that's what we use, the expression underlying cause, huh? And I think I mentioned how in English, the English word for cause is, what, ground, huh? Did I mention that before? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. We don't use it so much because we borrow the Latin word cause, right? But you still see it, you know, in the more conservative things like the law, right, huh? Where they speak of, what? Oh, grounds. Grounds for divorce or something, right? Yeah. Meaning cause for divorce, right? Okay. And Shakespeare, as they say, is the master of the English language, huh? And some people think it was a bad custom, but the Elizabethans were always punning on words. Mm-hmm. Okay? And Shakespeare, he's always punning on the word understand, huh? Servant, one servant says to the other servant, you know, you don't understand me, I don't understand you. And he says, well, my cane understands me, right? Yeah. And I don't know if we're going to, you know, put that on the scale of humor, but I mean, it doesn't make you stop and think of the fact that, what, the word to stand under and the word understand have the same etymology, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? And it's not simply by chance that he did it, right? Okay? But the connection between the etymology of the word understanding and the meaning of the word right can be seen in this way. You could say that to understand something means to know what stands under it, or what is said to stand under it, right? Or it's to know something through what is said to stand under it, huh? Okay? So to understand an effect means to know what? The underlying cause of it, right? Okay? Now the English word for cause, there's ground, right? Which stands under other things, huh? In Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, there he puns on the two meanings of ground. Ground meaning what? The earth. Yeah, the earth. And ground meaning the cause, right? Do you know that scene at the end there where after Romeo has arrived at the thing and he gets, he finds the Count de Paris there? Remember that? And again, to a little fight as the Count de Paris thinks he's come there to desecrate the grave, right? He doesn't realize the truth. And Romeo kills the Count de Paris, right? And then he goes in there and he brings the poison that the cloth that Carrie's given him, right? And then he dies, Romeo. Romeo, then Juliet wakes up for the potion that Friar Lawrence had given him, right? And she sees Romeo dead, so she, okay? So, finally, the night guard, watchman, come on the scene, right? And what the hell is going on here, right? Juliet's supposed to have been dead and buried and she's laying there freshly bleeding, you know? And Romeo, who's in exile, is laying there dead. And the Count de Paris is dead. What's going on, huh? And so the watchman said, we see the ground where all these woes do lie, you know? But the true ground we cannot without further circumstance decry, right? Yeah. We see the grounds of visor lie, but the true ground, the cause of all these, you know, unexpected deaths, right? Until the Friar Lawrence, you know, nades us. Right. So we do speak of the cause as underlying effect. We do speak of the cause in English as the ground, right? Okay? In Latin, they use the other spatial image. They spoke of the, what, of the effect as depending upon the cause, right? Oh, yeah. Not dependent means it hangs from, right? Okay? Like a woman's pendant, you know? It hangs from the, you know, down from the other part, right? Okay? But no, it's usually a different image, right? The one thing, you're thinking the cause is we're supporting something in existence, right? The other thing is holding it up into existence, right? Yeah. See? See, you have a few different images there, right? You know? Spatially. Above and below, right? Uh-huh. So first, I will, you know, will speak of the cause, the first causes being the highest causes, because you're thinking of the cause as being above the effect, right? In English, we think of the cause as being the ground, right? And therefore being below everything, right? And, but even in my term, in Greek, it's when you speak of the underlying cause, right? Uh-huh. And then you also speak of the cause as being before the effect. Oh, yeah. Okay? So, you shouldn't understand it in any of these, uh, you know, you shouldn't be tied to the spatial image, right? But you shouldn't recognize it. To look before and after, then to say it's a good thing to look under, right? And before and after are the definition of order, right? Now, everybody who's spoken about reason has really seen a connection between reason and order, right? Heisenberg and his gift for lectures, he was a great physicist, he was, you know. In order to understand the world, we have to find some kind of, what, order, right? And we always look in science for laws, right? But we always couple law and order, don't we? You can't make any sense out of something, you can't find some order. So Shakespeare adds, then, the word looking. Looking, he adds the words before and after. Now, I gave you the text of Aristotle there, where he, in the categories, distinguishes the four central senses before him. And then he adds the fifth sense later on, right? But that fifth sense, I don't think is fifth in order. In some way, it resembles the, what, second sense, huh? Now, let's enumerate those senses, huh? Now, the word before here is an example, like the word to see. It's an example of a word equivocal by reason, huh? And these words that are equivocal by reason, you'll find that especially the most common words are equivocal by reason. And it was Aristotle who discovered that all the common words, in fact, are the words that are, to some extent, used everywhere in every science because of that common. And they're used especially in wisdom because it's subject most universal. So, which are also the words used in the axioms, that those words are all equivocal by reason. And so, to understand those words, you have to see the meanings underlying them, and you also have to see the order of the meanings, huh? And just like you have these three meanings of this coming under the word to see, but they come in a certain order, right? And the order follows the order in our knowing, right? So, likewise with the word before, huh? You follow the order in our knowing, huh? Now, what Aristotle does with these words is not to distinguish all the meanings. He distinguishes what you might call the central senses, right? And sometimes, though, to one of these central senses, you can lead back a number of other senses that are sort of likeness to that, huh? Okay? So, Thomson is explaining the word beginning in the fifth book of metaphysics, huh? The first meaning of beginning is this is the beginning of the desk. Okay? And then, if you go down the desk here, the motion, the beginning of the motion corresponds, in a way, to the beginning of the desk, right? And then, the beginning of the time it takes to go down here, right? So, the beginning of the magnitude is the first meaning of beginning in the physics and metaphysics. And to that is not given explicitly by Aristotle, but to that you lead back the beginning of the motion, if you start from the beginning of the road, and the beginning of the time, right? Now, here he gives us the first meaning, though, not before in place, but before in time. And when you study time, as we'll do in natural philosophy, that's explicitly in the definition of time, as the number of the before and after. So, it's more explicit than before and after in time than in place of motion. To that, you reduce the senses. So, the first sense is before in time. And very often, daily life, we have that in mind. So, today is before tomorrow, right? And today is after yesterday, right? Now, to that sense, as I say, you reduce before in motion, right? And before in the magnitude of which the motion is. Okay. Now, the second sense that he gives, well, let me say one more thing about this. Why should the before in time, the before in motion, really, be the first meaning of before, compared to the others? Okay. We name things as we know them, right? We name things as we become aware of them, huh? And therefore, the order in naming follows the order in knowing, right? Now, the first order in our knowing is the road from the senses into reason. So, the first meaning of these words would tend to be something that is the most sensible. Okay. Now, what does Shakespeare say in Torias and Cressida? Things in motion, sooner catch the eye than what not stirs. I want to get your attention when you're getting off the airplane and you don't see me. I wait, right? Uh-huh. Okay. That's why ambulances and police cars and so on. These changing lights, right? And changing sounds, huh? Because that would attract attention, right? Lights going on and off and so on. Now, that's why these crazy performers, you know, are jumping around on the stage all the time, trying to hold your attention because they have nothing really nice to it. But I don't know if any movie you've seen that, it's some crazy chase, you know, or somebody's chasing somebody up and down. And so notice, time is tied up with the before and after in motion. We usually take the motion of the sun around the earth, right? But there's a before and after there, right? So things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs. So our knowledge begins with our senses, and the senses are caught by motion, right? And time is tied up with the before and after in motion. So this has to be the first sense, right? Okay. Do you see that? It has to be the first sense. Now, the second sense of before, which you might call before and being, huh? What does the second sense mean, before and being? Well, when this thing can be without that, but not vice versa, then this is said to be before that, huh? Aristotle takes a mathematical example, where he says, one can be without two, right? But two cannot be without what? One. He takes a mathematical example because there's no motion in math, as to be speaking. He wants to show that it's a different sense in the first one, right? But nevertheless, you can have a before in the second sense here, in the sensible world, right? Take a very simple example. Bricks are before a brick wall. Bricks can be without a brick wall. A brick wall cannot be without bricks. Now, very often, what is before and being may also be before and time, right? Take, for example, I'm going to write the word cat here on the board. Now, the letter C exists in time before the word cat, doesn't it? Okay? Write this, and now finally I have the word cat, right? But notice, C is before the word cat, not only in time, but also in what? In B. Because the letter C can be without the word cat, like this, right? But the word cat cannot be without the letter what? C. Okay. I know C is before, in this case, in both senses, right? Okay. But suppose we had a stamp here, and BAM, you had the whole word cat in one. Then, the letter C would not be before the word cat in time, would you? Oh, I hate it. See? But would still be before it in what? In meaning, right? Okay. Do you see that? Yeah. Okay. So, this is really a different sense than that, right? But still, it's something in the sensible world, right? Or it can be in the sensible world, right? Right. The same way, if you take Aristotle's example, there are numbers, right? Now, you can have one child without having two, right? But you can't have two children without having one, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So, one is before two in what? Being, right? Mm-hmm. Now, usually it's before in time, but not always. You might have twins, your first children, right? So, you went from zero to two all once, right? Mm-hmm. Due for the price of one, it is that, okay? So, one is not always before two in time, we know what often is, right? They read. different senses, huh? If you give me a loaf of bread and I take a knife and I cut off one slice and I cut off a second slice, right? A third, right? But here you have one before two, not only being as an airstyle's example, right? But also in time, right? They have one slice in time, shortly a long time, before I have two slices in time, right? But if I'm in the bakery and I say, then we just have that loaf sliced, you know? Which is, whoop! It goes from zero to, I don't know, 12, 13 slices, whatever it is, right? 14 slices? All nuts, right? So in that sense, one is not always before two in, what? Time. But it's always before two in, what? Being, right? Okay. Now, is God before us in this first sense of in time? So that puzzling way of Christ saying, you know, before Abraham was, I am, right? He's not before Abraham in time, right? Because he's not in time, he's in eternity, right? But God is before all preachers in this, what? Second sense, right? He can be without any of them, right? But they cannot be without him, right? So he's before in the second sense, huh? But notice, we're not thinking about God when we first see this sense, right? We're thinking about whether C can be without the word cat, or one can be without two, but not vice versa. Whether bricks can be without the brick wall, but not vice versa, right? If hydrogen, if water is H2O, right? Maybe hydrogen can be without water, but water cannot be without hydrogen, right? Because this is the second sense. Now, what is the third sense of before, right? Well, if you look at Aristotle's examples, the third sense of before is before in the discourse of reason, okay? And discourse in both of those senses, huh? So not only do the, in an argument, the premises are before the conclusion, right? Okay? In a definition, the genus comes before the, what, preferences, right? And in a treatise of Aristotle, the premium comes before the, what, the main body of the treatise, right? Just like in Roman Juliet, the prologue comes before the, what, play, right? Okay. Now, to this third sense, though, would be led back any before in our knowing, right? So the before and after there are an actual road, right? Led back to this sense here, right? It's not the same sense, exactly, but it's similar to it, right? Okay. But notice why this is placed third, huh? Because this is not so sensible, is it? This is more inward, right? And so it's not as well known to us as these more sensible, right? This is more sensible than that, though, right? Because things and emotions, and it gets the eye and whatnot. Okay? Now notice, what is before in the discourse of reason might be before in being? But usually it's not. I'll give you some example here, huh? Example from geometry. Square and cube. Do you see a before and after there of square and cube? Square before cube. In what sense? Because of cubes. Squares are in cubes. Okay, it's before in what sense here now? In B. Oh, I'm sorry, B. It's before in B, right? A square can be without a cube. Uh-huh. But a cube, which is contained by six squares, right, cannot be without a, what? Square. So square is before cube in the second sense here, right? Now, in geometry, if you get that far, you'll find that plain geometry is learned before what? Solid geometry, right? So you, square is considered in book one and book two and so on, right? In four. But cube is not considered until the last books there, because they're in science, right? So square is before cube, both in being and in what? Our knowledge, in the discourse of reason, right? Okay. Likewise, if you take circle and sphere, circle can be without sphere, right? But you can't have a sphere without a, what? Circle, right? The way Euclid generates the spheres, he says. Imagine a circle in the diameter of the circle and rotate the circle around the diameter of the sphere. So you have to understand also what a circle is before you can understand what a sphere is, right? Okay? And I guess the cylinder you rotate a, what? Rectangle, right? Around one of the sides, right? Okay. And if you rotate a right angle around, one of the sides there that's adjacent to the right angle, right? And it holds it together, what? Cone, yeah. Okay. But, is that always true? That what is before in being, he's also before in the discourse of reason, right? Oh, take the example there, the very difficult one of God, right? God is before all the things in being. Is he before all the things in our knowledge? No. No. You know, sensible things, material things, before you know. But take an example even from in natural science there. Which is before in being? Water or hydrogen. Yeah, before in being. Which is before in our knowledge. Water. Yeah. Yeah. And notice, huh, the word hydrogen is named from water. Water. Water. Hydrogen. It generates hydro, water. Okay. And why was hydrogen named from water? Because water was more known to us, eh? And hydrogen was discovered, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water. And that's what happened to him, I'm afraid. It's kind of funny, you know, the way they always attack the Church of the Galilee, the other thing and so on, you know. They never attack the Pedro Lucero, I don't know. Yeah. They didn't chop off the head of the Galilee. They didn't chop off the head of the Galilee. But anyway. Notice hydrogen is before water in being, but after in what? The discourse of reason, in our knowledge now. And then what about the proton, right? Proton comes in the Greek word meaning first, right? Now first is defined by before, right? First means before all the rest. So first has as many meanings as before does, right? In the same way order has as many meanings as before. Now what sense is a proton first? In being, yeah. A proton can be without hydrogen, but not vice versa, right? But is a proton before hydrogen in our knowledge? No, it's after our knowledge, right? So the order in the discourse of reason is water, hydrogen, proton. The order in being is proton, hydrogen, water, you see? So these are really different senses, right? So notice sometimes something can be before in more than one of these senses, right? The same thing, right? But not always, right? So they're really distinct, what, senses, huh? Okay. Now, notice a similarity again between these two meanings here, though. Because when you carry the word before over, it's because this here in some ways like that meaning, right? And just as this can be without that, but not vice versa, right? So likewise, this can be known without that, but not vice versa. And you see it very much like in the example I took here first, because the square can be without the cube, but not vice versa. And the square can be known without the cube being known, but the cube can't be known without the square. So there's a similarity there in what? The order in knowing and the order in being, right? There's a likeness there, right? You've got two things and this... be without that, without vice versa, right? And this can be known without that, but not vice versa, huh? Okay? You can know quadrilateral without knowing what a rhombus is, right? But you can't know what a rhombus is without knowing what a quadrilateral is. There's a real likeness of one to the other, right? You need a likeness to that first meaning, because in the discourse of reason, there's something like, what? Motion, right? Now, the fourth sense that Aristotle gives is much more unlike the first three sentences, huh? And the fourth sense is the sense of what? Better, right? Before, in goodness, you might say. But in one word, the fourth sense is better, right? So I say to the students, I say, Chaucer comes before Shakespeare in English fiction. But all the critics put Shakespeare before Chaucer. Well, what sentence is Chaucer before Shakespeare? Yeah, because he's in the, I guess, 14th century, right? Shakespeare's in the 16th, 17th. But Shakespeare is what? Better. Better, right? Okay. But with the Greeks, Homer comes before, it seems, almost all the other poets, right? Maybe not Essiad, I guess, in question. But he's also, what? Better than all the rest, right? So we go back to the words of St. John the Baptist there about Christ, right? He who comes after me is before me and so on. Well, he's thinking of these different senses, right? Christ is coming after him in what? Christ is man in time, right? But he's before him in the sense of he's better, right? Now, when Aristotle is given those five, four senses, then he comes out and he gives another sense, a fifth sense, right? And you count, you know, four, this is a fifth sense. But I think it's something what could be mistaken, you call it the fifth sense, if you thought it comes down here in the order, right? I think it's kind of a distant cousin of this before and being, right? Because we speak of the effect as depending upon the cause, right? And what is before and being, right? Or what's after and being depends upon what is before and being, right? But as Aristotle points out, how can you strictly speaking speak of a cause without having an effect, right? So they seem to be together, right? The cause and effect is. By this sense here, something can be without the other, right? But not vice versa. And Aristotle gives an example here where the cause and effect are very much together. He says, it's true that you are sitting, right? Okay? What's the cause of that statement, you are sitting, being true? It's the person sitting. It's your sitting, right? Okay? But is there any time lapse between those two? Can you be sitting without that statement at the same time being true? And when I sit down, you know, it's false not to say I'm sitting, right? Can I sit down, and a little bit after I sit down it becomes true that I'm sitting? No. As soon as I'm sitting, that statement is true, right? Okay? And can that statement be true without my sitting? So it's a different sense than this sense of before and being, isn't it? Because here, the bricks can be without the brick wall, but the brick wall cannot be without the bricks, right? But here, you have cause and effect, right? But I can't be sitting without that statement being true, and that statement cannot be true without my sitting. And yet my sitting is a cause of the truth of the statement. Okay? I think it's very interesting when you apply this to God, right? Because it's important to see that God is before other things, both in being, and as a cause is before an effect, right? And some people, you know, thought that God's causality is something, you know, where creatures naturally follow from what God is, right? Spinoza, you know, compares it to, if you have a two, it naturally follows its God before, right? Okay? And if that was so, then the production of creatures would be something that God is no control over, right? It just falls on that, right? So it's important to see that God is before creatures, not only as a cause, before an effect, at least before them in being, right? He can be without them, and vice versa, right? And even if God had always created something, right, he would still be before in being, right? Just like, you know, that example I took of stabbing the word cat, right? All at once. See, it would still be before the word cat in being, right? But it's very clear, given that there's a beginning for the existence of creatures, right? They didn't always exist, right? That God is before in being, as well as a cause is before in effect, right? But to avoid the confusion of thinking that this fifth sense is fifth in order, right? I like to call this fifth sense the crowning sense, especially for the philosopher that's a crowning sense, because philosophy begins in wonder, right? And wonder is an actual desire to live the cause. So the philosopher, most of all, and ultimately, he wants to look before and after in the sense of cause and effect, right? And you can, you know, ask about some of these other senses here, you know. If this is better than that, why is this better than that, right? You know? If this is before that in knowledge, why is this before that in knowledge, right? You know, and so on, huh? This is kind of a crowning sense on the ultimate thing, huh? Now, I ask you my tone-twister question, I'd like to be a part of a big to be a comparison sort of thing. In what sense of before, right, does one sense of before come before another sense of before? It drives us crazy. In what sense of before, right, does one sense of before, one meaning of before, come before another meaning, right? This meaning comes before this, and this before that, and this before that, and so on. But in what sense of before does one meaning come before the other? No? Second? Third, yeah. The third, yeah. And the reason why is that we name things as we know them, right? We name things as we become aware of that. We don't have to know something well, we don't have to be aware of it in some way to name it, right? So, the order in naming follows the order in what? Knowing. And that's the third sense, huh? To this third sense, you reduce any before and after and know it, right? Let's go back to this sense here, huh? Now, did Shakespeare know all these senses of before, didn't he? I noticed in the, uh, if it all's well, it ends, well, he puns upon a meaning attached to this first sense, before, place, and this fourth sense, right? We tend to pun on the first and the last senses because they're the first apart. Oh, yeah. When I was a child, my mother would point this, I see, said the blind man, but he couldn't see at all, right? Well, Shakespeare puns upon before the place and before the better. It's a time when the young lady there who's, you know, not of nobility, but she's fallen in love with the countess's son, right? And the countess suspects, right? That she's a mother, you know? So she kind of forces the confession, right? And the count, the helma says, you know, well, then before you, she kind of needed to be the countess, right? I confess that, what, before you, it makes to heaven I love your son. As it shapes, the Therastautist says there, you know, that even common people will say, what, you come first with me, you know, meaning you're before the sincere, which I love more, right? Okay. It says there, you know, that even common people will say, well, you come first with me, you know, meaning you're before in a sense here, but you love more, right? So he says, then, you know, leading before you, right? I confess that after heaven, right? And before you, I love your son. So that's heaven, the son, and then the mother, right? Beautiful, though, see? You know, he sees that, huh? I was rereading over in Juliet, you know, and he makes the same point that one is not a number, but he makes it a love poem. I don't know how he does that. It's precision like that, but it doesn't seem to serve any poetic reason, you know, it kind of knows it's coming back. See, yes. What are you doing that for? Now, in what sense of before, and there's as many senses of after as there are before, in what sense of before and after does reason look before and after? All of them, you know. Even the humble historian is going to look before and after in all of these senses, right? And the historian is going to, first of all, try to arrange things chronologically, right? And then he's going to start to see, well, you had to have this before you could have had that, right? He's going to try to see cause and effect of events, right? Okay. And he's going to, obviously, in his knowledge, we'll have it before and after. He's going to say that this civilization or that, you know, it's better than that, right? He's going to look before and after in all of these senses, right? So reason looks before and after in all of these senses, right? The crowning sense is the one that God is in. Notice, if wisdom is the highest perfection of reason, you can see the connection between this definition and the fact that the wise man orders, first of all, right? Thomas gives that reason in the commentary that we gave you on the premium to the Nicomachean ethics, right? The quotes Aristotle in the premium to the physics, where Aristotle says that the wise man, right, orders all the rest, right? See, most of all, it's order. And Thomas gives us the reason that wisdom is the highest perfection of reason. It's property of reason to no order, right? But Thomas also, in that text, he divides order in comparison to reason, right? He says there's the order which reason does not make, like the natural order, right? And then there's the order which reason makes in its own acts, which is one thing, in the acts of the will, and then in exterior matter, like the wood or the metal way. And then he divides the knowledge of reason on the basis of which order it considers, right? So natural philosophy considers the order not made by reason, right? And metaphysics is also doing that. Logic is considering the order made by reason in its own acts, in its thoughts, in the words that signify its thoughts. And ethics is about the order that reason makes in the acts of the will, in consequent in our actions. And then what he calls the mechanical arts, the survival arts, right? Consider the order made in exterior matter, the art of carpentry and the metal working art and so on. So the fact that you can distinguish the knowledge of reason by the order it considers, right, is again a sign how much this is tied up with what reason is. And I sometimes say, if someone wanted to, you know, say there's a better definition of reason than the one given by Shakespeare, right? You'd have to look at before in this sense down here. So you'd have to use his reason in the way Shakespeare defines reason in order to find something better. Or if he says there's some definition of reason that should come before this, in our knowledge, you'd have to look before this sense, right? So in a way, it's kind of a sense, right? He's looking for something already admitting that this is what Shakespeare says. So Shakespeare belongs to glory, huh, of giving us, I think, the first definition of reason. But notice, this is an example of a discourse, because we've been defining it, right? We're coming to know distinctly what reason is through ability and through discourse, through large, right? Through looking and through before, right? We have to stop at each one of those words and say, what do you mean by discourse? What do you mean by large? What do you mean by looking? What do you mean by before, right? And then you see them all for a while. But from those things, you can really come to understand much more fully and distinctly what reason is. So Aristotle or St. Thomas never gave a definition of reason? Not like this, no, no. No, but I noticed in the Dhyana there that Aristotle, he doesn't originally call reason noose, which means understanding, right? He calls it the Dhyanoidike ability, right? Which is knowing one thing to another. Oh, yeah, okay, I see. So it's good. And in those pages, I don't know if you reproduce those ones for the introduction to logic there, but the one from the postural analytics of Aristotle, right, has the same word he uses to describe reason in the Dhyana. Oh, right. Okay. Because we're going to have all Aristotle's works, you know, huh? Oh, okay. But you can piece these things together. I don't know why Shakespeare has that, I mean, I don't know why, or why so wise. Yeah. Because generally speaking, a man is not a good philosopher and a good poet. They're just sort of different. You know, Shakespeare himself said, the Dhyanaidike, the lover and the madman, all compact of imagination. He speaks, you know, compares a poet to the lover and the madman. They're all compact of imagination. But the two main exceptions in history to this are Plato and what, Shakespeare. Now, if I was going to classify it, I don't say he's a philosopher, but he has some poetic gifts that you see in the dialogues. Okay. If I was going to classify it in Shakespeare, I'd say we need a playwright. Right. You know, but he has some, you know, desirable gifts on him. And you're very unusual people, those two guys, you know. Yeah. Now, just to maybe compare a little bit with the agitation now, having defined reason, then you can define man and beast, right? It says man is an animal with reason, right? And the beast is an animal without reason, right? But now, this is an exhortation, which means an urging, right? You're urging people to use reason, right? And Shakespeare's telling us what reason is and what it is to use reason, right? Because he defines reason by what it's built before, and that's the use of reason. Large discourse. But he also touches upon about five reasons why we should use our reason, or use it more than we do, right? Okay. Now, these five reasons could be divided into three, right? To look at what's above man, look at what's below man, and look at man himself, right? Or if one uses the word before and after, you know, before man, look after man, and man himself. Okay. So, what's above man is God, right? What's below man is the beast. Of course, man himself, right? Okay. Now, what reason does he give for using reason in comparison to the beast? I think it's reason, but we know more than the beast. Now, you fall to the level of a beast, right? Okay. That's a darn good reason for using reason, right? Okay. So, if one does not use reason, one falls to the level of a beast. One of five, very good reasons, right? Now, in regard to what is above man, he gives two most excellent reasons.