Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
Lecture 41: Accidental Being and the Limits of Science

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

You know, page 4 here is going to be giving the reason why there's no art or science, you might say, about the accidental. It starts off with a division of things. Since then, among the things that are, some are always in the same way by necessity. And of course, he's referring to one sense of necessity as opposed to another sense of necessity that is distinguished in the what? Fifth Book of Wisdom, right? And he distinguishes four senses of necessity there. And four is one sense, not the sense he means, but the sense in which necessaries cannot be otherwise. And there's two other senses necessary in terms of the end. Like it's necessary to eat. You may not eat, but it's necessary to eat if you're going to live, right? Or something that is necessary not to be, but to be well, right? Like a horse for a journey time, he says. You can journey on foot, but you can't journey well without the horse. Okay. So can you philosophize without logic? Yeah. So is logic necessary? No. It's necessary to philosophize well without logic, yeah? Okay. So since then, among the things that are, some are always in the same way and by necessity. Well, others are not by necessity nor always, but for the most part. So for the most part, men have five fingers, huh? You say, and well, then they have six fingers. Why are you so interested here? I don't know. I hope it wasn't because you had six fingers. That would be the ultimate to destroy your country for a sixth thing that woman is. That's true. Well, others are not by necessity nor always, but for the most part. The latter is the beginning and cause that the accidental is. Now, why does he say that? Well, because what is for the most part will sometimes produce something that is, what, not for the most part, right? There's an exception, right? And, of course, that's what the accidental is about, huh? It's not about what happens always or for the most part, but what happens, what, rarely, huh? For we call what is neither always nor for the most part an accident, huh? And here's an example from the Greek weather there, right? As when storm and cold come to be the dog days, right? It happened to snow in August that year, okay? They wouldn't say it happened to snow in January that year, right? But it happened to snow, right? In August, huh? But that doesn't happen most of the time. It's rare, right? And man happens to be white. For this is neither always nor for the most part, huh? But he is not an animal by accident, huh? And the house builder restores to health by accident because the house builder is not apt to do this, huh? But the doctor is such and because the house builder happens to be a, what? A doctor, right? And the cook aiming at pleasure would make something healthful, but not by cookery. That's not often as an example there. The medical art aims at health, right? And so the medical art talks about what food is healthy for you to eat. He doesn't care if it's tasty or not, right? I mean, his art doesn't talk about that, right? And the cook aims at making the food tasty, and as such he doesn't care whether it's what? Or his art doesn't take into account whether it's what? Healthier or not. Healthier or not, huh? Okay. There's two different arts there. Well, then people have a problem when they try to understand the poetic art, right? See, is it accidental to the poetic art to be moral? See, some of them kind of claim that, right? They try to claim that the poetic art is like the art of cooking, right? You know, that the poet is trying to please you, right? Like Shakespeare often say in the epilogue, they will strive to please you every day, okay? So is it accidental to the poet that his fiction has a good moral effect upon you? What would you say? I would say it's not accidental, but most people would disagree with you today. Thomas, when he's talking about the poetics there, he makes a statement, It belongs to the poet, right? He leads us into something virtuous by a suitable representation. Now, Thomas is not inclined to speak Procedence, but per se, right? Yeah. So he sees it as being per se to the poet, right? But if you presented that, say, in English class, you know, you try to get a master's degree or a doctor's degree, you'd be, what, tacked for imposing this moral in upon fiction, right? Mm-hmm. Now, so, is that likeness, it's perhaps more known to us, right? That the poetic art is like the art of cooking, that it aims to please, right? Mm-hmm. In the same way as the musical art, right? We had the famous letter of Mozart there to his father, right? About the way to represent the anger of Osman in the abduction from Israel, right? And how the music has to represent the anger, in a sense, of him. But Mozart says, But not in a way that is displeasing to the ear. Or, in other words, cease to be music. Right? Okay? So, I was quoting earlier there, Shakespeare, we'll strive to please you every day, right? So it's more known to us, that the musician aims to please our ears, right? And emotions, too, I suppose. And the poet to please our imagination, please our emotions, huh? So it seems, in that respect, to be like the art of cooking. And therefore, it's a possibility, right? To say the other is accidental. And it's a little hard thing to see, right? In other words, does it belong to the poet to make a morally, you know, to make a work that has a good moral effect upon this audience? Does it belong to him to do that as poet? Or as a good man? You see? Which is it? Yeah, well, I'm saying, when Thomas says it belongs to the poet to do this into something virtuous, to a suitable representation, then Thomas seems to be saying it belongs to him as a poet, and not simply as a good man, right? But how would you show that, see? How would you show that? It's interesting that Aristotle defines tragedy, then. He defines tragedy as a likeness of an action, with a serious, complete, and of some magnitude, right? In sweetened language. Acted out rather than narrated, right? Moving us to pity and fear so as to, what? Purge these emotions, right? In Greek words, catharsis there. Well, he puts catharsis in the definition of tragedy, right? And catharsis is a name taken, first of all, from what? Medicine, right? And what does catharsis or pregation mean in medicine, right? It means the elimination of something harmful from the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? It means the elimination of the body, right? So the simplest example of a catharsis is when you swallow something that's poisonous and sometimes the induced vomiting says there are other things to do, but that's a simple example of a catharsis, right? You're removing this harmful substance from it, right? So what would mean a catharsis of reason? Socrates will speak of his conversations with men as a catharsis of their reason. He talks to the little slave boy there in the Mino and he asks the slave boy how do you double a square and the slave boy says you double the side, right? Well, you're mistaken, right? Double the side, you're going to get a square four times this big. So Socrates shows the slave boy that he's mistaken. So he's purged the mind of the slave boy, right? Okay? So what would be the catharsis of the emotions, huh? Well, you're reducing the emotions to a more healthful state, huh? But again, the fact that Aristotle puts that in the very definition of tragedy makes it in his opinion, right? But on to the poet as such or the tragedy as such, right? Okay? Why in the cookbook, you know, they say you mix this with that and this with that and so on and eat this and you know, and you have a delicious sauce, right? And there it says, and then you'll have a healthy sauce, right? You see? Some of us don't want to eat grilled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm seeing, I'm seeing. Yeah, yeah. But it combines two arts there, in such, right? No, that's kind of tragic in itself, huh? You know? I guess food is healthy and tasteful, right? Okay, but I mean you're crazy enough. This book was written by a lot of lyrics. It's like those white beers, man. Yeah. It tastes great, but it's kind of like, who cares? Okay. But Aristotle does tell you that the cook is being accidental. Okay? Whence it happens, we say, right? In some way he makes, but simply he does not make. He's not ending at that, right? Okay. And he goes into the fact that are the things that aren't come to be by accident, the cause is also, what? Accidental, right? Okay. Let me just talk about that. We haven't talked about causes, accidental causes, but there's many senses of accidental cause, huh? You say, house food, right? Makes a house, right? Okay. And the house collapses on top of somebody. So, a house builder in some sense is responsible for the death of this person, right? Okay. But he didn't intend that, right? He intended the house, right? Well, here's something that happened to the per se effect of the house builder. And that's what Aristotle's exemplified there in a bit, right? Okay. The cook is aiming at the, what? Tasty. And the tasty happens to be healthy, right? So the cook made something healthy. But that was what? Outside his intention, right? You know, okay? Now, the other way, or another way that you talk about the accidental, is you can say that if the cook happens to belong to the house builder, if the house builder happens to get a cook, then I can say that a cook made a house. Right. Or vice versa. If your house builder happens to belong to the cook, then you can say a house builder made something tasty. But again, it's an accidental cause, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? So Aristotle's saying you look for an accidental cause, the accidental, right? Okay. But there's many different kinds of accidental cause, but more than most of the kind, but those are the ones you begin with, huh? But Aristotle takes up luck or chance in the second book of the physics, natural hearing. He says that it's a, what? An accidental cause of what happens rarely, right? As a result of something done for an end, huh? And if it's done by will, then it's luck, right? If it's done by nature, it's called chance, huh? Chance can be said of luck, too. Okay, physical side there about accidental causes. So the next paragraph, he says, Hence, since all things do not exist or come to be by necessity and always, but most usually, it is necessary that what is by accident exists. As if white is musical, neither always nor usually, but since it comes to be sometimes, it will be by accident. If not, all things will be by necessity. Whence the matter which can be other than what it is for the most part will be the cause of the accidental. That's certainly why the evolutionists, right, want to say that things develop by chance, because they're making matter the first cause of all these things. We don't have any mover that has a mind, right? Okay, this will not be true, of course, as he says about the eternal things. Okay, now, finally, in the fourth paragraph on page four, he gives the reason now why there's no science of the accidental. It is clear that science will not be the accidental. For every science, you can say the same thing about art, is about either the always or the usual, right? How else could one learn or teach another, right? Okay, so if you're learning how to build a house, you're not going to talk to... But what might happen to people in that house? You think I'm talking about that, right? The same way you're giving rules, like grammar or some other art, right? You can give a rule about what is true always, obviously, but we also give rules about what is true for the UI. For the most part, right? And I've kind of invented that rule, right? The rule of two or three, right? You know? Which may not be true always, that we divide into two or three, but you could say, usually, huh, when you divide into more than two or three, you're combining some way more than one division into two or three, right? Okay? And so you take it apart, you find out that there was a, what, division maybe into two or three, and then you subdivided one of these members, or you crisscrossed them, like we said, right? Okay? Actually, if you look at the beginning of this second reading, we recall the senses of being from the fifth book, right? How many senses of being does he have? Four. Four. Four, yeah. Oh, here's into four, right? The distinction to four. But you go back to book five, right? What does he do? He divides being into two. Being, kakato, per se, to itself as such, and being kakosmbebikos, karachidens, by accident or by happening, right? That's a distinction into what? Two. Okay? And then he subdivides accidental being, which isn't here, but he does it there, right? When two things happen to the same thing, right? And then that thing is said to be both, right? Or else, and what happens to the other, right? And the two ways of doing that, right? And then, being kakato in Greek, per se, being per se, being through itself, by itself, being as such, they distinguish as... into three, right? Being according to the figures of predication, being as true, and being divided into act and ability, right? So actually he divides into two, and then he divides one of those into what? Three, right? The same way, I think, I don't know if we looked in the text in here, but the one at the beginning of the commentary of Thomas on the Nicomachian Ethics, where he wants to divide the knowledge of reason by the order it considers. Remember that one? Did that text a little time here? And he divides order in comparison to reason into four. He says that the order which reason does not make, like the order of natural things, there's the order which reason makes in its own acts, its own thoughts in the words that signify them, and there's the order which reason makes in the acts of the will, and what you do, right? And then there which reason makes in matter, okay? Say, hey, distinction into four, right? But Thomas, you know, seeking brevity there, right? Doesn't make explicit that the first order is divided against the last three, right? Because the first order is an order not made by reason, the last three are in order made by reason. And that distinction is by the maker in a sense, right? Okay? It's either made by reason or not made by reason. And then you subdivide the order made by reason by that in which it is made, either in reason's own acts, or in the acts of the will, or in mattering. So what you have, really, you take it apart, a distinction into two, and then a distinction of one of those two into three. So everything is a two or three. Okay? So usually you come back and you analyze it. You don't always make that explicit, right? But then you understand how you got these four, okay? Aristoteles, when he distinguishes the ten categories, he distinguishes them into ten. But when Thomas tries to explain the ten, right, he divides them into what? Three. Something is said of individual substance by reason of what they are, or it's said by reason of something in addition to what they are but existing in them, right? Or it's said by reason of something outside of them, into three. And then he'll subdivide the second and the third, right? But always subdividing by two or by what? Three. Okay? Okay? So you don't always make that explicit, but you just have to analyze it, huh? But are there exceptions, huh? I'm sure there are. Aristoteles divides quality into four species, right? Well, I don't know if I would really incline to say there's a two or three there, right? Okay. And, of course, the division in the four, it's hard to understand, but I'm willing to admit that there may be exceptions to dividing into two or three, right? But I still give us a rule, by telling us a rule for the, what, most part, right? So I'm going beyond Plato, who's always going to divide into two, or Socrates in the dialogues, right? Socrates is saying always divide into two. And then Hegel always divides into three. Okay? Well, nobody else has ever given the other number of the two or three for always dividing into, see? But I put the two together. If I don't say always divide into two or three, I say, for the most part, you divide into two or three, and you have to analyze things that way. I mean, it's a very useful rule. But could I give a rule for what happens around? Hmm? If something's divided into four, maybe sometimes it's, you know? Hmm? Couldn't give a rule for it, but it wouldn't be of any use, right? Once in a while I divide into four. That's not giving any direction, eh? Okay. For every science and every art, you could say, is about either the always or the usual, what is for the most part. Hmm? How else did one learn or teach another? Hmm? Okay? For it must be limited by always of the most part. Hmm? If you try to consider it easy, it might happen, right? Um, can I teach you what might happen to you if you go to the store? Go to the bookstore? What might happen if you go to the bookstore? Hmm? Well, you might be an old friend, huh? The drugstore in Shrewsbury, the roof might fall in, didn't one time. Unfortunately not in there, right? You might get shot, huh? Rob? Hmm? Hmm? Hmm? You can't teach that, can you? Hmm? What might happen? Hmm? So the accidental being rare, you can't make it the object of any art of what? Science, huh? Hmm? It has been said then what the accidental is, and through what cause it is, and that there is no science of it, huh? Hmm? Maybe we should stop there, huh? Because the third reading is another thing here, huh? The third reading is going to be talking about, um, there are really things that happen, huh? Hmm? There are a style, but there are things that happen. And of course, you know, the moderns have a principle that they call what? The principle of determinism, okay? And the principle of determinism, and the I think we mentioned we were talking about Decipes, right? Mm-hmm. Everything happens for a reason by necessity, he says. Well, this in a sense is the absolute principle of modern science in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And sometimes it's stated in terms of what the past and future. If you knew the position and momentum and so on of every part of the universe at any point in time, and you had a supercalculating mind, you'd see the whole future unraveling the complete what? Necessity, right? Mm-hmm. So the past necessarily determines the future. And, um, you've probably heard me take the example there of Claude Bernard, huh? As a witness to that being the absolute principle of modern science. Um, you know, this principle arises because you have a mathematical science in it, especially, huh? And mathematics you have a kind of determinism, huh? That's absolute. And so when you study the natural world of mathematics, you kind of carry this determinism over to the natural world. Um, now, it developed, as I say, in the physical sciences first, right? And they got all this prestige, right? And then when biology, and later on psychology, and maybe even the social sciences later on, when they tried to, what, take on the roles of science and the prestigious science, um, what they saw as being most necessary in science is this principle determinism on. Now, there's a very famous work by Claude Bernard, who's one of the fathers, I suppose you'd say, of modern physiology and biology. And they still reprint his introduction to the study of experimental, uh, medicine, right? The universe from Harvard and so on. Um, but he was trying to make biology more scientific there, right? Around 1860, right? It wasn't scientific enough to biology, right? And so, among other works, he wrote this book called Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. But the book has three parts, uh, and the first part is a general description of the experimental method, uh, the scientific method. The second part is a description of the scientific method in biology in particular. And the third part is concrete examples from his own research, which are very ingenious, right, of, um, following this, uh, experimental method in biology, right? So it's to make biology more scientific, huh? But now in the first part, Bernard has a good understanding of the fact that a scientific hypothesis is never known for sure to be true, okay? And from elementary logic, you can see the reason for that, right? See? Because the way the scientific hypothesis confirmed is, you say, if H is so, my hypothesis is so, then you predict what could be so, right? Okay. Okay. Okay. If my hypothesis is correct, then there will be an eclipse of the sun at 10 this morning, right? Now you wait until the clock, now there's an eclipse of the sun, right? P is so. Now, can you still judge then that H is so? No. And that would be, what, an escape. Because P could follow maybe from something besides H, right? And so the fact that P is so doesn't mean that H is so, right? It's a sign that it is, but it doesn't prove it. Yeah. And my example in class is that Perkos dropped dead last night, which is my hypothesis about Perkos. And Perkos would be absent from class today. But he is absent from class today. Therefore he dropped dead. I always tell the students that's wishful thinking. But it's not logical thinking. And, of course, Einstein, huh, says that Etonian physics have predicted so many things that came true. And then they began to think this must be true, Etonian physics, huh? And then Einstein showed he could predict the same things with a different hypothesis, right? Plus some things that he didn't look like. And then he said it became crystal clear to the physicists that you never know in the strict sense. Now, of course, the more things you predict that come true, right? And the more precise those things are, right? The thesis of Etonian physics is pretty precise, right? The more probable becomes a hypothesis, right? But this form of argument never is a syllogism. It never follows necessarily in HSO. So you never really know that HSO, right? You might be reasonable to accept it for the time being because, you know, everything that's predicted so far has been so, right? Of course, the thing that really, you know, strikes them is sometimes when they work out this, it predicts something will be that they've never seen before, like they'll predict. You know, like a deer apotop, the math, the other particles, they said they predicted that there was going to be a positive electron. You know such thing. Well, soon enough, they found a, what? Positron or something, right? Okay? So you predict the existence of something nobody knows exists. And you find out later on that does exist. Wow! You know? That's striking. But still, the form doesn't, what? Doesn't follow necessarily, right? So Bernard, in a sense, realizes that no matter how many times an hypothesis has been confirmed, it still might make sense sometime to, what? Test it again. And so he says that doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method. But, when it comes to the principle of determinism, he said, you can't doubt that. To doubt determinism would be to doubt science. He seems to be being inconsistent. Well, no, I mean, I give that as a witness, right? He's a man who in some sense understands very much, right? Yeah. The fact that a hypothesis is never, by its confirmation, shown to necessarily be true, right? And therefore, it can always be submitted to some further test, right? But yet, he excludes determinism from this, right? So, the determinism becomes, in a sense, the, or is seen as the actual principle of science. You must go down to that. To give up determinism is to give up science. Now, the other example I always give is from psychology, right? And I tell him the story of my cousin's dream, right? And my cousin used to have these wild dreams, and he'd tell us about them in the morning. We'd have a good laugh about them. And the one dream that he had at one time was a tiger was chasing him, right? And he was trying to escape from the tiger, running this way, running that way. And finally, he runs down this way. It's a dead end. It doesn't have to go. He turns around to face the tiger, right? And as the tiger comes up, the tiger says, would you like to buy a ruffle ticket? Well, how irrational, right, huh? If anything seems irrational, not to have any reason for it, right? And not do it by necessity, it's a dream, right? But then along comes a guy named Freud, right? And he's going to make, you know, psychology scientific, right? And so, there's a reason why you did that last night, huh? Cousin, huh? And you have to dream that, right? And it tells us something about you. We're going to find out what it tells us about you, right? That's kind of an extreme example, right? But you see, that's what it's got to hold on to, though. Determinism, right? Okay? Now, determinism was not challenged in modern science until quantum theory, right? And it was Heisenberg, right, who first clearly formulated, right, the principle of indeterminism, huh? And Einstein, as you know, would never go along with this, huh? Wanted to hold on to the determinism of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And the Copenhagen so-called interpretation of quantum theory with Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, so-called, because they were all students at one time of Bohr, I'm associating with him, and he's in Copenhagen. That was the subject, you know, of the great showdowns of physicists in the Solvay Conference. In 1927, there was the last big showdown, and Einstein came to the conference. He was trying to write down the Copenhagen interpretation, and he would think up a thought experiment that seemed to reduce difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. And Niels Bohr would stay up all night, come back the next day, and refute Einstein's objection, right? So Einstein would try to know, right? And finally, the last attempt at Einstein was pretty devastating, at first sight, in the way. And I've actually had one of the books, you know, a picture of Einstein and Bohr leaving, you know, after Einstein's been his last and greatest ejected to him. And Einstein was kind of walking along, kind of, you know, kind of self-satisfied, kind of, you know, work on his face almost. And Bohr's coming after, you know, and looking kind of worried, you know. Well, again, Bohr spent a sleepless night on him, and he found that Einstein and his objection had overlooked part of his own theory. Oh, no. And so he came back to the next day and pointed out, and that was the end of Einstein. He never tried to object publicly again to it. He never would accept it, you see. And Ehrenfest, who was a physicist who was kind of a personal friend of Einstein, said, I'm ashamed of you, right? I mean, you can't give an objection that holds up and make you go along with it, right? It shows how strongly they worked that idea of determinism. But the indeterminism that Aristotle sees in the natural world is tied to his understanding of matter, right? And Heisenberg, when he started to see the determinism, ever interested in Aristotle's idea of matter and the competency of matter, that matter is really able to be other than it is. Even when it's this way, it's able to be another way. And he thought that quantum theory, you know, suggested ideas in the physicist's minds, like the one that Aristotle had, huh? That's what he says in the Gifford lectures now. Would it only be in the determinism of matter that Heisenberg was rooting this, or would it also be in, because it seems so clear that we are free? Yeah, that's another kind of thing. So would it, yeah? Yeah, that's right. Natural sciences. Did Heisenberg go, well, was he a factor? Right, he might do that, yeah. But that's a really different kind of the determinism. Oh, yeah, certainly. Aristotle would see that, too. But, I mean, as far as natural things, in terms of matter, right? Okay, now, so this third reading, Aristotle's going to be kind of, you know, attacking the idea of determinism, right? Okay? And determinism in modern physics seems to be there to stay now, you know? But there's still some people who want to go back, you know? So, next time we look at the third reading, we'll see some of the reasons Aristotle gives for this. And then we'll go on to the fourth reading, which will be about the being as true, right? Okay? And it's already given the reasons why accidental being doesn't have to be considered much, a lot in wisdom, right? One reason, because no reason to acknowledge, right, considers the accidental, right? One reason, because no reason to acknowledge, right? One reason to acknowledge, right? One reason to acknowledge, right? One reason to acknowledge, right? One reason to acknowledge, right? And second, that this is the reason that knowledge is about being is being, and it hardly is a being. It hardly is. It's kind of interesting. Aristotle begins with the being that least of all is. And then it goes all the way to the one that says, I am who I am, right? And this is kind of the picture of our mind. That goes from what seems more real to us. What is less real, right, least real, and goes to what is most real, but least known to us. Now, mainly, I start to go from motion, right? But in motion, I do, yes. But accidental being is sometimes even less real. But literally, you find out that God is the cause of being as being, right? And his causal extends even down to accidental being. And as Thomas would say, God's causality is so strong, that not only what he wants to be is, but it is in the way he wants it to be. Some things by necessity and some by, what, chance and so on, right? And you realize how transcendent God's mind is, right? Compared to our mind, huh? Where you can't, you know, foresee the accidental right level and control. People running around, you know, to do enough, you know, to help people out of New Orleans and so on. You know, there's an awful lot of accidental being in these things, huh? There were a debate in a woman today about the, we tell you, the new hurricane coming in there. Everybody's speeding, you know, and the city are told to evacuate. But the line of cars, it says, 100 miles long, and the speed is 2 miles an hour. Oh, man. Well, one woman, you know, said, well, that guy's going to run out of gas when I get out of here. And we'd be stranded somewhere on the highway. So she turned around and went back home. So there's all kinds of things going on, right? And, uh, you know, playing people all together for the accidental, all right? Well, she should have had it all. You never know. She should have for the same place. Yeah, I'm just coming in with some airplanes, but I mean, still, I'm just, I don't know if we can take it all. Of course, you know. How he's there, you know, built, you know, to take this much at this time, in one time. Everybody's eating. Is this Key West? Well, the time of tech is not supposed to come in. I don't know. Houston, I don't know. How far is Houston from the shore? I don't know. I think they know. Yeah, yeah. This is also Category 5, is it? They call it Category 5, yeah. Just like the last one. Oh, really? Right? The last one was, was it 4, wasn't it? It was, it didn't help to find it. Oh, I thought it was. Oh, I thought it was. Oh, I thought it was. Well, Karl Marx and Freud, right, they say, you know, they explain this fragment of pedigrees, you know, Marx, I'll tell you, it's all part of the truth, right, that the economic mode of production does, has something to do with the social structure, society, and the political structure, you know, I think he's, but the economic mode of production explains everything, you know, and then, and then Freud comes along and says, no, sex explains everything, I'm sure sexes mean something, but it doesn't explain everything, you know, and, you know, can they both be right to, you know, economic mode of production explains everything, you know, But in a sense, that's what you see, because the problem in evolution has been, you know, the main problem is, how do you get a whole basic pattern, you know, of animal, right, piecemeal, you can't do it, you can't introduce it piecemeal, and you can have maybe, you know, variational color or variations in the links to the nose or something, right, It has some connection with changing things in the environment, but that's like a, that's not, that's not, that's not the whole, the whole makeup of the animal, right, and that's a problem that we had from the beginning, that we can't really explain it, and of course, apparently, the chemistry say that cells involve so many things that have to be coordinated, right, and that's another, you can't, you know, The cell won't work unless all these things are in place, and how can you do that piecemeal, you can't do it piecemeal, you see, so, they're kind of extrapolating, right, with no basis from a little part of the truth they saw that there were, you know, But if you find in England, you know, that the birds, some kind of bird there was, or not as a bird, it was an insect, but ones that had a certain color, right, that fit in with the smoky landscape of the industrial England, they survived, right, because they couldn't be seen by the predators, right, and ones of other colors, right, started to disappear, right, because they were picked up by the predators, right, okay, So you can see something better, right, but that's kind of my thing, compared to the whole basic structure of this or that kind of animal, and they don't really, can we address that, but they take it sometimes, you know, I mean, I saw sometimes even in Catholic magazines, you know, saying, you know, well, John Pope's second experience evolution, you know, that's the whole thing he thinks now, you know, this is the whole truth, right, but that's a common thing, right, you see, it's part of the truth that you're, what, I see with the whole, you boast, like he said, they boast of having seen the whole, and I think that that's seen, he says, or learned by man, but I think behind it, behind it, to the idea that of evolution, is that basically the materials, right, so the thinking of matter as the beginning of all things, and the mindless matter at the beginning of all things, right, then you have to try to explain everything by luck or by chance, huh, Chester's sort of mocked that theory, by saying, that particular principle is saying, some, you know, other listeners want to say that the whole universe is like a giant egg that laid itself by accident. Yeah, that's what it comes down to in their explanation. But in human things, we see, you know, like a chance means to chaos, huh, you know, and the exact example there is the library, right, you know, if you just put a book in anywhere as a whole, in the bookshelves, the whole collection goes to order to disorder, so, over time, things you get more disordered than ordered, huh, you take your desk and all of that, as you put an example around the school, you know, of course, as much as it goes on, it gets littered with, you know, kinds of things that come in all the time, you get more, you know, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you get more, you tendency is to go from order to disorder, like the physicists say, right, thermodynamics out of it, you're just going from organized state to thermodynamics state. My mother, my mother used to illustrate that for me, because when it was time when my room was visually disorganized, she would do it, she would take all the drawers out and dump them in the middle of the room, she would say, straighten it out. So I was forced to put order in, because it's intelligent design, I have a practical experience with intelligence. I don't know why I'm going to have to see the order you put in it. Well, I never said your most intelligence design, but it's so much. That was a good question. Quality rationality. More intelligence than the mess of the number. Can you get a look through that? Sure. It's your library. Let's see, I don't care. Oh, you dry? A little. Second, third, and fourth paragraphs, huh? So somebody's in there, what? Eating some salty... You have two kinds of mistake or two kinds of falsehood, right? And most people don't know what it means exactly, but when you swear in the courtroom, right? I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, right? Are the second and the third phrases there just reiterating what the first one says? I swear to tell the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Are we just saying the same thing in a sense, slightly differently in words and emphasizing it? Or is the second and third phrases more particular? One excluding, right, what you might call adding to the truth, and the other subtracting from the truth, right? What is Falster says? You know, if they say more or less than the truth, they are villains and the sons of darkness. But when you say that what is not is, you seem to be what? Adding to the truth, right? When you say that what is is not, you seem to be subtracting from the truth, right? Now, I'll take a simple example there. If I'm a bartender, and I'm giving testimony in court, and they say, who's at the bar between 9 and 10, and let's say that Paul and John were at the bar between 9 and 10, right? Okay. Now, I swear to tell them the truth. The truth is that Paul and John were there, right? The whole truth. Well, if I just said that Paul was there and left out John, then would I be telling the whole truth? No. And I'd be, in a sense of saying that who was there, was not there. I'd be what? Subtracting the truth. Okay? And nothing but the truth. Well, I could also depart from the truth by saying, John and Paul and Tom were there, right? Well, now Tom was not there, and I'm saying that he was there. So I'm adding to the truth, right? So there's these two extremes, right? Okay? You see that, of course, in the great heresies about the Trinity. And about the Incarnation, right? There's two ways of departing from the truth about the Trinity, right? Basically. And one is to say that because there are three persons, then there are three natures. And then you're what? Adding to the truth, right? And the other is to reverse the statement, say because there's one nature, there can only be one person, right? So the truth is in between two extremes, right? Like Kent there and King Lerick says something. He says, All my reports go with the modest truth, nor war, nor clipped, but so on. So truth is in between two contrary mistakes, two contrary falses, neither one of which can explain the other false thing. But the truth is in between, and there's no one to the truth, right? So those who say there's three persons and three natures of God have no one to the truth. There are three persons. And those who say there's one nature and one person have no one to the truth. There's one nature. But neither one has the whole truth, right? And it's just the reverse, of course, with the incarnation there. Some people say because you have one person, you have what? One nature. And they're subtracting from the truth. They're saying what is, is not. And others say, well, because there's what? Two natures there, there must be two persons there, and they're, what? Adding, yeah. You see? Okay. And Aristotle goes on to say, as a whole, they are about the dividing of a contradiction. Now, what kind of opposition is contradiction, right? Well, it's between an affirmative and a negative statement. And, but let's get a little more precise here. In the strict sense, contradictory statements are statements with the same subject, right? The same predicate. But one affirmative and the other negative, right? But they're opposed such that both cannot be true and both cannot be false. But one must be true and the other must be false. Also, so President Bush is sitting. President Bush is not sitting. These are opposed contradictorly, right? They have the same subject, President Bush. The same predicate, sitting. One is affirmative. President Bush is sitting. One is negative. President Bush is not sitting. And can both of these be true now? Can they both be false? One must be true and the other must be false. And in this case, I don't know which is the true one, which is the false one, right? Okay? Yes? I'm not trying to be cute. Suppose he's lying down. Okay, well then... Then they'd both be false. No. No. Then he's not sitting. Okay. So he's either sitting or not sitting, right? And this goes back to the axioms of being and non-being. In a way, there's two axioms about being and being. And one says it's impossible to both be and not be. Or you can say, more precisely, it's impossible to both be and not be at the same time in the same way. But then the other axiom is that it's necessary to be or not to be, right? At the same time in the same way. You've got to be one or the other, right? There's no middle ground, right? There's something middle between being black and white, between being hot and cold, like being lukewarm. But there's no middle between being hot or not being hot. It's whether you're cold or lukewarm. You're still not hot, right? Okay. And so sometimes I quote Hamlet there, you know, where he says, to be or not to be. That is the question, right? But it's a question because you can't both be and not be. And because you must either be or not be, right? Or if I said, you know, to breathe or to philosophize, that is a question. Well, you can do both, right? Okay. So it's not really a question. You can do both. It's not a question you've got to be one or the other, but you can't do both. But to be or not to be is that way, right? Now, you may remember from logic, huh, that to see the contradictory of a statement with the universal subject a little more involved than with a singular. They say Socrates is sitting, the contradictory is Socrates is not sitting. But now, if you took the universal subject like man, grammatically, man is sitting, man is not sitting seems grammatically like Socrates is sitting, Socrates is not sitting, right? But Socrates is the name of an individual, one man, who retired at the age of 70. But, man is something said of many, right? So, when you say man is sitting, someone might say, well, that's not altogether distinct what you're saying, huh? Do you mean that every man is sitting? Or do you mean that some man is sitting, huh? So, if you say man is sitting, it's because the subject is said of many, right? It's not clear what you mean exactly, huh? It's indefinite, we say sometimes, huh? Now, what's the contradictory of man is sitting, huh? What is the statement that would be, what's the contradictory of every man is sitting, see? No man is sitting. Well, is no man is sitting opposed to every man is sitting, such that one must be true and the other must be false? Some man is sitting. Some man is sitting. Yeah, some man is not sitting, right? Because every man is sitting, and no man is sitting, could both be what? All false. Just looking around this room, you can see that both of these statements are false, right? So every man is sitting, and no man is sitting. In logic, they sometimes call them contrary, because that's about as far away as you can get to what you're saying, right? But are they contradictory? See, because contradictory statements are ones of the same subject and predicate, one affirmative and one negative, but opposed such that one must be true and the other must be false. They can't both be true, they can't both be false, right? Well, these could both be false, right? Now, what every man is sitting is opposed to contradictorily, is that some man is what? Sitting, yeah. All you need is one man, okay? Some man is not sitting. So these statements, every man is sitting, and some man is not sitting, are what Aristotle would call the two halves of the contradiction. These two statements are opposed, right? And they're opposed such that one must be true, and the other must be false. They can't both be true, they can't both be false, right? And you just have to think about it, if it's true that every man is sitting, that means there's no exception, right? Well, then some man is not sitting would clearly be false. And if it's true that some man is not sitting, just one man, right? Then it must be false that every man is sitting, huh? Do you see that? And it's false that every man is sitting, huh? It doesn't have to be that no man is sitting, but it must be that at least some man is not sitting. And if you can't say that some man is not sitting, then you're forced to say that every man is sitting. Now, likewise, the universal negative is opposed to some man is sitting, right? But some man is sitting, and some man is not sitting. Although grammatically, it seems to be like Socrates is sitting, and Socrates is not sitting. But because some man is indefinite, right? It's possible that it be true that some man is sitting, and true that some man is not sitting. So, the two particulars can both be true. Well, the two universal statements can both be false. But the diagonals, huh? The universal affirmative and the particular negative, and the universal negative, the particular affirmative, they can't both be true, they can't both be false. But one must be true, and the other one must be, what? Well, false, huh? So Aristotle is saying that they are, what? The affirmative and the negative statements divide a contradiction, right? Now, sometimes I'll say, in grammar, of all possible statements, how many are true and how many are false? Well, for every affirmative statement, there's a contradictory and negative statement. And for every negative statement, there's a contradictory affirmative statement. And that means that there's always a statement to every statement that's opposed such that one must be true and the other must be false. So, of all possible, the infinity of possible statements, how many are true and how many are false? I guess you've got the same number. What? I guess you've got the same number. Yeah, yeah. Fifty percent of statements you could make are true. See? Fifty percent are false, right? So, if you have some reason to think this is true and that's false, right? You can get over that half and half, right? See that? She loves me, she loves me now. You know, really. You can pull the boss out of it. Well, one must be true and the other must be false. Except you still don't know until you get to the last. I don't know, right? That's a classic way to say it. He's absolutely certain because of me. So, he says, for the true has the affirmation to put together, right? Okay, so, if man and animal are together, and you say man is an animal, then you have true. And man is not an animal would be, what? Divided and false, huh? But the false would be the reverse, right? Okay. I didn't put say that too well today. For the true has the affirmation to put together, and negation to divide it. So, if man and animal are together, the affirmative statement will be true, right? And if man and stone are divided, then the negative statement will be true. And the false would be just the reverse of that, right? Putting together what are divided, or dividing what are together, right? Now, the second little paragraph there is an allusion to the third book about the soul, right? And Aristotle, in the very book, he says, When you think that man is an animal, at the same time, you think of man and an animal. Or when you say man is not a stone, at the same time, you think of man as stone. But it's possible to think of man not thinking of stone, and to think of stone not thinking of what? Man, right? But when I think that man is not a stone, I have to, at the same time, know man and stone, right? And this is something discussed in the third book about the soul, and he's talking about our reason, right? So, in a sense, you've made something, one, out of man and stone, when you say man is not a stone. Now, he began the third paragraph, huh? This is an extremely important thing he says here, but he's extremely brief here. I think I mentioned how my old teacher, Kasuri, could say, you know, Aristotle wrote the book, and then he scratched out every other sentence. But maybe a more reasonable thing is that what we have are kind of like the official notes, right? And you know how professors sometimes will have a very concise note. Sometimes people have an index card, you know, and they're giving a whole hour talk or something like that, right? And just, you know, they don't have to expand it when they give their talk, right? So, in a sense, it's like looking at professors' notes, almost, right? And there's no more, I don't think we intentionally made it obscure, but, you know, this is kind of an official record, but you expand upon it, right? And this sentence here is extremely important, and that could, the whole point of it could be easily missed without Thomas Aquinas, right? Okay? Once you, Dionne, said that one thing about Cajetan's mistake was trying to comment directly to Aristotle without going through Thomas. Of course, Dionne says, you know, in a distant way, it's like the angels, right? Where this angel instructs the one immediately below him, and either one went below him, right? So he says, well, what are you there? There's something like that in the mind. So you've got Aristotle there, and then Thomas understands Aristotle, and then Charles DeConnick understands Thomas, right? And I'm just going to show you how to read Thomas, he says. And then you can go on your own, to some extent, right? Okay? So you have to learn how to read the mind that is, what, closer to your mind, and ascend to the greater mind, right? So he says, the false and the true are not in things, as if the good is true and the bad false, but in the mind, right? And this is a fundamental distinction, huh? Between good and bad, and true and false. That true and false, found primarily in the mind, in the reason, right? But, and bad in things, outside of the world.