Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 8: The Natural Road, Rhetoric, and the Mathematics-Nature Distinction

Transcript
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That ties up with that old prayer to the garden angel, huh? Oh, yeah. You know, he's explaining some kind of confusion that people have, and then, what if someone rightly considers? Okay, so you're all masters now of the first road in our knowledge, huh? That's something you can look at from time to time, you know, because it kind of organizes and outlines the whole thing. Now, why does a philosopher follow that natural road, huh? I can give at least four reasons why he follows that natural road, why he should. One reason, of course, is that he's a man. That is to say, he's an animal with reason. So it's natural for him to follow this road, because he's a man. Secondly, you could say that all of our knowledge is over that road. It has to be, since the road is from the senses into reason. The knowledge that we have is either in the senses or in reason, so it's got to be over that road. But then, as philosopher, as a lover of wisdom, he follows this road, because, as Heraclitus teaches us, wisdom is to speak the truth and to act in accord with nature, giving ear thereto. And finally, he could say that this is also the road to wisdom. You see, the one Aristotle describes it, huh, that the animals that have sensation seem wiser than the plants. They don't have sensation. But the animal that has memory... And the botanical arts are about the arts, the order that reason makes an exterior matter. But, when you come to what is called rhetoric, Aristotle says that rhetoric, which is defined as the art of persuasion, he says that's an offshoot. It's an offshoot of dialectic, and therefore logic in some way, because there's an argumentative aspect to it, and it's also an offshoot of political philosophy, and of ethics in a way, huh? Well, because you persuade men, not just by the arguments or parent arguments you give them, but you persuade them by your image of a man of foresight, a man of justice, a man of character, you know. And you have to know about these things from ethics in political philosophy. And you don't talk to people in different kinds of government, different kinds of political constitutions, in the same way. When I was young, I was interested in politics in high school and so on, and, you know, I was into speeches and so on, making speeches. And I went back and I started reading Demosthenes' speeches, huh? Because I paid for it, you know, Demosthenes, and so on. And I was reading Demosthenes' speeches, and he's making fun of his opponent, right? Because he came up the hard way. He scrubbed benches when he was a kid. I said, gee, would that be a lousy rhetoric nowadays, huh? But if you came up, you know, if you scrubbed benches as a kid, you were a nobody. You were ill-born, huh? You know, you're kind of a slavish origin, huh? You see? But in America, we admire the self-made man, huh? The man who started with nothing, much more than the man who was born with, you know, wealthy or something, huh? The man who had to, you know, struggle to open the world, huh? But for Demosthenes, you had to struggle to open the world. That meant that you were ill-born, that you were, you know, you'd come from trash alongside of the road, and so... Well, you see, you have to understand, you know, whether this is a democracy or an aristocracy, right? And the rhetoric that would work in one, if Demosthenes was the greatest of the Greek orators, or whatever, anyway, you know, why would he be so flat today? Well, because you've got to know who he's speaking to, huh? And, you know, sometimes they follow politicians around and record them. You know, if I'm talking to a bunch of businessmen, and then I go and I talk to a labor union guy, you know, you don't talk the same way to these people. And so you have to kind of adapt yourself, right? You don't talk the same way, you know, under this kind of government, under that kind of government. And I'm reading... of Edmund Burke recently, you know, where he speaks in the 18th century where Edmund is still not so democratic. Some people want to make the House of Commons more democratic, and this is going to destroy the New Constitution, you know. So, so anyway, rhetoric is kind of a mixed thing there. It's an offshoot of dialectic, of logic in a way, because it has arguments, but also it's an offshoot of ethics and political philosophy because these talk about character and virtue and they talk about the emotions and so on, and the virtues are concerned with different emotions. In the art of persuasion, I persuade people partly by my arguments, but more so by the image I project of myself as a man, you know, who knows what he's talking about, a man who has your good in mind, a man who you know, this and this and so on. And by the way, I move your emotions and whatever your prejudices are, and by the way I appeal to your your customs. So that this is a very powerful art with the Greeks. And we can kind of see how powerful the art of persuasion was, even in those great men, St. Augustine and St. Jerome, who were both trained in the art of what? Rhetoric, huh? And, you know, the famous vision of Christ, where he's supposed to, Christ is supposed to have said to St. Jerome, you know, are you a Christian or a Ciceronian? Make up your mind, you know. And St. Augustine says, when you read the Confessions, when he first picked up the Bible, he found it unworthy to be compared to Cicero, and this beautiful style, Cicero, and so on. And then I didn't appreciate the Bible, but, I mean, you know, he noticed how important that art was. And when Aristotle gives a little history of the art there, it began in the Greek cities of Sicily, when they threw out the tyrants, and they had a democratic form of government, and then advancement and power dependent upon your ability to persuade a crowd. Well, the crowd doesn't follow in an elaborate, you know, intricate argument, huh? You need these, you know. Aristotle says, sometimes an educated man succeeds better with the crowd than the professor, because the professor goes way back to fundamental principles and they used them before. So our politicians, you know, they talk about, you know, economic values who don't keep an economic selection, do they? They have lost all their audiences if they were one to do, and the economy still is too, huh? To make his predictions. So, but it's an option of two different kinds of order. The order which reason makes in its own acts and its own thoughts and we signify those thoughts, logic in a way, and it's an offshoot of the order which reason makes in our will and our emotions and in our actions, huh? In the city. So it's kind of a mixed thing, you know, it's a paraphuis. But modern experimental science is a paraphuis of what? Natural philosophy or natural science and mechanical artists. And the oldest part of modern science is in what we call today physics. And what's the fundamental part of physics? What it's called? The part that Galadiel and Kepter and... Mechamics? Mechamics, yeah. See? Well, those... That goes back to the word, the Greek word for nature, phusis. And mechanics, we saw, Thomas using that, the mechanical arts. That's the union of what? Natural science and technical science that's reflected in the words. This one comes from nature and this one here comes from the technical arts, the mechanical arts, the servo arts, they're called. They're two different ways, mechanical or servo arts. But these are the arts that transform matter in some way. So there's a union of natural science and technical science which really begins strongly in the 17th and 18th century. And so developments in mechanical arts help us to perform experiments that have been performed before, right? But then developments in theory, more in a theoretical aspect, suggest new inventions, and so on. So one helps the other. But it's a kind of intertwining. And you have to understand the theory to understand how the instruments are presumably working, what they mean, what they're telling us, and vice versa. So you have really an offshoot of natural and technical science. You have kind of an offshoot of the study of natural things and of artificial things. By the fact, The philosophy of nature is more like a purely natural knowledge, huh? Besides make comparisons to the art, but it's not really like a union like the way experimental science is. And, you know, Kant was one of the first philosophers who really saw this, huh? You know, if you look at the second preface, the critique of pure reason there, he sees that, huh? But he's seeing that nature here knows, I mean, not nature, but man knows here only what he in some way makes. And then Karl Marx, you know, he develops that idea in the thesis on Feuerbach, huh? But he generalizes that. See, if you take the experimental sciences as being the only reliable knowledge of the natural world, well, then we have no knowledge of the natural as natural anymore. We only have the naturals in some way transformed by our instruments. And therefore we know only what we ourselves have made in some way. And man is the beginning and the end of everything he makes. And we know only what we make in some way. Therefore... See, when you take those four orders that Thomas distinguishes, right? The first order he talks about is the order not made by reason, huh? And the other order is the ones made by reason. But if the natural order becomes, what, kind of an artificial order, an order made by man, then you've closed the circle. Man is enclosed in a world entirely of his own making. And that's what Karl Marx does, huh? Well, then he's the beginning and the end of all he makes. Yes. And therefore he seems, and he only knows what he makes. Therefore he's the beginning and the end of all he knows. He's God. I am the Alpha and the Omega, he says. That's it, right? You know? Because we've got horrible consequences if you see, or if you think that experimental science is the only knowledge there is of the natural world. This is science. It's not reliable stuff. And then you realize, I mean, the nature of this knowledge, right? That it is, in a way, knowing what you make. And there's another making there too, you know, the mathematics, you know, that we make, like I was quoting the great Niels Bohr, right? Reduce it to order. He didn't say find an order there, right? But reduce it to order, huh? The mathematics is made by us, and then we bring that in to order these other things. In order to, order these other things, we have to, you know, experiment on them, and that's also something artificial. Someone once said, you know, the trouble with modern man is he's trying to live entirely in a world of his own making. That's exactly our problem, right? Because a world of our own making is obviously inferior to us. So a world of our own making can never satisfy us. But if all we know is what we make, then we are trying to live in a world entirely of our own making. But that's necessarily inferior to us, huh? You know? The meaning, you know, of God rested, you know, from everything he had made in the seventh day was, he didn't find a satisfaction in the things he made, he found a satisfaction in himself, huh? But even we can't find a satisfaction ultimately in the things we make. Because they're obviously inferior to us if we're the beginning and the end of them. So this distinction between the natural and the artificial is important to see what natural philosophy is about, because it's about the natural and not the artificial, so you have to distinguish the two, right? But it's also important for understanding what experimental science is. Like, everything we do in this course, you know, is important for more than one reason, huh? Now, in the fourth paragraph, he says, whatever things have such a cause have a nature. That's obvious, right? And all of these are substances. Now, nature is what is first, huh? And substance is before everything else. And now, when he says nature is always a certain subject and any subject, he's hinting at the two meanings of nature, the active one and the passive one. And the subject is the passive one, the matter, and the active sense is the form in the subject. But when we go back to the first book, we'll see the distinction between matter and form, right? But he's hinting at that right here, huh? Now, the... The fifth paragraph is merely explaining how we use these words, huh? And notice how the expression natural or according to nature or by nature is more general than the expression has a nature. Now, let me explain a little comparison, too. Natural means, basically, by nature, or you could say according to nature. Now, has a nature, you could say that what has a nature is by nature, is according to nature, but is everything that is by nature or according to nature, does that have a nature? Well, think of Aristotle's example there. Tree, a tree, and the growth of a tree. Both of these could be said to be natural, the tree and its growth, right? They could both be said to be by nature, according to nature. You could also say that the tree has a nature, but does the growth of a tree have a nature? No, not as we define nature. But the growth of the tree is due to the nature of the tree, not to another nature inside the growth. So the expression has a nature and by nature, according to nature, are not identical in meaning, are they? So Aristotle, in the next paragraph, he says, you said then what nature is and what it is to have a nature, to have that kind of a cause, and what natural means, huh? So when he says that natural philosophy is about natural things, we mean it's only about things that have a nature? That it's about the tree and not about the growth of the tree? No. It's about both, right? So he's distinguishing nature, it has a nature, and by nature, according to nature. Okay? And did you see that distinction? And in some ways you can say that natural philosophy is more in a way about growth or about change in general than about what has a nature because nature loves to hide. And it's known only through what it does and so on, huh? So up front is more what changed itself and what we're going to be studying. Now notice this kind of distinction. We can make a distinction between art and what has an art and what is by art or according to art, huh? Okay? Take me, for example, right? Am I the art of logic? No, I'm not the art of logic. I might have some of the art of logic, right? But I'm not the art of logic. I'm very too. Okay? You see, there's a real difference there, right? Okay? Now, is everything that is by art, does it have an art? No. If I construct a, what, syllogism, right? Where the conclusion follows necessarily and so on. This is by the art of logic, maybe I do this. But does the syllogism itself have the art? No, I have the art. It doesn't have it. Or take the medical art, right? The medical art is one thing, right? The doctor, you see the medical art? No. What he might have is something of the medical art, right? But a medical procedure, does that have a medical art? The doctor has the medical art, the procedure doesn't have it. But the medical procedure is according to, huh? And it's by the art. You see that? So, you know, if he was talking about these things, he'd say, we've said what art is, and what it is to have an art, and what it is to be by art, but don't identify these, you know? In the same way we don't identify nature, and what has a nature, and what might be by nature, but doesn't have a nature. Although what has a nature could also be said to be by nature, maybe, huh? Okay? But not everything that is by nature has a nature. The growth of the tree is by nature, but it doesn't have a nature. The tree has a nature. But the growth of the tree is due to the nature of the tree. And the stock growing of the tree and gets to a certain height for its kind of tree is again due to the nature of that tree, the kind of tree it is. So he says in the next to the last paragraph then, what nature is then has been said, and what by nature and according to nature. And also he said what it means to have a nature, right? What's the last paragraph in this reading about? Well, someone might say, Aristotle, you violated what you yourself taught in the Posterior Analytics. In the Posterior Analytics, he teaches that there are four central questions. Does it exist? And if it does exist, then the question, what is it? And two other questions. Whether this is that, and if this is that, why is this that? Okay? So the question, does something exist, is before the question, what is it? Like in the Summa Theologiae, question two, does God exist, right? And after you show that God does exist, then you begin to ask, well, what is God, right? Okay? Well, he's been asking up to this point and determining, in a way, what nature is, but he never took up the question, does nature exist, right? And tried to show that nature does exist. Now, the reason why he didn't do that is that it's, what? It's obvious or known to itself that nature exists, huh? So the fact that we see, in my example there, the tree and the stone, with the same sun, rain, soil, one grows and the other doesn't, right? In the garden, right? You know? I clear the garden, and I've got the same dirt, more or less, over the garden, and then I add kind of a common fertilizer and mix it in there, right? And then I plant the row of broccoli and the row of lettuce, right? And I keep it watered, and so on. Up comes broccoli, up comes lettuce. It's due to something within those seeds, that broccoli comes up here and lettuce comes up there, isn't it? Because they have the same sun, the same water every day, the same soil, the same fertilizer, right? I told you one time, you know, I looked down at broccoli, and one of the things came up, instead of green, it came up white. I said, Rosie, is that, my wife, is that a mutant? Or what? Have I discovered something? But I suspected right away it was going to be cauliflower, and sure enough, I went out to look at it. It was cauliflower, yeah? But I think that cauliflower seed got accidentally into the broccoli seed. I don't think that broccoli seed became cauliflower. I don't think that broccoli seed became cauliflower. But no, it's obviously an experience, right, with the same exterior things, like the stone and the, you know, you've got the iron grate there, the stone and the wood, the one burns, and it doesn't burn with the same fire, I'm looking at them both. So it's obvious that there are causes of change within things, right? So if you try to prove that, you'd be thinking you didn't know what you didn't know. And that's lackable, he says, right? If you try to prove the obvious, what is there to prove it by, except what is not obvious? And isn't that lackable to try to prove the obvious by what is not obvious? To try to prove what is known to itself, but what is not known to itself, huh? So he says, it would be laughable to try to prove that nature exists, for it is obvious that there are many such things among the things that are. To prove the obvious to what is not obvious belongs to one who can't separate what is known to itself from what is not known to itself, huh? Now that it is possible to undergo this is not unclear. A man blind from birth might syllogize about colors so as to have reason about names while understanding nothing. And that's the example he gives there, right? The man blind from birth doesn't really know what colors is, but he talks about what he doesn't know as if he did know it. While the man who tries to prove that nature exists, he's talking about what he does know as if he didn't know it. Now why does Aristotle manifest it by the opposite example? That's the way he's reasoning, huh? Suppose, huh? It's like this. Suppose someone makes a mistake of thinking that a man... He is a what? Woman, huh? Suppose you say Michael Jackson, right? Okay, and you think he's a woman, right? He didn't make that mistake, right? Okay. Now, if someone does in fact make that mistake, could someone else possibly make the reverse mistake of thinking that some woman is a man? Okay? You can see how you can go from one to the other because if you make the mistake of thinking a man is a woman, it's because, in some case at least, you can't tell them apart, right? But if you can't tell them apart, you can make the mistake going in the reverse direction, huh? Okay? Now, Aristotle is saying that the man who tries to show that nature exists, he's taking something he knows, something that's obvious to him, and he's thinking that it's, what? Not knowing. That's why he's going to try to prove it. Okay? And he says that someone can make the mistake of thinking that something he knows he doesn't know is shown by the fact that men sometimes think they know what they don't know. But isn't it more known to us? It's more common, this kind of a mistake, than that. And Socrates, who came before, is famous for finding out that men are in this position all the time. They think they know what they don't know, right? Well, if men can make that mistake, you can make the reverse mistake. You make this mistake because sometimes it's hard to separate the two. And therefore, you can make a mistake going either way, right? If somebody could think that Budweiser is Miller, then some would make a mistake of thinking Miller is, what? Budweiser, right? But this is more known, this is more frequent. And you just say, most men are making this mistake, but many thinkers make the opposite mistake. They're trying to avoid this. They're trying to avoid claiming to know what they don't know. and they go to the opposite extreme and say they don't know what they do know. And this is the characteristic of the modern philosophers. My old teacher at the Surrey, I was teaching the modern philosophy course, and a student comes to the class one day and says, how do you argue with someone who says that material things don't exist? And Surrey's reply was, kick him in the ass. And it wasn't just a jocular reply, it was very precise. Because if your senses don't convince you that material things exist, it's stupid to try to argue, because the senses are closer to these things than your reason is. And if the senses touch you, the most certain of all senses are going to convince you. So the modern philosophers very often, and thinkers, they end up thinking they don't know what they do know. And so they deny the obvious, as if they didn't know what they do know, and they already try to prove, right? Immanuel Kant says, it's a scandal that philosophers have not been able to prove the existence of the external world. But the scandal is that they should have tried to prove the existence of the external world. The scandal is that they all thought they didn't know what they did know. You know, Bishop Barclay here, I don't know if he didn't know Bishop there, right? He thinks that, what, Mattick doesn't exist, right? So I used to say, well, even Bishop Barclay opens the door to his study before he tries to leave. So notice, in order to really make, to go forward, you have to distinguish what you know from what you don't know, right? And either kind of mistake is going to be fatal to the life of the mind. Whether you think you know what you don't know, or you don't know what you do know. If you think you know what you don't know, you won't bother to investigate it, right? What you do know. If you think you don't know what you do know, you have nothing to use to know anything. So, you can see Aristotle's common sense here. But it's very important that he sees this, huh? Okay? I guess we have to stop now, really, huh? Five after five. Now, next time we're going to look at reading three here, right? Okay? And there, Aristotle's going to be distinguishing between the natural and the mathematical. In the reading we just had, the natural and the artificial, nature and art. But, in this third reading, he's going to show there's a difficulty about this, right? And he's going to propose a solution, and then he's going to prove the solution is correct. He's also going to touch upon the central question of philosophy. Which is really a question for the wise men, but he touched upon it here, so we'll touch upon it. Now after that, we're going to, before we look at Aristotle again, we're going to look at the first natural philosophers. And so, I'll give you a ten copy of this again. Ten in here, right? Okay. So we're going to do that third reading, and then, before going back to Aristotle, we're going to look at the first philosophers. We call this here the natural fragments of the first philosophers. I might mention as a point of fact there, that for the philosophers before Plato and Aristotle, we have no complete work behind that. All we have is, what, fragments, and usually preserved in the form of quotes from later authors and so on. And the German scholars with their, you know, their, their, uh, scholariness, uh, they would go and gather all these, right? And one of the most famous one, of course, is the Diels Kronz, uh, Diels originally in the Kronz, huh? So, I have a copy of the Diels Kronz in my office there, it's in Greek, you know, you get all the Greek fragments, huh? And they give them a number, but the number has no significance, it's just a way of referring to a particular fragment, huh? Um, now there are, I've made a number of collections of these fragments, but, uh, these are what I would call the natural fragments, the fragments in natural philosophy, huh? Mm-hmm. Okay? And we're going to look at these, and then go back to Aristotle and see how he proceeds from them, huh? Okay? And in reading these men, um, we don't read them as being the truth, we read them as, as nevertheless making reasonable guesses, huh? Mm-hmm. And here we're going to be introduced to the, what, the second road in our knowledge, huh? Which is the road of reason as reason. And that's the road from reasonable guesses towards reasoned-out knowledge, huh? We're going to go through the reasonable guesses of these philosophers before Aristotle, and then we're going to see how that gradually leads to the beginning of reasoned-out knowledge in, uh, in Aristotle, huh? Okay, let's see how that, how that's done, huh? Okay? But these are very important, these natural fragments, but you have, you know, other collections of these fragments that I've made, you know, like the ethical fragments or, you know, fragments on, on method and so on, and I have the natural theology fragments too, which are very interesting, you know. But these are the, perhaps, the most basic ones, the natural fragments. And so we're going to talk about that, but we'll talk about that again after we do the third reading in Aristotle. Okay? But in the second reading of the first book of natural hearing, Aristotle begins with a logical division of everything that they say. And then we'll see the dilemma that leads you in, and then how Aristotle goes forward, huh? But, uh, we'll, uh, do readings with me first. Okay? Here you go back to the very beginning of philosophy, and it's also regarded as the beginning of natural science. Einstein says we reverence ancient Greece, huh? As the cradle of Western science. Heisenberg goes back very often to them, huh? Mm-hmm. And, uh, other scientists have talked about this, uh, science is a Greek way of looking at things. No one has ever had science as in Concordia the Greeks, they say. So they have great to respect some of them. Greets. Okay, now that this is my extra paper here. Are you an ear or a nose? I'm getting a whack. So the higher things, are you actually understanding them when Thomas or Aristotle explains them, huh? It's at the end of the honeymoon period. The first one is going to be. Get back the, the zero, you know? What is the, which sense of in is the definition of nature? I'm saying more than one sense. What, it's in a subject, you mean that sense? Yeah, the third part of the encircling in that in which it is. Well, I suppose it'd be I suppose it'd be. I suppose it'd be. I suppose it'd be. I suppose it'd be. I suppose it'd be. I suppose it'd be. Well, generally, it resembles, it seems like a part and a whole, right? But then when you talk about form and matter, then you have the other sense there, too, of form and matter. But you know the proportion Aristotle has that matter is to form as parts are to the whole. Parts are like matter. But then form becomes more like the whole, form and matter. The whole soul is in each part of the body. Things that they see, right? That's very hard for us to understand, you know, because you want to try to picture the soul or imagine the soul. You know, I think I talked to you about the four senses of part and the four senses of whole and the metaphysics. And what's interesting is that the sense in which what we call sensual parts matter and form are parts of the thing. That's in some ways it seems the one that escapes people the most. And if you look at Aristotle here in the first reading there, he talks about the sensible composed whole and the understandable composed whole. And there's really touching between senses of whole and part there, okay? The way in which maybe olive oil is a part of the salad dressing and the sense in which genus and difference are parts of the definition, right? Those are two different senses, right? And then he talks about the universal whole, when he talks about the general and the particular. He says the general is the particular, something like the whole is to the parts. So if the whole is more known than the parts than the general, right? We're talking about that a bit, right? We're talking about the general sensible, which is like that, right? But the kind of whole and part that doesn't appear there in all that is matter and form. But when he goes from a confused knowledge of what changes to more distinct knowledge, he's going to be coming to matter and form. So the one he's after most of all doesn't appear there in the beginning, right? It's just not so clear, right? Mm-hmm. And the other place where I noticed this in my thing there when I'm teaching the third book of Wisdom. And it's the Dalitual book there, the third book of Wisdom by the Physics. And when he gets to the point there where he's talking about getting to the beginning of things, Thomas points out that he has three opinions there and they correspond to three kinds of division. And, again, it's those three that we've mentioned already. In other words, you have to divide in order to get to, you know, take things apart to get to their beginning, right? Okay, well, and if you divide in the way in pedigrees divides, you end up with earth, air, fire, and water, let's say. But if you divide in the way we do when you define, you end up with the most universal. You know? If you define square and then you define quadrilateral and then you define earth, you know, you get something more universal all the time. But if you divide the way we divide genus into its species, you end up with the least universal. So, the question is, are the beginnings of things like earth, air, fire, and water, are they like body? Or like the least universal, huh? Well, the one he's really going to conclude to in the twelfth book of Wisdom is matter and form or act and ability. It doesn't even appear in the Dalai thing, right? See? Now, I ask myself, why is that so? Well, it's clear that if I've got one thing here and one thing here, they're not the same thing, right? If I can put one thing here and one thing there, it's easier to separate them, right? So, I mean, it's easier to see how, let's say, a man and a dog are two different things. You can put the dog in there and the man in there. But is the man and his shape two different things? Clear, right? And I can't put the man in there and his shape in there, right? Mm-hmm. But even if I divide a genus into a speech, that's kind of in the mind, it's kind of hidden to us, right? When I divide anyone into man and dog and cat and horse and elephant, I could put the man in one room, the dog in another room, the horse in another room. It's more clear, they're distinct, right? Parts of animal. And the definition of course of that's really maybe up in the mind, but the definition that we know more is the one in speech, and we can separate, you know, and put, you know, quadrilateral here and equilateral here and right-angled here, right? We can separate the words, right? But now, just take a very simple example of something like matter and form. Take the word cat, right? Can you put the letters here and you order them over here? Well, it's kind of hard to see, they do two different things, right? And therefore, it's the order you get to something that is much further removed from the senses than the order of the letters, right? Or an rubber ball. Can I put the rubber here and the shape over here? Right? Or at the end, it would be kind as a whole part. To some extent, I could put one here and one there, right? The mind doesn't really understand that very well, right? It has a hard time getting a hold of that, huh? And to say that the parts of the word cat are the letters and the order sounds kind of strange, doesn't it? The two parts? Not even two parts. I mean, the C-A-N-T are the parts of it. They can't see that the letters, in another sense of the word though, it is another sense of the word, that the letters and the order of them are the two parts of the word. Anyway. Sounds kind of strange, isn't it? They didn't even say that, huh? But in some ways, it's made up of those too, isn't it? In some sense, they're in a different sense. They're kind of a strange sense, huh? They say the tragedy and the comedy are the parts of drama. Well, I think we'll see a tragedy one week and comedy the next week or something, right? Or I can go read Hamlet and then go read The Comedy of Errors, right? You know? Here's a comedy of errors. I've got a copy of the comedy of errors. You know? They're kind of, you know, here's the one, here's the other. You know? But I can't do that with matter and form if I use the form. Yeah. If it's already, they're talking about substantial form, you know? Substantial form, right? The soul here, you know? See? See? And in a sense, whoever thinks, you know, the soul is being distinct from the body, you know? You think of it as being kind of a different substance from the body. You know? Primitive people think of the soul is kind of an air-like substance with the same shape as a man. You've got this solid, gross body, right? You've got this kind of air-like body. But you think of it, you know, it's like the seder in the boat, right? You know? This is the soul, you know, it's kind of the material substance and you have this material substance, you know? Material substance and the material substance, the substance can separate. Right? Mm-hmm. You can't really... You can't really... It's very hard for us to get that, huh? And yet, that's the key thing, finally, in understanding change. And the thing that changes is that it has these two parts, right? Yeah. And then understanding the soul, you know, the union of soul and body and man, huh? Right? I mean, you know, when you say that a man is composed of body and soul, we're told that as children maybe, huh? You know? By the priest or the catechism or something. So, to get it from the body and soul, it's very hard to put even to see what that means for a moment to, you know, be accepted, huh? I went to my car there. The light was coming on. I want to see if the brake light is off, will you? Mm-hmm. Let me just get somebody to stand behind there. That's because it's closer to what we sense, huh? The eye is wiser than the man and very experienced. So, you can see that the road is going in the direction of wisdom. That's the fourth reason why the philosopher follows it. He's a lover of wisdom. This is the road to wisdom. Okay. So, let's come back to natural philosophy here in the third reading in the second book of natural here. Now, the division of this reading is kind of a classical one. But Aristotle does. He does. He does. He does. He does. He does. He does. He does. in the first three paragraphs is to raise a problem or a question. But there seems to be some kind of overlapping of natural philosophy or natural science and mathematics, and therefore there is some problem. Are they really distinct, or is one in some way a part of the other? So he raises the problem in the first three paragraphs, and then in the middle paragraphs, actually in the first of the three middle paragraphs, he solves the problem. But in the second, actually the fifth and sixth paragraphs, if you remember them, he touches upon the central question of philosophy. And it's really a question for wisdom, but because he touches upon it, we'll touch upon it. Then in the last two paragraphs, he proves that his solution proposed in the fourth paragraph is in fact correct. And he gives a reason and then a sign to show that it is so. So you see the way it's divided, basically, huh? The problem, the question, the solution, the proof of the solution. Very classical. And he says, Since it has been determined in how many ways nature is said. Now, we didn't go into that, huh? But after he defines nature, he shows that nature is said of both matter and form. Next after this, it should be considered by what the mathematician differs from the natural scientist. Now, if there's a reason for taking up this, he's shown in the next two paragraphs. For natural bodies, he says, have surfaces and solids and links and points and so on, about which the mathematician considers. So here, mathematics seems to be talking about something found in the natural world. The mathematician talks about number, for example. There's a number of things here in the natural world. A guy of five fingers. He talks about what shape, and natural bodies have shapes, huh? He talks about surfaces. Natural bodies have got surfaces. He talks about length, and width, and depth, and natural bodies have length, and width, and depth. So it might seem that the mathematician is talking about something found in the natural world. And therefore, mathematics is like a part of natural science, talking about at least some of the things found in the natural world. Then he turns around in the next argument and says, on the other hand, natural science, or at least some parts of natural science, seem to come under the mathematical sciences. And the great thinker there of Pythagoras, huh? Pythagoras divided the mathematical sciences that we should really study for their own sake into four, and they were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. And this is where we got the quadrivium later on in the ages, those four. Now, astronomy and music, but especially astronomy, would seem to be talking about natural things. So here you have a mathematical science of the natural world. And we're, of course, acquainted with this even more so in modern times because we have much more mathematical science in nature. But take, for example, Sir Isaac Newton's major work, which is usually called the Principia. It was such a famous work that the physicists of the 20th century called the physics of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century classical physics or Newtonian physics. Not that he did it all, but he was kind of the model for everybody else. And what he did, he united Galdi and Kepler. But what is his major work called? Well, the actual title, the Latin title, is Principia Mathematica, Naturalis Philosophiae, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. So you've got mathematical principles, you've got a mathematical science, don't you? And yet you're studying natural things. So now at least some part of natural science seems to come under the mathematical sciences. So Aristotle asks this kind of concretely with the question of astronomy. Further, he says, is astronomy other than or a part of natural science? It would be strange if it belonged to... the natural scientists to know what the Sun or the Moon is, but nothing of what happens to these as such, especially seeing that those speaking about nature also speak about the shape of the Moon and the Sun, and besides that also whether the Earth itself or the universe are spherical or not. Incidentally, Aristotle thought the Earth was a sphere. He didn't think the Earth was a flat disk, and he had more than one reason for thinking the Earth was a sphere. So, isn't this a part of natural science astronomy, and isn't it talking about these things, the shape of these objects and so on, huh? I guess one argument Aristotle used is that the Earth casts a circular shadow upon the Moon now when it comes between the two, and that's one way. You get other reasons for thinking this too. So, there's no problem now. Do these sciences, it seems, at least to overlap, or are they really distinct, huh? Now, in the fourth paragraph, he's going to propose a solution now to this question, that they really are distinct, and the solution he gives is one that is somewhat puzzling to the Platonist Sun, and it does touch upon the central question, but we'll save that to the last, huh? So, look at the fourth paragraph. He says, the mathematician then, and he's thinking of what we call the pure mathematician. The mathematician then also treats of these things, but not insofar as each is the limit of an actual body. And then likewise, nor does he consider the things that happen insofar as they happen to such existing things. Let's state that a little more fully. What he's saying is that the mathematician considers number and shape and surface and length and width and depth in separation from natural bodies. And even more generally, you could say in separation from all sensible matter. While the natural philosopher is concerned with number and surface and shape and length and width and depth only insofar as they are the number of a natural body or bodies, the surface of a natural body, the shape of a natural body. Okay? But the mathematician is considering these in separation. Likewise, he says, he doesn't consider what might happen to these things in natural bodies or in sensible matter, the mathematician. So, for example, you may be aware of the fact that many scientists say that the earth is more or less a sphere, but it's sort of flattened at the poles. I don't know what the reason for that is exactly. But something happens to the sphere in matter. And sometimes I take an example from artificial things. If you look at a tire from the side, you say, what is the shape of a tire from the side? Well, it's circular, huh? But you go out to the parking lot and you see that the tire there is, what, kind of flattened there at the bottom where it touches the pavement, and that's why you can't leave a car for the winter there. On this tire, you've got to kind of prop it up, otherwise the tires will be, what, ruined, huh? You see? But does the geometer consider the fact that his circles might be flattened by the force of gravity there or something? See? Or that the sphere might be flattened by the poles, I don't know, right? Um, no, huh? See? So he doesn't consider what happens to these things insofar as they are in matter, insofar as they are in natural bodies and so on. So you see the solution that Aristotle is proposing to this question, right? The mathematician is talking about all these things, but in separation from natural bodies and indeed from the whole sense of a world, huh? But the, um, mathematician, but the natural philosophy is considering them only insofar as they are the numbers and the surfaces and shapes of natural bodies. You see that? Now we're going to skip temporarily the, uh, fifth and sixth paragraphs, which touch upon the, um, central question of philosophy. Okay, but we'll come back to those shortly. Uh, now...