Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
Lecture 5: Four Natural Beginnings of Philosophy

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So, we're giving you a little introduction to philosophy. And this is distinguished into four questions that come in a certain order, right? And the first question is, what is a philosopher? And the second question is, what is philosophy? And the third question is, what are the kinds and parts of philosophy? And the fourth question will be, how should one come into philosophy? Okay. Now, the question, what is a philosopher? We saw that the original and true, I think, in full sense of the word, is a lover of wisdom. And then we examined what wisdom is and saw that it's a knowledge of causes. And at the end, a knowledge of the very first cause. And it's looking knowledge, right? And it's liberal or free. And it's not really human possession. But it's the best and most honorable knowledge because it's the most divine knowledge. And we saw that the philosopher has to love wisdom for its own sake, huh? More than anything else, he loves for its own sake. And therefore, he must love it as the end or purpose of his life. He must love it as a common good. Both the common good of reason and the common good of mankind. And the second question we took up was, what is philosophy, huh? And perhaps the first answer you should give is that philosophy is a methodos, knowledge over a road, the knowledge that follows a road. And by road, we mean an order, right? The before and after in our knowledge. And the reason why philosophy is a methodos is that it's a work of reason. And in every work of reason, you find order. Because that's what philosophy is, you could say it involves two ways it can be had. One is to have a knowledge of the road to follow. And the other is to go down that road, right? And if you go down that road to its end, and the mind comes to a halt or a stop, then you have episteme, which I translate into English as a reasoned-out knowledge, a reasoned-out understanding. But you could say that in the beginning, it's not a reasoned-out knowledge, but a search, an investigation. You see, tesis, as Kirstaus says in Greek, or in historia, meaning investigation. But in the end, it's a reasoned-out knowledge, huh? Now, there are three kinds of philosophy, huh? Two chief kinds, which are looking philosophy, whose end is to understand. And practical philosophy, or the philosophy of doing, whose end is to do, right? And then there's a third kind of philosophy, which is the tool moral philosophy. And that is logic, huh? Okay? We saw that looking philosophy has three parts, huh? Mathematical philosophy, and then natural philosophy, and then what Aristotle usually calls first philosophy, or wisdom. And likewise, practical philosophy has three parts. Ethics, which is about the good of the individual, man. Family, which is, or domestics, which is about the good of the family. And then political philosophy, which is about the good of the city, or the nation, and what once you do. And then you have logic, as you mentioned, huh? Now, when we say that these seven are parts of philosophy, huh? We don't mean part now in the sense of, original sense of part, but composed as a whole, right? We mean what they call subject parts, right? Each of these is a reasoned-out knowledge, right? Each of these is knowledge over a road. So, geometry is a reasoned-out knowledge of continuous quantity. That is, of lines and angles and figures, right? And arithmetic, arithmetic in the Greek sense, is a reasoned-out knowledge of numbers, huh? And natural philosophy is a reasoned-out knowledge of natural things. And wisdom, you'll find out, is a reasoned-out knowledge of what is, completely universal. And likewise, ethics is a reasoned-out knowledge of human happiness, and the purpose of human happiness, and so on, and virtue. And likewise, the domestics of political philosophy are reasoned-out knowledges of the family and of the, what, city, huh? And logic is a reasoned-out knowledge, we'll see, about definition and statement and argument, huh? Or syllogism. Now, the fourth, one other thing there. We also distinguished briefly the roads in our knowledge, huh? And we'll be coming back to these roads at various times. But there are three roads in our knowledge that come in a certain order, at least in our looking knowledge. And the first road is made by nature, and that's the road from the, what, senses into reason. And then the other roads are made by reason. And there's the common road of reason, the road of reason as reason, which is the road for reasonable guesses to or towards reasoned-out knowledge, huh? And then there's the private road of each reason-out knowledge, okay? We'll say some more today about the natural road, but the road of reason as reason, we'll be talking about that when we begin logic, right? And then as we start, say, natural philosophy, we'll talk about the private roads and the seven or eight elements that are found in every private road, huh? How did you put it, what geometry is reasoned-out knowledge of? Continuous quantity. Continuous, yeah. Okay. Quantity is divisible forever. It's quantity whose parts are made at a common boundary, like a line or a surface or a three-dimensional continuum. Okay. Now the fourth question was, how should one come into philosophy, huh? And one can answer with the brevity of wisdom, in one sentence, how should you come into philosophy? You should come into philosophy from its natural beginnings through the use of reason. So we want to ask them, what are the natural beginnings of philosophy? And secondly, why should one come into philosophy from those natural beginnings? And then we have to ask what reason is, what it is to use reason, and why you want to come into philosophy through the use of reason. Okay. Well, it's almost obvious that philosophy is working reason. Okay. So, now with the natural beginnings, it's like a piece of chalk I ever made. Hey, hey, buddy. I'll clear this all. I'll distinct this about it. Now, what are the natural beginnings? Unfortunately, people are crazy. You see the blackboard, or the greenboard, as someone called it. Now, some of these natural beginnings are in desire. Others are in our knowledge. Now, there are two main beginnings in our desire. And one is wonder. And you saw maybe those readings from Plato and Aristotle, where they say that in the beginning, and now men begin to philosophize out of wonder, right? And I wonder, could be defined as the natural desire to know, put in parentheses, for its own sake, right? The cause. The natural desire to know, for its own sake, the cause. And you see that expressed in that fragment of Democritus. I would rather discover one cause than be mastered the kingdom of Persians. He's the greatest king in the world at that time. Now, in the passage where... Socrates talks about wonder, you see the questions what and why, and you could also define wonder as a natural desire to know what and why. So you see the question what there in the words of Theotelus and why there in Socrates, and you see the little childhood rhyme, twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Now in one of the books of logic, in fact, the center of logic, the second book of posterior analytics of Aristotle, he shows that both the question what and the question why are looking for the cause. And sometimes these two questions differ only in arrangement. What is an eclipse of the sun? It's the cutting off of the light of the sun by the moon coming between the earth and the sun. Why is the light of the sun late today? Because it has come between, right? The two. So both of these questions, what and why, are answered by knowing the cause. Later on in the logic we talk about definition, which answers the question what it is, and demonstration, which answers the question why. But definition and demonstration are very closely related. As Aristotle will point out, sometimes a definition is the beginning of a demonstration, sometimes it's the conclusion of a demonstration, sometimes it differs from a demonstration only by arrangement. So these two definitions are equivalent, right? Now this is more the beginning of looking philosophy philosophy than a practical philosophy, because we're talking about the natural desire to know, and I'm going to add in some parentheses, for its own sake, not for the sake of doing or making something. But in practical philosophy, it's seeking knowledge not for its own sake, but for the sake of doing, right? For the sake of living well, right? Doing well. So the natural desire behind practical philosophy doesn't have a name, doesn't have a name, but it's the natural desire to live well. Man has a natural desire not only to live, but to live well, right? So in ethics we're asking when is an individual human being living well, right? In domestics and in political philosophy when is the life of the family going right? And when is the life of the city or the nation going right? So these are the two fundamental natural beginnings of philosophy in our desire. But one, as I say, is more the beginning of looking philosophy, the other more practical philosophy. Incidentally, I might make a little theological footnote on it. One of the major differences between philosophy philosophy and theology is that in philosophy, looking philosophy and practical philosophy are two different kinds of philosophy, right? Two different kinds. Now in theology you have sometimes people talk about dogmatic theology, right? And they'll talk about moral theology, right? And in the definition of say, infallibility there in Vatican I, they'll speak of the Pope as having infallibility in matters of faith and morals, right? But dogmatic theology and moral theology are not two kinds of theology, not two different knowledges. They're really one and the same. So what is divided into philosophy is one in theology. And the reason for that is that in theology you're sharing in God's knowledge itself. And God's knowledge, like everything of God, is altogether but one and simple. So in God there's no, there's not two kinds of knowledge, right? But his one knowledge is both chiefly theoretical but also practical. And so theology is sharing in God's knowledge. So there's only one theology. Okay? So don't think of dogmatic and moral theology as though there's some likeness to this distinction, right? It's not a distinction of two theologies. There's only one theology. But there's two quite distinct kinds of philosophy. And that's because of the human level, right? He's going to proceed quite differently. Now, there are also two natural beginnings of philosophy in our knowledge. And one we met already. And that is the natural road. And the road from the senses into what? Reasona. And maybe after we finish this we'll say a few more words about that, okay? Now the other natural beginning in our knowledge is what you might call the natural understanding of the axioms and their parts. Now if you read a little bit of Euclid there, you may see that he distinguishes between the postulates, which are private to geometry. Like among the postulates is the statement that all right angles are equal, right? And that's private to geometry to talk about right angles. But then the postulates are more general statements, right? Like the whole is larger than one of its parts, right? The quantity is equal to the same, to each other. Now, the axioms in this context here means the statements that are known through themselves. They're not statements that are proven by other statements. They're statements known through themselves and by all men. Like the whole is larger than one of its parts. They often say in class, if anybody thinks the whole is not larger than the part, we'll give him a part of his celery this week, right? We'll give him a part of his dinner, right? Or a part of the car he bought, right? Since he sees no difference between the part and the whole. And he'll rave and rant and you know that he's lying when he says he doesn't know the whole is more than the part, right? Okay? So there are some statements that are known to themselves by all men, and these are called the axioms, right? And it almost seems like we're born knowing them, but actually we actually, I think, come to know them, right? Through our common experience. Once we see a whole and a part, and we actually understand what a whole and a part is, or come to understand what a whole and a part is, and it's obvious that a whole is more than a part, right? And these statements underlie all reasoned out knowledge. As we pointed out before, if you understood nothing before reasoning, you'd have nothing to what? Reason from, right? Okay? So there must be some statements that are known naturally before your reason, and that's what the axioms are. And these are also, you could also reason that through itself is before and a cause of what is through another, right? What is so through itself, right? Is before and a cause of what is so through another. Take for example, sweet, right? Sugar seems to be sweet to itself, right? Sugar through being sugar is sweet. Is coffee sweet to being coffee? No. If coffee is sweet, it's sweet to another, right? So if the coffee is sweet, but it's not sweet to itself, there must be before it something that is what? Yeah. Okay? The same with the statements, right? If some statements are known to other statements, there must be some statements before them that are what? Known to themselves. And that's what we call the... Actually, the way this distinguishes between the statements known to themselves by all men, which are the axioms, and the statements known to themselves by those who are learning in some science. So if you know, for example, in arithmetic what an odd number is and what an even number is, it's obvious that no odd number is even, right? Okay? Now, if you know from geometry what an two-set angle is and what an acute angle is, it's kind of obvious that a two-set angle is greater than an acute angle. If you open up, maybe you would know that, right? If you open up, maybe you would know that, right? If you open up, maybe you would know that, right? If you open up, maybe you would know that, right? Mm-hmm. The peasant might not know that, right? We'd know what a whole and a part of it is, right? So these are the statements naturally known. They're naturally coming to know. So these are the four natural beginnings of philosophy. Two of them in desire, and two of them in our knowledge. Maybe we've said enough here about what wonder is, and this is fairly obvious here, this natural desire to live well. Now, let's come back a bit, though, to the natural road in our knowledge, right? Let's speak a little bit more about that road. Now, as I said before, when you speak of a road in our knowledge, you mean an order in our knowledge. An order means a before and after, right? So if you want to understand the natural road in our knowledge, you have to see the before and after in that road. Now, there's two before and afters you can see in that road, and they somewhat, you know, correspond to each other, but they should be considered separately because each brings out something more. So you can speak of a before and after in kinds of knowing along this road, from the senses into reason. And you can speak of a before and after in things as known along this road, right? Now, in Aristotle's premium to wisdom, he took up the natural road a bit in order to see better what wisdom is aiming at. Remember that? And he gave us something of the order, right, of different kinds of knowing along that road. The road from the senses into reason. Well, obviously what comes first along that road is sensing. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. So sensing comes before anything else along that road. So, then Aristotle pointed out that in man and, in fact, in higher animals, sensing gives rise to something called memory. Remember something about the sense, right? I can't remember anything before my fifth birthday about when I was in kindergarten, right? I remember anything before that. But there were all kinds of things in the past, right? So sensing comes before memory. After memory, if you recall in Aristotle's treatment there, there comes what we call experience now. Experience in the sense of a collection of many memories of the same sort of thing. Now, it's after experience that you start to get a knowledge of the universal, right? Which is something proper to reason. And because of an experience, you see many individuals of the same kind, and you have brought them together, and you start to see what they have in common. And you separate out what they have in common, you now have a knowledge of the universal. So as a little child, your mummy said, see the dog in the yard? And there was an individual dog that you sensed, right? And maybe you remember something of what you sensed. And the next day, there's another dog, and you say, see that dog, right? Okay. And gradually, you're picking up memories, right? Sensing and many memories. And eventually, you're starting to get an experience of dogs, right? But then some day, the little child will look out the window on his own, and say, mummy, a dog! See? He separated out what's common to those many, right? And now he recognizes this new individual, right? As coming under this universal, right? Okay? So, sensing, memory, and experience are all a knowledge of the, what? Singular, right? But after that, you start to have this knowledge of the universal. What comes first is that natural understanding we spoke about. Natural understanding of these very basic universals like hold and heart. And from that and other things, we come to a reasoned-out understanding of things. Reasoned-out knowledge, at least. Reasoned-out understanding, we call it a reasoned-out knowledge. And after many forms of reasoned-out understanding, like geometry and arithmetic and natural philosophy, ethics and domestics and political, comes wisdom, right? And when you study wisdom, you'll see that it perfects both natural understanding and reasoned-out understanding. It's really a kind of unique thing. So, wisdom is going to come here at the very end. So, that's something of the order there, the before and after of different kinds of knowing about this world. So, sensing comes before memory, memory comes before experience. Experience comes before any knowledge of the universals. But among the universal comes this natural understanding of these very general things that hold and heart. And then a reasoned-out understanding, and there have been many forms of reasoned-out understanding. And you can distinguish the order among them. And at the very end comes, what? Wisdom, right? I understand metaphysics. Is Aristotle the wisdom? Yeah, Aristotle usually calls it first philosophy. The metaphysics comes from Andronicus of Rhodes, right? Who saw that these books come after the books in natural philosophy. And so, if you look at the Greek, it's actually three words. Meta, meaning after. A, which is the article. Fusika. Meta, ta, fusika. After the books in natural philosophy. And if you ever, you know, get even the Random House, you know, the basic books of Aristotle, you'll see that they've placed the metaphysics after the books in natural philosophy. Because in the order of learning, it comes after. And transphysica, as they say in Thomas, right? Across or after the natural books. Now, there's also a before and after in things as known along this road. And there you can distinguish two before and afters. And distinguish the order before and after. The order in which different things are known along this road. And then, the order in which the same thing is known along this road. In other words, because of this natural road, because of the order made by nature in our knowledge, we're going to know some things before other things. But also, because of that natural road, we're going to know the same thing in different ways, and in one way before another way. Now, let's talk about the first one. The order in which different things are known. Well, you can begin with something very obvious and very general, right? And that is that. Since. things are known before things that cannot be sensed, okay? That's kind of obvious, right? If you're going the road from the senses into reason, obviously sensible things, things that can be sensed, right, are going to be known before things that cannot be sensed, right? And you could add to that, of course, obviously, things that are more sensible will be known before things that are less sensible, right? But now, under this idea, we're going to distinguish three befores and do them in an ascending order from the particular more to the, what, general, right? Material things are going to be known before immaterial things. That's kind of obvious, huh? And that's why natural philosophy, which is about material things, right, comes before wisdom, which is about immaterial things. And of course, the very first philosophers only knew about material things, huh? And it's not until Anaxagoras and then Plato and Aristotle himself that the Greek philosophers started to have reasons to think that there exist immaterial things, okay? So in the beginning, they knew only material things, huh? And they thought of everything as being material, right? And it's only by reasoning that they arrived at the idea that there exists immaterial things. And then they realize there's some knowledge after, metatabuzika, right? After the study of natural things, huh? Okay? So that comes under this, okay? Now, a second thing which is even more universal than this, right? One way we get from material things to the existence of material things is because the immaterial things are in some way causes of material things. And so we reason from the effects in the material world to the causes in the immaterial world, but this is true not only in going from the material world to the immaterial world that we tend to go from the effect towards the cause, but even in the natural world, right? Even in the material world, the effect is for the most part, anyway, more known to us than the, what? Cause. So this is a more general than going material before immaterial. Effects is usually known before cause, huh? Okay? And the reason for that is that the senses are more acknowledged of effects than of causes. Take, for example, day and night, right? An effect that we see every day, right? Day and night, huh? The ancients knew there was day and night as well as we know there's day and night, right? But there's some disagreement. Is day and night caused by the sun going around the earth? Or is day and night caused by the earth turning on its axis? Right? It's not obvious which one it is, is it? Okay? And the fact that they disagreed, or people have disagreed historically, right, as to the cause of day and night, right? While agreeing that there is day and night is a sign that the effect, right, day and night is more known than whatever its cause is, huh? Have you ever drunk alcoholic beverages, right? You may have had a certain, experienced a certain effect of an alcoholic beverage upon you, right, huh? See? But why does alcohol have that effect? It's kind of hidden from us, isn't it? And you ask the chemist, you know, for the formula of alcohol, and it still doesn't tell us why alcohol has that effect, right? Okay? Or we notice that trees grow, right? But why do they grow, right? That's hidden, right? And notice the question why, which we often ask, right? Every time we ask the question why, that's a sign that we know the effect before the cause, right? Okay? We see an effect, but we don't know its cause, and we ask why. So the historians will agree that there was a French Revolution, but they will disagree sometimes as to why there was a French Revolution, right? And we often know what people do, but we're puzzled as to why they did it, right? And we often are mistaken as to why people did this or did that, right? Even though we're pretty sure that they did it. Okay? You see how that's a little broader than material before the immaterial. Because not only are immaterial things causes the material things, and so we go from material things to immaterial things, that's one way of going from effects to causes. But even in the material world, right, there are causes, too. Okay? And even there, we tend to know the effect before the cause, huh? Okay? Einstein, you know, was trying to find out why stones fall to the ground. And a lot of people think, you know, that Sir Isaac Newton answered the question with gravity or something like that, right? When they actually go and read the text of Sir Isaac Newton, he says, I don't know why they fall to the ground. And it's the editor who made it appear as if Newton had discovered why stones fall to the ground. But Newton himself was in no doubt that he didn't know. And when Einstein went to England and gave a talk on Newton, right, he said what he admired in Newton was more his knowing what he didn't know than what he did know, right? And there was a famous remark of Newton that, I don't know why it may have appeared to have been to other people, right? But to myself, I seem to be like a little boy playing with the seashells on the seashell, right? Or the whole vast ocean of truth laid out there, undiscovered, you know? But the people came after Newton, you know, I mean, the poets say, you know, always dark. And God said that Newton being always like. But Newton himself doesn't have that, what? Yeah. He doesn't have that ignorance of his own ignorance, right? So Einstein was trying to find out, you see? But, you know, that's something that's very common, right? The stones fall to the ground. But here, Einstein's saying, Newton didn't know. Newton says, I don't know, right? And Einstein was trying to find out why they do. Now, notice, you could reason from this, too, as to why wisdom comes last, right? The wisdom is a knowledge of the first cause, right? And you know the effect before the cause, right? Sometimes the cause has a cause, right? But you know the cause before you know the cause of the cause, right? So, if we, for the most part, go from the effect towards the cause, then a knowledge of the first cause would come at the end of our knowledge, right? As we said before, it would be the order in our knowing, right? Okay? But you could also see that because we know material things. And mathematics, like natural philosophy, is about material things, but you define them without using this concrete matter, right? This is extension. Well, wisdom is about immaterial things. If they're not immaterial things, there'd be no wisdom other than natural philosophy. Natural philosophy would be wisdom. Okay? So from both of these, you can see why wisdom comes last in the order of learning, right? Now, the third thing is going to generalize this, huh? The cause tends to be simpler than the effect, huh? In fact, when you study God, the first cause, you find out that God is the simplest thing there is. If you ever look at the Summa Theologiae, question two in the Summa Paras is on the existence of God, right? Question three is on the, what, simplicity of God. So, the composed is known for the simple. Because the last thing we know is God is the simplest thing there is. He has something like that in physics, huh? And they talk about, all the great physicists talk about the principle of simplicity, right? Of the fundamental. Thank you. Equations are simple, right? And the father of modern physics there, Max Planck, said, right? The more universal an equation is, the simpler it is. But if you look at Einstein's lecture there at Columbia there, where he has students as well as professors in the audience, and he says, simple doesn't mean easy. In other words, the equations of relativity theory are very simple, but it's not easy to understand that you count the time when relativity theory came out at West Point there. The professor was supposed to teach relativity theory one day, right? And he came into class, and he called upon Dr. Partha, who was a student at the time, right? He was the brightest student in the class, right? He says, Dr. Partha, do you understand this? Partha said, no, sir. And the professor said, neither do I. Class dismissed. But notice, God is the simplest thing there is, but he's the hardest thing to really understand. But notice, huh? Notice, even in mathematics, huh, we define the simple by the composed. Just think of the definition of body, the definition of surface, the definition of line, and the definition of what point, huh? A body is that which has length, width, and depth, right? There are three affirmative things in the notion of body, right? A surface involves one negation. A surface has length and width, but no depth. But the surface is simpler than the body, right? Then you go to the line. The line has length, but no width and no depth. Two negations, right? The point has position, but neither length, nor width, nor depth. Euclid defines the point, as you made it in the geometry there, that which has no parts. In other words, you're defining that which is simple and has no parts by the negation of what is composed and has parts. And even when something is grammatically affirmative, like we say, God is simple, right? But when we show in theology that God is simple, we show that he's not composed in any way. So it's really, what? I'm stating the simple by the negation of composed. It's like we tend to come to know the cause and effect, so we know the simple through the composed. So, in general, then you can say along this road, good, sensible things are known before things cannot be sensed. That's kind of obvious. The more sensible before the less sensible. But then under that, you can bring out these things, that material things are known before immaterial things. Effects are usually known before causes. Composed things are known before what? Simple things. I'm going to erase this so I can have room to talk about the order in which the same thing is known, right? Okay? So this now is the order in which the same thing is along this road now from the senses into easy, right? Now the first thing is pointed out by the great Boethius, right? And this statement of Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy is repeated down through the whole Middle Ages, right? Boethius says, A thing is singular when sensed, but universal when understood. A thing is singular, individual, right? When sensed, and universal when understood. Let me give you a simple example of that. The chair that I see with my eyes, which is one of my senses, or that I feel with my hand, which is involving a sense of touch, right? It's an individual chair, right? It's a singular chair, right? But when I understand what this is, I'm understanding what a chair is, right? And what a chair is, is something, what? Common to me, said to me, something universal. No.