Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
Lecture 52: Three Fundamental Distinctions and Common Philosophical Fallacies

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But another place he gives you there is to look at the word in combination, right? So when you see a liberal politician and liberal arts, if you define the whole and then drop politician and arts, you wouldn't have the same thing left, would you? Liberal arts are arts that are pursued for their own sake, just for the sake of knowing, right? Whatever politician is a politician who sells other people's money. You know, you need a politician who follows the left there. Right? The fouls are left and it wouldn't be the same if you drop politician now, right? And what you have left if you drop arts, right? So this is where you might look to see that the word has more than one meaning, right? The places you have it are on of where you might look to find an argument, a probable argument in this manner, right? See, even independent of the places, you can see the four tools would help you to construct these arguments, right? If you're able to select probable premises, and you can select eyes from probable premises, right? And if you're able to see differences in likeness, you have these spaces. So that wouldn't really be right to say some books on dialectic and on the rhetoric when he's giving you all these places. It looked to me that he was giving you just a more universal way. I think you would say that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't know if that expresses entirely the use of the place, right? I think it's better to push it concretely at first, you know, saying it's where you look to find an argument, right? And you go there, you might not find an argument, right? And I can, you know, compare it to something, you know, like, you know, people like me wear glasses sometimes, and you can't find your glasses, right? Okay. Or somebody can't find my keys in the morning, right? Because we usually hang them up, you know, and we're supposed to hang them up and come in the house, you know, and I have a slot for Dwayne, and then I'm the first slot, and then mostly he's the second, and my son's up there, right? You keep it, they're hung in that thing, you know? And especially if you borrow somebody else's keys, for some reason, you know, this car, whatever it is, you should be turned that and you get in trouble with me, you know? Okay, so it's kind of a house rule, but people will sometimes come in and answer telephone and set their keys down someplace, right? And they're in a hurry or something, and they'll go back in a hurry, wherever it be, that breaks their routine, and then they can't find it the next morning, right? And, but there's some places you might look, right? Where you might have left it, right? And we always say, well, think where you might have left it. Where were you? Sometimes I might even look at my pants, and then I change my pants or something, right? And I can't find anywhere. I go in the closet and it's still in the pants, right? In the pocket there, right? So a number of places I might look where it might be, and maybe you'd only, like in this case, only one of those places could it actually be, right? I don't look at every place, but there's some place where I would look at. So there's something like that, right? In fact, you're trying to find that logical argument, huh? Where would you look, huh? And Aristotle actually has kind of a more general thing there in the Paralyptics, right? Where you look to find the syllogism, right? So you look at the definitions of the things that you're looking to find what term for, right? And their properties, right? The things that they fall upon, the things that fall upon them, right? When you compare, and you see if there's a, what? Something common, right? Right, okay. So in a sense, he's getting some very general things about the syllogism, right? Where to find these things, huh? But the more proper it is to the thing you're considering, the more you're starting to go away from dialectic and towards that demonstration, right? So now I was thinking that comedy moves the passions that are contrary to the ones that tragedy moves us to, right? I was proceeding more dialectically, right? The ones I was taught by Thomas what the principal passions were, right? And I was closer to what? Demonstration, right? See, then I'm down to something more, what? More proper to the passions themselves, right? Because in a way, boldness arises from hope, right? Because I have the hope of victory over my life that I approach boldly, right? And it's because I fear something that I, what? Despair, right, huh? If you have the fear of the Lord and the hope in the Lord, you would, what? Kind of despair, right? It's not your fear, because you're sinfulness, huh? But if you had, you know, the hope without the fear, you'd get probably, or a confident time, bold, right? Security is mortal's chiefest enemy, which is, say, in Macbeth, right? But he'll hold his hopes above, what do you say, above fear, above grace, different things, right? Then he ends up going, security is mortal's chiefest enemy, right? Security, there's a sense of what? Or confidence, huh? Openness, huh? Very true. And our child says, that's what a young man is deceived more than the older man, right? Because he's full of all kinds of hope, right? All these things, as a young man, we hope to accomplish, you know? All these hopes we have when we enter this or that aspect of life, right? And in most cases, things don't turn on exactly what we hope they would, you know? And we were deceived, kind of, you know, full of hope, you know? Quantum physicists, you know, to the successful completion, you might say, of quantum theory, you know, they would feel such hope, you know, they've got to go in and corrupt old biology, easy quantum theory, you know? All these things, you know? I mean... You make one, you know, great accomplishment in philosophy or science, whatever it is, and then you get kind of bold, you know? And all the doors are going to come crashing down, you know, and all the difficulties, you know? And then there's always some other difficulties on our question, you know? But it's best, you know, in the beginning way, to concentrate on these four tools, you know, the time idea of, especially, of course, in Dalek, you know, I just work with the four tools, right? They're so basic, right? Exercise yourself in using these four tools even without, you know, knowing explicitly all the places, right? You can remember them more. I mean, as I say, I gave a whole, one time, a whole senior seminar there in philosophy just on sea proportions, you know? And it's amazing how important they are and how often they come up, you know? I remember one time in the Worcester newspaper, you know, they were talking about, you know, exams they're giving, you know, hiring people in the industry, you know? You know? In business. And they're giving an example of one of the tests, and it was all based on proportions. And I guess sometimes in these IQ tests, too, they have a lot of proportions, right? They say A is to B is X is to, you've got to check off the right one, right? And because it's really, you know, gauge of intelligence, right? And you kind of see it as you read through the botanic dialogue. simply without qualification. Accidental being is being in a, what, limited and qualified way. Now, you can see that, right? This is an example I was given in class, I'd say. If you leave this room, you're going to cease to be. Doesn't that sound like a threat? Now, if you bring me to court for threatening my students, I'd purpose this. Well, all I meant was, if you left the room, he would cease to be in the room. Mr. Burkens, no one would understand that remark, right? It's different. When I walked into this room this afternoon, did I come to be? In a certain sense. Yeah, you want to qualify it, though, right? I came to be when my mother and father conceived me or something, right? Okay? Did you see that? When I die, I will cease to be. My soul will go on, but I will cease to be, right? I won't be around until the resurrection, then. Okay? When I leave this room, I don't think I'll cease to be. At least I hope not. But I will cease to be in this room, right? In the same way, the other distinction of being and to act and ability, right? When you have a pile of lumber, do you have a wooden house? An ability, you could say, but you wouldn't say you have a wooden house without qualification, would you? A pile of bricks is a brick wall, right? An ability. You wouldn't say it's a brick wall, period, would you? Simply without qualification, huh? So, the fundamental distinctions of being, into substance and accident and into act and ability, they are distinctions of this kind, right? So, understanding that kind of distinction helps you to know what kind of mistake is being made, right? But seeing the danger of this kind of mistake there, and you may know in other places, makes you, what, aware of the importance of that distinction, right? And there's no kid's play to avoid that, right? And you see people making that mistake all day long, right? Now, suppose that door over there, you can't see through. Suppose somebody knocked at the door, okay? And I say to the student now, do you know who's knocking at the door? He says, I don't know, I don't know, right? The door over there, we open the door, and it's your mother. You said you didn't know who's knocking at the door, right? But it's your mother knocking at the door. So, you don't even know your mother, right? Well, now, what's the fallacy in that, huh? I can prove to you that you don't know your mother. Is that, in a way, of overlooking this distinction or not? I don't know this mother as the one knocking at the door. Yeah, in a qualified way, right? You don't know your mother, right? You don't know your mother as the one knocking at the door. You know your mother. Period, right? But you don't know your mother as the one knocking at the door. In some ways, she's unknown to you, right? Now, again, there might seem to be, in that same example, something of the accidental, too, right? Because to be knocking at the door is something that happens to your mother, right? And notice, when I was talking about substance and accident, and act and ability, and talking about the distinction here, right? But also, you can say that substance and accident are two meanings of the word being, right? And to be an act and to be an ability are two meanings of the word to be, too, right? So, you can have, you know, more than one of these, what, distinctions and more than one of these, what, fallacies, huh? Okay? And you see some of the Greek philosophers, they'll think that whatever comes out of matter is already in matter, right? Well, they're confusing two sentences of to be in. To be in matter and to be in place, right? What is in place is actually in there, right? What is in matter is only there in what? Ability. So, in a big slab of marble, right? There is the Pietas, huh? The Pietas out here. Okay? Inability, right? Okay? But this table is in this room, right? In a different way than the Pietas is in a rough slab of marble that hasn't been shaped yet, right? By my poangel, right? Okay? So, you can say it's confusing two sentences of to be in, right? The way in which something is said to be in a place and the way something is said to be in a, what? In matter, right? I've got you in my power. There's another sense of being in. In fact, there's eight senses of being in. And people often confuse those, right? Okay? But, you could also say that in thinking of these things as being actually in matter, right? Why they're only, what? In matter, in ability. They're confusing, what? Being simply and being in some way. So, it's possible that you have more than one kind of mistake, right? And more than one kind of distinction involved almost in the same, what? Matter, right? It's the same thing you're talking about. Yeah, well, usually you see in the Latin, simpicitere and secundum quid. Haplos in Greek, huh? But it's a little bit hard, you know, even to, you know, to get a hold of what this is at first, right? You have to go through a mini example and you have kind of a sense of what this kind of distinction is, right? But understanding this kind of distinction is made over a philosophy. If you look at every part of philosophy and you see this kind of distinction is being made all the time. But this kind of mistake could be made over the place too by the unwary, huh? So, this belongs to the mistakes which are in the things themselves. Yeah. Not in language, right? Yeah, yeah. So, is abortion something good or bad? What is it? It's taking the life of a innocent human being. So, that's bad, right? Okay? But enables somebody to continue their career or enable somebody to finish their college education uninterrupted. So, in some very diminished sense, it's what? Good, right? So, people are choosing what is bad because in some very, what? Imperfect way, it's what? Good, right? You annoy me, so I'm going to murder you, huh? Good to get rid of annoyance in your life, right? Something annoying you're going to get rid of it, isn't it? Huh? See? You annoy me, so... As far as I can see, it's good to get rid of you. I mean, that's really what we're... What's going on, right? People are choosing something bad, like abortion, or murder somebody, somebody, because in some very diminished sense, it's good. Robbing the bank, because it's what money is. Bank robber said things, really what his name was. Or else, they're not doing what is good, because it's what? It's uncomfortable to study, isn't it? Makes me restless, studying or something. Isn't it also true that some things are bad as such, but may appear to be good? Yeah. Yeah. But again, you see, when a man chooses the bad, it's not as bad, but because in some ways it's good or because there's an appearance of good, right? See? But then it's really the, you know, I always take the example there. My wife tells me of some Italian relatives she had, and one of the relatives that came more from Italy, and he was a self-proclaimed expert on mushrooms, and they gathered mushrooms and had some big Italian feast, and ended up always in their stomachs, because, see, now, did they desire poisonous mushrooms, right? No, no. They desired the good mushrooms, right? But they wanted to eat these mushrooms because they appeared to be the good ones. So they desired the bad because it appears to be good, or because of the good that's in it, but not because it's bad. People sin so they can go to hell? That's why you sin? What about it? You sin because I'm paltry good, right? So as I said, I'd like to emphasize those three kinds of mistakes, most of all, the mistake from mixing up the senses of a word, right? The mistake from mixing up the as-such and the accidental, and the mistake from mixing up the what is so simply, what is so in some imperfect and limited and diminished sense, huh? Okay? Because of how common those three kinds of mistakes are, right? And they're such important mistakes, I mean, such dangerous mistakes, you could say, but also because they correspond to three kinds of distinction that are so fundamental to philosophy, huh? So we're going to philosophy of nature next time, then, huh? Okay. I'm going to give you, um, I think I've got about eight copies of what you need, about eight copies. I think I've got eight here. Okay. What? Okay. Eight here. Okay. Um, so you could be reading over reading one here, right? And we may get, uh, through that, right? Next time. And I remember a, um, when I was in graduate school, right, um, you can go in the library and they have, uh, bound editions of doctoral theses that people have written before your time, right? And so, as a student, people would often go there and look at these bound, uh, copies, doctoral theses, and, uh, they might look at them, you know, because they're going to write doctoral theses themselves and want to see exactly how it's done, you know, a little bit of a little bit, or because you're interested in the topic of this person's doctoral thesis, right? Here's a doctoral thesis just on, on these words here. Of course, I was interested in them, so I, I read the doctoral thesis, but I didn't think he did justice to it, right? So if a man can write a doctoral thesis, which is a major undertaking, uh, on just, uh, these words, right, we can, uh, take some time to try to understand those words, right? Okay? And, uh, I know myself, I first studied these words with the, when I was a student at the College of St. Thomas with my teacher, Kisirik, and so on, and I had read these words many times, and Thomas has commented on it many times, and so I said to myself, well, if there's anything I know, it's this. And when I got to the vault, I kind of was lecturing on this here, um, of course, that is there for the first year students, and I said, well, now when I went to class, I said to myself, now let's see if he says something that I don't understand, uh, because sometimes professors just read the book first, right? And, uh, uh, sure enough, huh, it kind of really gave me a much deeper understanding of this, huh? Okay? Well then, um, after a couple of years, my brother Mark calls me up on the phone, and he needs somebody at St. Mary's for a while, so I interrupted my graduate studies and went out to teach for three years at St. Mary's College. And of course, I was teaching the philosophy of nature every semester or so, and you teach something, you learn better, right? So then I came back to Laval, right, after three years of teaching this now, and then talking once in a day on, I began to realize something else at NC, right? You know? But Taconic had been teaching, you know, these things from the 1930s, you know, on, and I met him in the six, or three out of six, well, 58, which was the first year I was up there. And, uh, so he had been teaching these for, you know, maybe 30 years almost, right? And he said he still would see something new in them when he went through them again, right? And, uh, he'd be in class, you know, he'd be, uh, he'd be, uh, you know, at the country of Thomas, you know, and he'd read a little bit, you know, and then he'd stop, and he'd go, and he'd explain how this modern philosopher misunderstood this, and, you know, and he'd go on, you know? So, I mean, um, went to make a whole excursion and a few words that he says here, right, huh? And see how, how universal importance it is, right? So, um, um, but you want to first do a, you know, basic reading of the text, right? But then you want to, you know, kind of go off the text and make an excursion where you see the universal importance of these things and other things about them. So, uh, I still remember Dick Connick, you know, he'd teach these things, right? He'd come down the hall, you know, and he kind of was kind of a short man, I mean, you know, wasn't too tall, you know? He'd come down the hall, and I'd be standing there in the hall waiting for class, you know? And I'd say, isn't this wonderful, you know? But you could see the man was filled with wonder, and I know he'd been through this, you know, 30, 40 times, you know, in class, and I don't know how many times in his office and so on, right? He had more wonder than anybody in the class, right? I say, you're supposed to be wondering because something is new to him, you know? I mean, to him, I mean, it's just, you know, amazing, you know, to see that wonder, huh? And, uh, and so, you'd be honest, I could be down with his text, you know, a whole semester, you know, and, you know, and, you know, he'd go, you know, and, you know, he'd go, that's your, you know, you see? You know, so, there's something, you know, there's something that you get from, you know, seeing when these great minds are, you know, kind of expound, you know, an even greater mind, you know, and, boyahoo! It's just amazing to see that, huh? So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of funny, you know, because, uh, some people, you know, they kind of measure how much you've seen in a chorus, but how many words you've read, huh? I'm going to write a few pages with you, you know? But, uh, but when you make, you know, some of these excursions, you begin to realize how this little is a seed of so many things, huh? Okay? So read the first page, and maybe look at the second page of this, I mean, as far as it is, well, get it the most, right, huh? Okay? Okay?