Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 33: Dialectical Reasoning and the Three Principles of Change

Transcript
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What do you know? It's a buddy of all of a sudden. Okay. And with the incarnate man, the emotions went out, right? Whether it be lust or the desire to drink or anger, whatever it might be, right? Okay, you see? So the incarnate man, he's not as good as the virtuous man, right? But he's better than the incarnate man. But the incarnate man, he regrets that he gave in to his Christ. Temptation, right? The vicious man does it, right? So Don Giovanni, he seduces somebody in somebody's life. He rejoices in the fact that he's done this, right? Okay? So virtue and vice are the contraries. They're what's furthest apart, right? In the same way I like to say in drama, right? In drama, they say that tragedy and comedy are the contraries. They didn't have a good name, but the Renaissance used to call soon plays tragedy-comedies, but there's something in between. Now they call it romance, but in the Greek sense of the romance, or in the medieval sense of the romance, not just romantic in the sense of the love story, right? So Shakespeare's plays, there's four last plays there, leaving aside in the eighth, I mean, they're called romances now in the standard edition to Shakespeare, right? They're not classified on the tragedies or the comedies, but on the romances, right? Okay, there's actually two kinds of romances in there. So, the romances are more serious than the comedies, right? But they're not tragic in their ending, right? And what they're, you might say, a serious play that is happily, as opposed to, you know, laughable. But tragedy and comedy are what? What are furthest apart, therefore they are the contraries, right? Okay, but how about like a substance, like a genus animal? Well, he just takes the genus substance, he's not talking about the particular genus. Okay, so he'd go to the absolute universal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, so then you'd have material and immaterial at that point. Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, or living and non-living or something like that, right? Okay, so that's right. But anyway, he's arguing that substance is one genus, right? And it's before all the other genera, so it makes sense to look to the beginning of things in substance. And if the beginnings are contraries, as he said in the previous reading, and there's only one pair of contraries in a genus, right? Then we don't need more than one pair of contraries, right? Okay? But, in the middle arguments, right? We're saying there's a third thing. There'd be reason for the legal contrariate in substance, right? But only accidents are contraries to the fact that you need a third thing, namely the substance underlying that. Okay? So, in fact, in the second and third arguments in the middle of the three groups of arguments, the middle group of arguments, the arguments that there's need to have a third thing besides the contraries, he reasoned from there being no contrariate in substance, but only in accidents. But in the second argument against you being an unlimited multitude, and the second argument here to say we don't have to have, you know, well, one pair of contraries and so on, he reasoned from substance being one genus, and one genus, like substance, is going to be one pair of contraries. So he's reasoning from there being contrariate in substance, right? So how can he have his cake and eat it, right? Well, he's doing this for a reason, right? He knows what he's doing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. But we need a teacher, right? Yeah. And the teacher is not me, but the teacher is Thomas, yeah? But this is where I was saying there's like this is equivocation. I'm saying it because there's a contradiction there, so our mind's equivocating, it seems, a couple different things there. Yeah, but there can be apparent contradictions even without, what? Equivocating. Yeah, based on other things, right? Okay. You know? The paracetans, right? But it seems that when he's arguing with the contraries then, and then with substance as the third thing, that's as opposed to, like, color is already kind of an accident now. It is an accident, yeah. Yeah, but here... I was exemplifying in different genre of accidents, the statement that there's only one contrariety in any genus, right? Mm-hmm. And, you know, they always compare, you know, as they say, to kind of a spectrum there, like, you know, you could arrange on a line all the different species. Well, there can be many points in a line equidistant, right? But only one pair of points that are furthest apart, right? So, contraries are like the points that are just a part of my mind. There can only be one pair of them. Okay? But he seems to be contradicting himself, because in the arguments against him being an unlimited multitude, and in the arguments that there are, you don't need to order one contrariety, he's reasoning from there being contrariety in substance. But in the middle arguments, where he's arguing there must be a third thing besides the two contraries, he's reasoning for there being no contrariety in substance, but only in accidents. You see? Of course, Thomas Aquinas picks this up, right? Okay? But he explains that what Aristotle is doing here is proceeding, what? Dialectically. Okay? From probable, what? Opinions. Okay? Now, he's not yet determined the truth with complete, what? Necessity, right? There's some necessity here. That's why he emphasized that first argument in the third, in the middle group, right? Okay? But there is some probability here, and not complete necessity. So, he's reasoning, probable opinions, huh? Now, if you want to understand what a probable opinion is, as opposed to a necessary premise like you have in the demonstration, right? You've got to go back to your logic and to the logic of the second act and to what contradiction is, right? Okay? And if you go back to what we mean by contradictory statements, like Socrates is a man and Socrates is not a man, right? or every man is wise and some man is not wise or no man is wise and some man is wise, right? Contradictory statements are statements with the same subject and predicate, right? One affirmative and one negative, right? But they're opposed such that both cannot be true, both cannot be false, but one must be true and the other must be false, right? And that's regardless of whether you know which is the true or which is the false one. See? So, take the two statements here. President George Bush is standing now. President George Bush is not standing now. Can they both be true? Can they both be false now? No. No. One is true and the other is false. But we don't know, you and I, which is true and which is false, right? Okay. But now, likewise, on the statement, Berkwist is standing now. Berkwist is not standing now, right? One must be true and one must be false, right? But now, in this case, you know which one is true, don't you? Mm-hmm. You know it's true that Berkwist is standing. And if you know that's true, you must know that the contradictory is what? False. False, yeah. So, when one is ready to demonstrate, he's got to know which half of the contradiction is true, right? And then, necessarily, he has to know that the other half is what? False, right? So, in geometry, right, if I know that no odd, let's take that, if I know that an obtuse angle is greater than an acute angle, right, I must know that the opposite is what? False, right, okay? If I know that all right angles are equal, right, I must know that the opposite, that some right angles are not equal, must be false, right? If I know that every whole is more than one of its parts is true, I must know that the opposite, that some whole is not more than one of its parts, must be what? False, right? Okay? So Aristotle, he describes demonstration, he says, the demonstrator takes one half of the contradiction, right? the one that is either obviously true or at least proven to be true, and he lays that down, right, and discards the other half, right, and he proceeds to the true one, right? Now in the case of Dalek, um sometimes aristotle speaks of dialectic premise as the um asking about the probable right and you ask the man that you're speaking with which side seems to him to be so right then okay but if you don't see that side that you think is probably so as being necessarily true in which case you'd be ready to demonstrate right if you see it only is probable then can the contradictory be in no way probable see because if the contradictory in no way was probable then the contradictory would be clearly false and then the ritual one would be more probable okay okay now um nurse dog defines a probable opinion you can see something in this too because he says it's the opinions either of all men right or the opinions of most men or the opinions of all or most men in a given art or science you know talking about the matter that art or the most famous ones right okay so um uh it might be though that the opinions of most men might disagree with the opinions of those in art or science so most men might say sense pleasure is the best thing in life and moral philosophers might say no that's not so right so there's some probability to saying that sense pleasure is the best thing in life because most men seem to think this right there's some probability maybe it isn't so because the uh more philosophers say it isn't so right okay and sometimes most scientists disagree with the greatest scientists and vice versa right you see so you see a little bit of probability in both sides but another way of looking at this is and this is going to be a little bit of probability in both sides of the world and this is and this is and this is and this is um in order to be probable a statement doesn't have to be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth right in order to be probable a statement needs some part of the truth right okay and so the man who says that the best thing in life is sense pleasure right uh he's mistaken right but undoubtedly the best thing in life will be something pleasant to have so that there's no element of truth in what he's saying right but he's mistaking the lower pleasures the higher pleasures and so on do you see okay now what's in question here is the statement there is and there is not there is not contrariety in substance is there is contrariety in what an accident right okay now uh the distinction thomas sees is this that there are contrary differences in substance in substance but there are not contrary species in substance but in accidents if you want to contrast with accidents son but in accidents there are both contrary differences and contrary species let me exemplify both of those just to give an idea here let's take the example here of virtue and vice right now virtue and vice are two species of what habit right okay so here you have two contrary species that are accidents right okay now if you define virtue and vice without trying to get too profound here right you might define virtue as a good habit habit and vice as a what a bad habit right okay and good and bad there or reasonable and unreasonable would be contrary as well right did you see that so in virtue and vice there you have contrary species because you have species of habit and their differences are contrary right okay okay okay but now does man for example and stone right or even man and beast do they seem to be contrary like virtue and vice are contrary no but some might say but man is a living body and the stone is a non-living body right or you might say that man is a non-living body right or you might say that man is a rational animal and the beast is an irrational right so living and non-living and rational and irrational would seem to be what contraries right but they're contrary differences huh but the species don't seem to be contrary like man like man in stone right like man and beast right okay so there are contrary differences it seems in substance but they're not contrary what species and substance so there's an element of truth in saying there is contrary in accidents and not in substance right you're looking at at species right and that's how we usually define contrary in terms of species but if you think about differences then there seems to be contrary in substance as well as in what accidents right so aristotle is reasoning um from the statement there's contrary in substance as a probable thing right and it does have an element of truth in it he's reasoning from there's not contrary in substance because there are not contrary species right so both statements have a part of the truth right and therefore they are probable but they are what not altogether what certain right not demonstrative in that sense okay so aristotle here is not proceeding with complete necessity yet okay i say that i think there's necessity in that first of those three middle arguments huh unless there's a third thing can change right besides the two contrary forms right change would be impossible okay and we say sometimes that love turns into hate right sometimes hate into love right but can love itself really become hate that would be a contradiction right but if there's a third thing like let's say a heart right there's not the same thing as either love or hate a heart that is capable of loving but it's also capable of hating right well then it could be loved in this heart for somebody or for something right and that heart could lose that love right and acquire a hate for someone or something right or vice versa right there could be a hate in a in a uh heart for something or someone right and then what you lose that hate right and you start to love that person or that thing right okay sometimes you hate the food when you're young and then you get to love it later on right the prescription is filled with people you know it's not hate you dislike somebody right and then they you know okay and then they what start to like this person or something right okay so this disliking become liking no no and so um if my heart and love were the same thing could my heart ever hate but love itself become hate no no see so unless there was a real distinction between my heart and the love that is in my heart my heart could never cease to love right unless there was a real distinction between hate and my heart between my heart and the hate that is in my heart for someone or something right i could never stop what eating right do you see that and so when when saint john says like saying the epistles there that god is love right huh right well he's speaking you know properly there right there's no distinction in god between himself and his what love so it's impossible for god to what hate huh and so if hate is ever said of god in scripture it said metaphorically right okay so i think there's a necessity that's one reason why i emphasize that argument right and that's why um you can use the idea that you learn there that what changes is always composed yeah of the contrary in the strict sense right and the subject right of that and then when you syllogize in in say that question three of the summa that god is not composed right then you can syllogize later on in the question on the on god and change right you can syllogize that god is unchanging because he's not composed and what change is composed right okay but if you compare the second and the third arguments they say with the uh was the second argument you know against the unlimited there and then the second army down here against there being more than three right and you say well gee this is a contradiction right and then you realize that aristotle is proceeding to some extent what dialectically here and that means he's proceeding not from uh simply false statements no but he's proceeding from statements that are probable and if what uh one half of the contradiction is probable right there must be some probability in the other half it seems uh because if the other half was in no way probable would be manifestly false and if you know that one half is manifestly true or one half is manifestly false you know the other side right you see that's why in the prior analytics and aristotle you know beginning to talk about syllogism there and he says that the dialectician and the demonstrator they syllogize formally speaking in a similar way right but It's possible to reason from, what, contradictory statements and even to contradictory, then, conclusions. Now, Socrates comes back upon his arguments, right? And he says, he finally finds a premise that he thinks is not necessarily true. And that is that what directs us to the good is knowledge, right? He says, well, one could also be directed to the good by right opinion, he says. Okay? And you've heard me give, you know, I always get a simple example in class of the man coming down to the fork of the road. One fork goes to Providence, the other one goes to Boston. He wants to go to Boston, right? Now, if he knows the right one here, fork is the road to Boston, he will take that. He will turn right, the fork, right? If he doesn't know that that is the road to Boston, but he thinks that it's the road to Boston, in fact, it is, but he doesn't know it. He's also going to take the one, isn't he? Right? And he'll get to Boston just as much as the guy who knew the road. So Socrates is saying, you don't necessarily have to know which road to take, which thing to do, to do the right thing or take the right road, see? It might be just that you had a hunch even, right? See? You know? I said I'd take, you know, MacArthur's, what, you know, the Inshon Landing, right, huh? It's kind of interesting to read all the accounts of MacArthur first proposed it, and Washington was opposed to it, because they thought it was too dangerous, right? And they sent the chief of staff of the army down to try to convince him not to do it, and they sent Tom Admiral down, right? And the admiral and the chief of staff both spoke against it, right? And MacArthur got up, you know, started very slowly, and kind of persuaded them to do it, right? And, but then, as he's about to do it, Washington sent the telegram saying, you're on your own. Like the Washington Hand, right? You know, I mean, and MacArthur's going out. He called up his next-in-line officer, and he went over the thing, you know, the reason for him ends, and he says, well, it's the right decision, he said, right? Then he sat down and started reading the Bible, MacArthur. You see, so did MacArthur know that the Inshon Landing was going to succeed? It was a wonderful thing what he did at that time, you know? Because right after the Inshon Landing, you know, the people who were being pushed into the ocean down there, they saw the enemy starting to weaken and just kind of fall back, you know? And so on. And, but, do these great men like MacArthur who make the right decisions, do they always know this is the right decision? No. MacArthur had a plan to withdraw if it didn't work, you know? He said, well, it will be lost except my reputation, he says. You know? But the point is, you know, it was a time when Richard Nixon was down in South America, and there was, you know, a lot of turmoil down there. And I forget which country he's in now, but his van was going down, his car, right? The American position was going down this street in one of the big cities there in South America, and the crowd was getting a little more boisterous and so on, right? And Nixon had just the hunch that this was kind of the situation, right? And so he ordered the driver to turn off, and right up the road there was a bomb that was set to go off to blow him to pieces. Okay. Did he notice a bomb there? No, that was discovered afterwards, right? But they had planted the bomb, and they had already to blow Nixon up when he got to that point, huh? It was a safety's reputation, though. I guess, you know, they discovered Saddam Hussein had a plan to assassinate the elder Bush, you know, and when he came back, you know, visiting in the east there, and they foiled the plan, you know, but I mean, you know. So, well, it was Kennedy's decision, you know, to go in an open car, you know, down that road, right? See? Okay. So, I mean, you can have hunches, right, that are correct, right? Which is not the same thing as knowing, is it? No. See, Nixon had no way of knowing there was a bomb down there, right? Kennedy had no way of knowing, right? Okay. So he made the wrong guess, right? Nixon made the right guess, huh? Okay. But it's hard to know. I mean, some of these men, you know, get very, you know, these military men, they get very, what? They seem to have a sixth sense, you know, what's going on in the battlefield, huh? But notice, it's a statement then, that what directs us to the good is knowledge, is that has no basis in truth at all. Well, men can be directed to the good by knowledge, right? And that's the safest way to be directed to the good, right? But it isn't the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is it? Right? Do you see that? So Socrates' reasoning there, when he first reasoned, he wasn't reasoning from something simply false, right? He was reasoning from something that had some probability to it. But it can't be both true that, what, virtue can be taught and virtue cannot be taught, huh? Okay. Now, in another dialogue to the protege was, the thing is solved in another way, right? There's not one person who teaches you Greek, you know? It's your mother, your father, everybody who spoke Greek around you as your little child, right? So I can't point to any teacher that I chose to teach my children how to speak English. Like, I can point to who I chose to teach them how to play the piano, you see? So there might be, you know, a distinction there, right? You know, which there are, are not teachers, right? So, to some extent, you know, your mother and your father and anybody who watched over you was kind of teaching you, we hope, a little bit of morality, right? You see? But you don't really have, you know, who's your teacher of justice? Who do your parents choose to teach you justice? Well, no. I think my father and my mother and my brothers and uncles and aunts, right? And my teachers, they all talk a little bit about, what, justice, right? So it's not, you know, I can point to my first sense teacher or my first, you know, teacher calculus or something, right? You see? Okay? So, Thomas notes the apparent fact prediction there. And what he, what Aristotle was doing here, he's not, you know, stupidly contradicting himself, like people, but he's reasoning what? With dialectically. He's reasoning with probability, right? And a probable statement doesn't have to be the whole truth, but she has some element of the truth, huh? And, you know, I think we mentioned before how the second road in our knowledge is the road from, what, reasonable guesses, huh? Towards reasoned out knowledge, huh? And that's why dialectic, huh, comes before demonstration, huh? But it also fits the nature of our mind, as Empedocles taught us, among others, that we tend to see, what, a part of the truth, huh, before we see the whole truth, huh? I mentioned that fragment of Empedocles, you know, he says that men don't live very long. And having seen a part of life, they boast, you know, right? Out of pride, right, huh? But, um, uh, that pride there is, um, what? Exaggerating how much you know, right? That you don't know more. But, I mean, it also is touching upon the fact that we tend to know, or to see, a part of the truth before we see the whole truth. Niels Bohr, in one of those, uh, uh, in fact, three volumes, you know, atomic physics and human knowledge, and there's three volumes of Bohr's essays, and, uh, like I was mentioning the other day, there's a nice one that we, you know, account of this conversation with Einstein, despite the disagreement, it's kind of an interesting account. Um, he's very respectful of Einstein there, you know. Um, but he has another essay on quantum theory, and how no one of the men who got the Nobel Prize, and so on, in regard to quantum theory, saw the whole truth by themselves, right? But Max Bloch saw one part of the truth in 1900, and Einstein saw another part in 1905, and Niels Bohr himself saw another part in 1913, and then Heisenberg saw another part, and Louis DuBois saw another part, and Wolfgang Paul, you know, but he's showing how this was not the work of, what, one man, right, huh, see? And that's one reason, also, why dialectic tends to come first, right? And that's one reason, because when you have these opposites, when you have these opposites, when you have these opposites, when you have these opposites, when you have these opposites, The sides clashing, there may be parts of the troop that are on both sides, but it's like two armies clashing, and I compare it to the Trojans and the Greeks and the Achaeans clashing, right? And the weak men would tend to, what, go down on both sides, and the stronger men to emerge. If you would stop the fight, you can always do, if you stop the fight and get up those who remain and make one army out of them, you'd have a better army than the Greek or the Trojan army. You'd have Hector and Achilles in your one army, right? So, dialectic is a way of bringing out a part of the truth at a time. And that's why, when you read through Plato's dialogues, there's 36 of them at least, you don't see the whole truth in any one of these dialogues, but, you know, it's not the nature of our mind to see the whole truth at once anyway, you see. And as you read, you know, this dialogue, this dialogue, then you start to see, huh, different parts of the truth, huh? It seems he has a little bit of a distinction in the way he says this, because he says, well, we see that no substance is contrary, but for the other sense, as there is also one contrariety, one genus, although a genus could be, I guess, a substance, but at the same time... The differences are in some way in there, too, you mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, notice Aristotle's kind of hesitation here at the end, in the bottom of page five. It is clear, then, that the element or the beginnings is neither one nor more than two or three, but which of these, as we have said, has great difficulty, huh? See, when you're reading ten, it seemed quite probable that there's just two things, right? The two contours, right? And now it seems that there's reason to think there's a third thing, right? You know? And it reminds me, you know, a little bit of my rule of two or three. Mm-hmm. See? But we're kind of expanding on that, huh? I know sometimes things can be divided into two or into three, and you can make it sensible in both ways, huh? Let's take a simple example from logic, right, huh? When you talk about one name set of many things, huh? Well, you could divide that into two and say, either you have one name set of many things with the same meaning in mind in all cases, right? Or with what? Other meanings in mind. Either there's one meaning or there's meaning, meaning more than one meaning, right? Okay? That's the only two possibilities, right? Unless you have no meaning in mind. It's just a sound, right? Okay? And then you could subdivide one name set of many things with many meanings, right? Subdivide that. You could call that equivocal, and the other one univocal. And then you say, well, sometimes there's a reason why the same name is set with many meanings because there's some connection with one of the meanings. Sometimes there's no connection, right? Okay? And so you call one equivocal by what? Reason. And the other equivocal by what? Chance, right? Okay? But now sometimes Thomas will divide it into three right away. He'll say, either they have wholly the same meaning or wholly different meanings, right? Or partly the same and partly different, right? You get the same three, but you divide immediately into, what? Three, huh? So you want to divide all the goods of man, huh? The Greeks usually divide all the goods of man, like Socrates does there in the Apology, into the goods of the soul, goods of the body, and exterior or outside goods, huh? Okay? And Aristotle gives the same division in the seventh book of the Politics, huh? He exhausts all the goods of man. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, huh? It touched upon that division into three, because health is a very important good of the body, wealth is an excellence of outside goods, and wisdom is one of the greatest goods, if not the greatest, of the goods of the soul, right? But sometimes I divide them into just two, right? The goods of man inside of man, whether it be inside of soul or inside of his body, and the goods of man outside of man, like his car and his house and his clothes and so on, right? Okay? That makes sense, doesn't it? And so it's exhaustive inside or outside, right? So, but sometimes you have an even more difference between the two divisions, like when Aristotle divides plot in the Poetics, he divides plot into a beginning, middle, and end. He praises Homer, you know, for saying that the unity of a plot is not in its being about one man, but in its being about a course of action as a beginning, a middle, and an end. Then later on in the Poetics, he talks about a plot has two parts, tying the knot, and then untying the knot. So, you see that? So sometimes, I mean, there's reason to divide something into two, sometimes into three, but sometimes there's reason to divide it into both, and they bring out something, right? I mean, sometimes we divide the family into the parents and the children, but sometimes we think it makes sense to say father, mother, and children. Especially nowadays. Very important to that division. We need that division nowadays. It's interesting to Aristotle, you know, that little hesitation here, but, you know, good to keep that in mind. Would it start from showing there's two and then there has to be an underline? Could it have started from saying it seems that they all deposit some underlying thing and then saying they need the contrast for change? Yeah. But, in a sense, the opposition of the contrast kind of stand out in the idea of change, right? Because if you ask, what is change, right? Is it staying the same or becoming different? Because it was becoming different than you were. So you're thinking of the opposition, you know, between the way it was and the way it has become, right? So you tend to think of the contraries. Opposites alongside each other kind of stand out, huh? And the third thing, the subject, is obscure in some way because it's an ability, huh? An ability is less known than what? Act, huh? It's kind of a strange thing because the butter, is it hard or soft? Well, no, it's able to be hard, but it's also able to be soft, right? It has an ability for both. In a way, it's the same ability for both. But it can't be actualized, you know? It's an obscure thing when you come down to it, huh? Is it because it's really, one of those things that's just really obvious so we really don't think of it? Which? The fact that there's something that undergoes the change. Well, in some ways, it's more obscure, huh? Because we'll see as we go on in the course here. The difficulty people have in understanding ability, I want to talk about why it's so difficult to understand, huh? But you're first to be kind of reduced to the idea of ability there. You get to the Ninth Book of Wisdom there. First, I'll mention the Bulgarians who deny that there's any such thing as ability. Very strange position, but there are people who, you know, if you read Heisenberg's, what, Gifford Lectures there, right? It talks about how people want to transfer the actuality of things in the world around us down to the fundamental particles as if they were as actuals of things here. That's an illusion, he says. You're dealing with a world of what things exist only in potency, huh? Okay? Heisenberg says, we know matter only through the forms of matter. Aristotle said something like that, you know, a long time before.