Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
Lecture 4: The Philosopher as Lover of Wisdom: Definition and Equivocation

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So the first question is, what is a philosopher, right? And the first thing you want to see is that in the original and, I think, true and full sense, the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, right? The second thing we ask, what is wisdom? And that's when we look at the bringing, the stopping. The third thing is, how must the philosopher love wisdom, right? And the fourth thing is the equivocal use of the philosopher, right? Now, I think you find this mainly in the modern philosophy. If you read Bacon, for example, Bacon is always emphasizing that knowledge is power, right? Now, why is he emphasizing it so much, right? Because he's a lover of wisdom or because he's a lover of what? Power, right, you know? So you've got to be kind of careful there. If you call Bacon a philosopher, but he's really a lover of power, then what? You're using the word equivocally, right? Almost by chance, right? Why call a man who's a lover of power, right? He loves knowledge for the sake of power. Why say he's a lover of wisdom? I mean, this one is confusing, right? Now, you go to Adam Smith now. Adam Smith's greatest work is the wealth of nations, right? Smith gives the benefit of the doubt. He's not just addressing his own wealth. He's addressing the wealth of his country of nations, right? But if that's his main concern, the wealth of nations, I call him a lover of what? And I call him a lover of wealth. You get to Hegel. Hegel says, the end of history is freedom and liberty. You go to Jean-Paul Sartre. The start, the absolute good, is freedom, right? That's important. It's not what you do, but what you freely do. Well, why isn't such a man more a lover of freedom, liberty, or maybe in a sense of license, almost, but it's a lover of freedom, rather than, what, wisdom, right? Some of the students in this seminar this year were giving papers on Nietzsche, right, huh? Of course, it comes out every paper in the discussion that Nietzsche's really kind of irrational. Well, how can you be a lover of wisdom and not be a lover of reason? Because wisdom is the highest or the greatest perfection. If I don't love reason, I can't be a lover of wisdom. How can I love health and not love the body? How can I love the body and not love health? How can I love the eyes and not love 20-20 vision? How can I love 20-20 vision and not love the eyes? It's a good sense of it. So if I love wisdom, I must love reason. If I really love reason, maybe I have to love wisdom. It's the highest or the greatest perfection. Thomas, in his training to Nicomachean Ethics, he recalls this idea that it belongs to wise men to order things, right? And then he says the reason for that is that wisdom is the highest perfection of reason and it belongs to reason and the order, right? So again, how can you love wisdom and reason without loving order, right? The love of wisdom, the love of reason, the love of order, is there something irrational about it, actually? How is he really a philosopher in the original sense of the word, right? Now, you can see in a way, in the Greek philosophers, they've not been exposed to the wisdom of God through the prophets, through the apostles, right? Of course, they're writing before, of course, they didn't come around, but they're not really in contact with the prophets and so on. But notice what Aristotle says, and they're all saying these are the great thinkers. Either God alone is wise or God knows to all, right? So, if you're a lover of wisdom, you must love the wisdom of God more than the wisdom of the man. And so, if we could partake in the wisdom of God, right? If God were to speak to us, then we would partake of a wisdom that the Greek philosophers themselves, without knowing that God had spoken to the prophets, right? Or without knowing that God became man, wasn't going to become man, right? In the course of time, it can teach us, right? But, for their own principles, they'd have to say this is wisdom in a, what? Fuller sense, right? And I know what happens when you go through the history of Mark's philosophy, kind of a columbic against Christianity, and it's more violent as it can go on. The link between Hague and Mark's, really, was Vorabach's, the essence of Christianity, or Vorabach's essence of Christianity, not that God became man, but the man himself is God, see? So, this great act of humility, this incarnation there, has turned into him an occasion for pride, right? And it's really, but if they give up the wisdom of God, they can even keep the wisdom of man, see? The Greeks were not really faced with that, right? Because they weren't exposed, right, to the word of God, right? Through the prophets, sorry, not through Christ's apostles, right? Aristotle died in, what, 322 B.C., right? More than 300 years before Christ. A lot of times, I go back to the fragment of Pterotitis, as the child is to a man, so is man to God, right? I say, the child must learn from the man, right? But he first learns from the man by invitation, and then he learns from the man by invitation, right? So, there's an order there, right? And Aristotle's talking about invitation there, in the book of the Poetic Art, he says, he first learned by invitation, right? So, in a sense, the Greek philosophers are learning from God, and by imitation. They were learning through the works of God, and meaning natural things, right? You can see how Aristotle, in a sense, is starting from nature there, right? This natural desire to know, this natural road, right? And that, in a way, is presupposed to learning from the words of God, right? And so, our Lord instructs us, by his words in the parables, he uses natural things, right? The seed fell in the ground, and some failure, and some failure there, right? So, you have to learn already about seeds, and he says, you have to learn from the works of God, right? Before you can learn from his words. So, the modern philosophers, some of them, thought they were going back to the Greeks when they, what, rejected Christianity, right? And tried to, in a sense, philosophize without the faith in the way the Greeks did it. But it's not the same thing at all, because the Greeks never rejected the revelation. They were never exposed to it, right? And so, they're not lacking something in the way the modern philosophers are lacking something. In the modern philosophers, they're writing after Christ. It's not right. So, they reject this. They lack something they should have. So, they they tried to find a substitute for philosophy, right? In, in, for philosophy. I think I was mentioning how I was reading this biography of London recently, you know, from one of the, one of the Russian historians, he was a historian in general, right? But, he talks about how the young man, you know, he talked about Lenin was a wonderful man, right? And he was just stout in and made things bad. But you go back into the, he has access to now all the records there, and you realize that an awful man Lenin was, a terrible man, you know? And, the, the, the, oh, yeah, oh, there's, there's words that happen, you know, praising Lenin. Lenin. The Great Prophet and Apostle. They're called. Where a flower never calls, you know, Plato the Great Prophet and Apostle. First I was praising Plato was, but he's the first man to show both by word and deed that the happy life is a virtuous life. Some men had shown by where they live, that if your virtue is going to be happy. Other men had shown by their words, but didn't look up to no words. Plato, he says, the first man to show both by, but he did what he said, this is the way that he happened to them, the virtuous life. He didn't call them the prophet and the apostle. He's the prophet and the apostle, which wasn't. There's all kinds of ways that you find this. Language. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. I think you can see the will in that. I always quote that passage where he says, we're not atheistic, he says, in the sense that we would exhaust ourselves in trying to prove that he doesn't exist, right? We're atheistic, he says, in the sense that it makes no difference to us when he doesn't even speak to us. Well, I can see people, you know, being in doubt, you know. Look at that book there. There's a guy who converts to C.S. Lewis there. Oh, so they're not C.S. Lewis? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I was just thinking, the letter that Chris wrote to C.S. Lewis, Lewis, you know, had converted, right? Of course, you can see the man is, you know, he wants to believe, but he can't quite believe yet, you know. And so he wants C.S. Lewis to kind of help him, you know, to believe and so on. I can see a man being in some kind of doubt in that sense, you know, about being a wicked man, you know. But here's Sartre saying, you know, it makes no difference. It's the way he wants to do it, you know. Whether he does, it doesn't, you know. And Marx, in the practical thesis, he takes Cometheus as the first hero of philosophy, right? Well, I mean, not Cometheus, the very legend is not Cometheus, the legend there, is not now the existence of Zeus, right? But he's even bold against Zeus, right? And that's what Marx is, he's even bold against that. Okay, so that's the fourth thing I want to talk about, right? The equivocal use of the word philosophy, right? So a lot of times you have one word, people think there's one thing, but it ain't so, right? I had your philosophy in three. What is the distinction and order of the times and parts of the four? What is the best way to come into philosophy? Yeah, so we just finished the first one, what is the philosopher? I had that in four. What is the original and true sense of the word philosopher, lover of wisdom? What is wisdom, right? That's what it's bringing him for. How would he love wisdom, right? It's not necessary to talk about the equivocal use of the word philosopher, right? Well, you know, a lot of times it means just about either, right? It means free, I'm kidding. It's not very helpful, right? I think what's interesting about divine providence, you know, church fathers, you know, point out how divine providence used the non-conversion of some of the Jews, right? Many of the Jews. That the non-conversion of many of the Jews and the violent opposition of many of the Jews to Christianity, right? Those Jews were at the same time a witness to the antiquity, right? And authenticity of the books of the Old Testament, many of which the church fathers used to, you know, argue that the Christ coming was foretold and so on, right? Now, somebody might say, you know, pagan society, well, you guys just, you know, put those books up, you know, and now you claim that this is foretold, right? But when the enemies of the Christians, right, you know, they don't understand maybe their prophecies, but when the enemies of the Christians are witnesses to the authenticity and antiquity of those books, right, then when the Christians argue that, right, they're not a way of doing that, right? Well, I think there's something about Greek philosophy developing before Christianity, right? And independent, as far as you know, from, you know, Jewish, you know, Phoenician, we can see how far natural reason can get, right? I mean, for Aristotle, you know, in the Nicmarcha Ethics, it's obvious to Aristotle that adultery is something wrong. He takes it as a exact example, right? He says that although virtue lies in the means, right, you need too much and too little, there are some acts that are by definition already in the extreme. And the clear example of him is adultery, right? If you don't do too much or too little, but just the right amount. No, he says, isn't it all wrong, right? It's kind of obvious things, right? And in the topics, right, he's talking about doubtful questions and things that are doubtful that you want to discuss and try to find the truth on, right? But he excludes certain things from a doubtful question, right? And one other thing he excludes is that the smell is white, you know? If a man is in doubt about that, he means not arguing, he says, but it's in census, right? He says, if a man is in doubt that he should honor his father and mother, he's not in need of argument, he says, he's in need of punishment. So it's obvious here a lot, right? So when somebody comes along and says, well, it's because of Sinai that you think you should honor your father and mother, you know, or you've got to not commit adultery or something, that's right, because of Sinai. But here, someone who's never heard of Sinai, right, is very clear about this. So then you see, you know, that makes it more credible, right? That human reason can know that these things are bad, right? Or like the Hippocratic Oath, right? You know, I guess the doctors stopped taking, right? But the Hippocratic Oath was not invented by a Christian or a Jew, right? The Hippocratic Oath was invented by a Greek pagan, you might say, right? And the Hippocratic Oath, you know, was opposed to both abortion and euthanasia. And so someone said, you know, we are opposed to abortion and euthanasia because it's your church teachers, right? Well, that's part of it, but it's not just the church. That's the only basis for it. See, we're in fact, you know, we would be opposed to it, right? And I don't know if people would come into the church because we're opposed to these things. And the church seemed to be the only thing that was, what? Yeah, yeah, the only thing that was remaining firm about the evil of these things, right? So, there's something in Divine Proverbs, right? All the Jews are not converted for one reason. So the idea about the fact that philosophy began to reach a sort of perfection in the title of Aristotle, so that they could be called the chief philosophers, by Albert de Bain and Thomas and Al-Farabi and some of the new ages. But this developed independently of the revelation, right? And human reason Ken knows sort of thing more than well without revelation. Now, if you talk about the soul, you must be, you know, on basic Christianity, right? So it's got a whole book there about things to talk about the soul, right? So, next time we should talk about coming to Jesus. How many copies do you need? It's going to be seven copies. Now, we're going to be talking next about the philosophy. I'm going to just, not to the effects, so this is going to be a little bit ahead of myself. Well, I might get to that, but that's the first thing I'm going to consider. I'm going to talk about what philosophy is. Then, we're going to talk about the distinction of the chief kinds of philosophy and their parts, right? And in this frame, the Nicomarckian Ethics, a lot of interesting things in there, but Thomas eventually is going to divide practical philosophy. And that's one of the chief kinds of philosophy. He's going to show why ethics and domestic philosophy and political philosophy, why they're not the same thing exactly, right? But in the beginning of this, he kind of situates practical philosophy within the whole of our knowledge, right? And he begins with a quote from the physics, right? So we're going to use that for a number of reasons, right? He's going to talk about, you know, belongs to the wise man to order things, as Aristotle said, right? But then he gives the reason why, because wisdom is the highest perfection of reason and belongs to reason and order. And then he's going to divide order in comparison to reason. And then he's going to divide human knowledge by the order it considers, right? Now, this is not the main text for distinguishing the shape, kind of philosophy. I'm going to give you that on my own, right? Okay? But it's interesting for a number of reasons, huh? Okay? That's one text that you can look at. But as I say, it does give a division of practical. Now, this one page here, seven copies, you said? Just because that's a symbol of wisdom. You've got a seven, right? Four, five. These are the three main texts on wonder from the first, from the Greek philosophers. It wasn't from Aristotle, but we've seen, but I just, we could list them and there's hard to deal with this, right? But read the text here from Plato to the Decades and the Pachyre. Now, another text here, which we've been looking at eventually, this where Thomas shows how order is defined by before and after. Then the famous text of Aristotle to the Categories would explain what we have before. It's a very funny text, right? Notice, it belongs to the wise man to no order, right? Most of all. In general, for reason in order, right? Take that text. We'll venture the key piece here. Now, as we said, you can't love wisdom without loving reason. And it's ridiculous to want to be wise and not wanting to be reason, right? So, because the philosopher is seeking the highest perfection of reason and generally good of reason, it belongs to the philosopher to urge people to use a reason, right? But the best short exhortation to use reason was written by William Shakespeare. Okay? So, I'm going to give you Shakespeare's exhortation and then a little gradient by myself to make me start thinking about that exhortation which you should memorize. Okay? The premium in the... Well, the wisdom of the premium. Now, see, you can be looking at these texts, but we're going to be bringing them in at the proper moment, right? Because what I'm going to do next time is get the second question, what is philosophy, right? A lot of people think the question, what is philosophy, is answered by a state level of wisdom, right? Well, you could use the word philosophy in that sense, right? But Plato and Espresciarstava would use the word philosophy not to name the love of wisdom, but to name the knowledge that a love of wisdom would pursue. So philosophy doesn't need a kind of love, it needs a kind of knowledge, right? Okay? And what is that kind of knowledge? So I'm going to talk about that without a catch here. And then, as we talked about that, then we're going to talk about the two-sheet pangs of philosophy, looking philosophy and practical philosophy, and there are, what, parts, right? Looking philosophy, mathematical philosophy, natural philosophy, whatever it's all called first philosophy. And then practical philosophy, like Thomas was talking about, there is ethics and domestic, see, technical philosophy. Then there's a third kind of philosophy, which is the dual. And that's logic, right? And so we'll talk about that a bit. But Thomas does touch upon a little bit of those parts of philosophy redevise philosophy and personal order, right? There's a lot to be learned from that division. It's not really the proper division of kinds of philosophy, right? Here we get Montilla Dion's notes, they're in French, right? One time I went up to see them, right? And I was asking them about this text, and all of a sudden you see the notes. I'll see him in the left. He said, you want to go to my question, right? He worked for this whole course. He said, talking about my question. But I'm also going to be doing that reference there, right? But here's a text that brings out, right? The fact that you can divide the knowledge of reason by the order it considers, right? Shows how tied up reason is in order, right? And you'll see that Shakespeare defines reason by order. When defined reason is ability for large discourse looking before and after. As Thomas says in that text, I think it's interesting to tell us, but instead of order means before and after means. So, order is in the definition of reason, reason is the definition of limit. There's lots to be thought about there. I was given, you know, I might start off in class, and give the shapes of education to use reason. I give a scientist text, or the premium, and a little text, so I have a question to ask about the education. That actually is an amazing idea, isn't it? An outstanding challenge, for anybody to make it good in education to use reason as Shakespeare has. Shakespeare uses just 49 words, 50 words, even 100 words. No one can have it in publicism. But they do, I mean, you know, it'll be extremely good. You know? To me, in the sense, reading Aristotle's look-almogene ethics is kind of an education. It's got a reason, right? But, you know, reading physics, ethics, precisely. What is a man? He's working on. He that made us with such an art that he must not be capable of doing. You know, if he tells you what reason is, what man is, what a beast is, there's many reasons why man should use it. Reason is what he does. Really, he does. I don't know where Shakespeare is as busy as nobody knows, but, you know, I've learned more from Shakespeare than from any of the modern philosophers, which doesn't say much from the modern philosophy. That one's having more Homer than Shakespeare, right? I've seen it from Aristotle. I've learned more from Aristotle than at the moment, right? Well, I don't know, compared to him. But the case of, well, in the modern, it's just reversed. I've learned more from Shakespeare's doing many of the modern philosophers of Aristotle. And sometimes, considering the stake is, you know, self-right, you don't remember what you thought of it. See, in Heraclitus, we should not act towards the sleep. For the waking there is one world, he says in common, when he falls asleep, which goes into his own world, right? And, of course, the word idiotic, which would be great for pride, right? So, the idiotic philosophy is a, what? And that comes out in our own discourse about the devil, right? He's the father of lies, right? And he spoke from himself, what is private to him, right? But you'll be able to chance sometime, you know, to study some natural philosophy of Aristotle. That's incredible what he does, right? He finds, in the beginning there, he gives a logical division of what his predecessors say, right? And all you see is disagreement at first, right? And then he finds a common thought, a common understanding among this group of them, and a common understanding among that group. And he finds a common understanding among all of them, right? And he's, you know, following the advice of Heraclitus, where he says, those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all, as much as Asilius Romance's law. And even more so, because of all the Asilius Romance's laws. Yes, he could. And then Aristotle, after he does that, then he finds a common basis among all of them, right? And he makes that the cornerstone of his mouth, right? Well, in a sense, as I say, I go back to the fragment of Heraclitus, as a child is to a man, so man is to God. And then I say, now, a child must first learn by imitating his father. That's even how we learn the language here. Then later he can learn more perfectly from the words of the father, I agree. That's where it's with imitation. So, in a sense, man has to learn from God as a child of man. But he first has to learn from God by including him. And that's why Aristotle was always saying that art imitates nature, I think. And it's true in a lot of it, right? I say to students, two dogs get together, what do they produce? A cat? They produce a dog, right? Two cats come together, they produce a horse? A cat. Two horses come together, what do they produce? A horse, right? So two statements come together, what do they produce? And so just, not statements, right? Yeah. So, let's say, the first road is the natural road. The natural road is the reason. If two statements come together, what do they produce? Same way to calculate, right? Multiply, or numbers, what do they get? A number, yeah. And he says, and he put numbers in, and what do they grind out? More numbers, right? But if you're in a cat in nature, right? Put two dogs together, you get a dog, right? If that dog get another dog, get another dog, right? I'm a grandparent now, so, you know. In fact, we don't want to hear it, right? Notice, we learn all kinds of things by imitating from God's things that God has made. And then we, what? In a lot of realization given to these words, he speaks to us through the prophets, through the apostles, but to himself, right? Coming in, right? You couldn't understand Christ unless you first learn from the natural things, right? That's what I was saying earlier about the parables, right? In a seed, you know? In an alimony, in a seed, right? And divining, in a grandkids, all these things, we support that you learn something through the things that God has made, right? In the natural things. The next question, then, is what is philosophy? Now, if wisdom is going to be, obviously, it would be what? You could have most of all right to mean philosophy, right? But not consider the only kind of philosophy or part of philosophy. It's the last one to be fully acquired now. You know, it depends if you have to acquire before that. Even the word that they use now, the metaphysics book, metaphysics comes from the Greek word as well. Metatahusica. What it means is after the books of natural philosophy. That's the name. So the 14 books of wisdom, or Aristotle calls first philosophy, are metatahusica. They're after the books of natural philosophy. And the books of natural philosophy are after the books of wisdom. If you want to acquire all of these well, then you have to do some logic first. You have to do ethics before domestics, and then philosophy, before clinical philosophy. Even there's God in the politics, because the family doesn't want that. It's better to have a people, right? That a father in Socrates sets, right? He takes his community of wives and children, right? Everybody calls father, hi daddy, hi daddy, hi daddy, hi daddy. You better to have a real uncle than a father in that sense. He knows a lot of the ethics philosophy. It's kind of easy, you know, when Aristotle talks about the age of the man who needs to be married, right? Apparently the man should get married around 3 to 6, a woman at 18. But the reason he gives for that, right, is that when she's no longer fertile, and able to conceive, right, he kind of lost interest in generating children, right? So, I mean, it's kind of like Aristotle was thinking of what age he should marry at, right? He's thinking primarily of the chief good of marriage, which is children, right? And we're so used to, you know, for education, all these sort of things, right? And then women, you know, much closer in age, right? My father was five years older than my mother, right? So that became really the English part. You know, you'd be, like, five years older than your wife. Why don't you think that's a rule? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Aristotle, you know. I should get married when I was 36, and my wife is at 18. It's easy. It's easy. It's easy. It's easy. It's easy. You know, I mean, you can see something in it, you know, that first I was thinking primarily of what, not the companionship so much, right? I'm going to talk about that too, it seems to be important to that, but primarily of the children, which are the chief good of marriage, right? And that can truly really change that, right, because it says that, you know, that children must be considered the chief less than a marriage, right? 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Even years later, they still want them to begin again, but they somehow feel that they're torn apart with the fact that they're mother and father and they're not together, right? It's kind of amazing to see that it affects somebody. Even years later on, when they're married and they're in a new family or something, right? It still feels like something's happening, right? In the meeting of the mother and the father, they immortalize each other in that one child, right? And I always say to people that the phrase two-in-one pledge, right, is more found in the child than in the marriage act. The marriage act is transitory and so on, right? And you can, you know, you can lower this one. But if they're divorced, they can't go down to the most part of the child. If you think that part of the child will go our way, right? You know, you're joined forever in that child and you can't what? That's to me the main reason for it. It doesn't make any sense to separate from somebody who you're joined forever in this child. You know, you immortalize yourself, right? You know, I think twice about being married, too. You know, you're going to be immortalizing yourself in a permanent way in this child. And you can't see what they're coming in. So we have to even respect ourselves for seeing the other, you know? Whatever you say about being the same thing, right? We have to work out the ears, right? But the idea that a woman was, that was at least negating, right? Seeing, you know, an orientation. You know, she does exaggerate. You know, okay. I mean, it's, you know, being solid. That's primary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.