Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 40: Aristotle's Critique of Anaxagoras and the Principle of Fewness

Transcript
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He says it's none of these, then it wouldn't fit any of them, apparently, right? And so it must be all of them, but it can't be all of them, because then it wouldn't fit anyone. So he ends up by saying it's all and none of them, right? Okay? And then I mentioned how Mark, right, in his next work, coming out after a clock, he says, well, it doesn't make any sense at all. Therefore, we have no general ideas. So he's allowed a part of the apostle, right? Well, the point is, what would you say about the three straight lines of the definition of triangle and general? Are they equal or are they equal or unequal? What would you say? Not actually either. Yeah, there are none of these actually, but it's all of them in what? In ability, right? But he can't understand the ability of the genius, right? See? And so he ends up in that confusion of mind, right? Well, you can see the same confusion that could arise down here, right? You could say that all of these things that come to be out of matter, right? They're all in there. None of them are in there, right? I mean, A.C. is going to say that they're all in there in a way, but infinitely small pieces and nothing is distinguishable. So wait, they're not in there, right? And Aristotle, in another place, in the metaphysics, I guess it must be, where he says that if you listen to what A.C. is trying to say, you'd have the truth, right? But what he actually says gets him into difficulties, huh? Now, another interesting thing here about the order here, the fourth and fifth meanings, huh? A little paradox here, huh? If you look at the order of the second and third meanings, and then the order of the fourth and fifth meanings, I mentioned how part and the whole is more sensible than genus and the species. And since the natural road for us is from the senses, obviously part and the whole is before genus and the what? Species, right? Okay? And then, of course, what's most like that is not form and matter, but species and the genus, right? But now, species and the genus is something mental like genus and the species, right? By form and matter, it might seem to be something that you find in the sensible world, like there's a shape in the metal, like there's a shape in this piece of chalk, right? There's a shape in my sensible body, right? So it's kind of amazing to see that, right? Now, you can see that Thomas is ordered them correctly, you know, in terms of what is nearer to the third meaning, right? Okay? But, if you just look at these two meanings by themselves, you might just think that form and matter would come first, right? Okay? But, this is kind of the way I show this, right? And you've kind of prepared for it now, but try to answer them like an unprepared person, okay? Suppose you have a piece of clay, right? In the shape of a sphere. And you're molded into a cube, right? What has changed, the clay or its shape? What would the average person answer that question, you think? Shape. Yeah. Has the shape changed? You're saying the shape, which means that's the genus, right? You're saying the shape has changed. That's really true, right? As if the genus were the subject underlying the two species, huh? But there's a sort of likeness between those two, huh? But notice, the fact that you speak as if the genus had changed rather than the matter is a sign of this in a way is more known to you, huh? Okay? So, a lot of things you can learn from this comparison, but if you go back to John Locke, you can see that he gets confused about the way the species in the genus. He's trying to, in a sense, make the genus, a triangle, contain differences actually, right? And then he gets into trouble. He gets into contradiction, right? It's all and none of these, huh? Okay? So, let's look at Aristotle's text here now. Now, in the first three paragraphs, Aristotle was recounting the position of Anaxagris, but more fully the line of reasoning whereby he apparently arrived at this, huh? And basically, the starting point of his thinking, you might say, are two premises, right? One that he gets by induction, right? And the other that he gets by simply being what? Something that seems to be obvious to all the Greeks, right? Okay? You can't get something from what? Nothing. Nothing, right? Okay? But then he saw that in the natural world, you could start with anything in the natural world and eventually get everything else. And I think I did that before when he talked about Anaxagris, huh? But I say, let's start with the grass, right? Okay? And take the example of the cow eats the grass, and you get to what? More cow out of grass, right? And then, uh, Berquist has a stake, right? Or the cow, right? So now you get more, what? Man, right? Then we feed Berquist to the lions, who he discovered as a Christian, and get more lion, right? And the lion dies and you get worms, right? And then you get from the worms more bird, right? And from the bird, more cat, right? And the cat dies and pushes up daisies. So you're getting from the original grass more cow, right? Eventually more man, eventually more, what? Lion, more worms, more birds, more cats. It seems to go on and on and on, right? Okay? Now there's something similar to that in the study of elementary particles. It seemed in their experiments that you could start with any elementary particle and eventually, by acting upon it, get all the other elementary particles. I put those two together. You can't get something from nothing, right? And out of anything and everything else, and the conclusion that arises is what? Inside of everything, right? Okay? Okay? Now you're imagining, right? Although maybe falsely, that everything that is in everything else is actually in there, right? In that case, everything would be composed of everything else. Or in modern science, every elementary particle is composed of all the rest. That was the well-known formula. You know, I see it a lot of times in the book there, right? I assume well-known among the students of elementary particles. But they're thinking, like the Greeks, you can't get something from nothing, right? Okay? If you can get hydrogen and oxygen from water, then water must be composed of hydrogen and oxygen, right? If out of any elementary particle we can get all the rest, any elementary particle must be composed of all the rest. Clear as mud, right? Clear as day, right? It seems to be. Doesn't it? Okay? But there's going to be an obvious difficulty in that. And the same difficulty that Aristotle would point out with Anaxagoras. Okay? So let's look at the text here a little bit. Anaxagoras would seem to have thought the beginnings, the causes, are limited, infinite, in this way, because he assumed the common opinion of the naturalist to be true. That nothing comes to be from what is not, right? Can't get something out of nothing. For an account of this they speak thus, All things were together, coming to be such as alteration, what others say as putting together and separating. For the reason from contraries coming to be from each other, therefore they exist within. Okay? For if everything that comes to be necessarily comes to be either from what is or from what is not, and of these coming to be from what is not is impossible, for all those tweeting about nature or one mind about this, he thought the rest followed necessarily, right? That coming to be was from what is and exists within. Okay? But an account of the smallness of their sizes to be from what is unable to be sensed by us. Hence he said that everything is mixed to everything, because he saw, and you can say by induction, everything coming to be from everything, right? Okay? But basically everything coming to be from everything, and you can't get something out of nothing, those are the two premises on which he draws his basic conclusion, right? Everything is inside of everything, right? Okay? Now we can add to that that he thought, like with all the early Greeks, that things keep on coming to be in the natural world without end, right? So there must be an infinity of pieces of everything inside of what? Everything to keep on coming to be forever, right? Well, how do you fit an infinity of pieces of everything inside of everything? How would you fit inside a blade of grass, which is finite, an infinity of things? Only by making them infinitely small. Something like the modern mathematicians speak of a line that's composed of infinity of points, right? Which we say is false, but they're having that same difficulty, by the way, right? They're imagining, right, the line to be composed of all the points that are able to be on the line, right? See? So they're falsely imagining what is their own inability to be actually there. But just as they could fit that infinity of points, it seems, that are finite lines are making them infinitely small, infinitely short, right? So Anxiegris is fitting everything into matter by making it infinitely, what, small, right? So its grand position is, as we saw in the fragments, that there's an infinity of infinitely small pieces of everything inside of everything. But to speak English, there's an unlimited, right, multitude of everything, but unlimitedly, what, small without limit, right? Now, if that's so, you know, the objection is, well, why call this a dog and that a tree? For everything inside of everything. Everything's a mishmash, right? Well, he says, we call them by what they have most of. And I call that the Anaxagorean way of what? Naming things, right? And we follow that a lot, though. Okay. So I was mentioning how we even define the books of Scripture, we follow that way of naming things, right? So the book of Psalms is a book of, what, prayers, right? It's not one of the historical books, is it? But there's some history in the Psalms, right? Okay. There's some prophecy. It's not one of the prophetic books, but we classify it as one of the sapiential books, right? Because of that, right? Okay. It's what it has most of, either absolutely or in comparison to other things. Okay? I mean, Shakespeare's comedy of errors, right? We call it a comedy, right? But there's some kind of, you know, serious scenes in there, right? Okay. Now, at the bottom of page four, and going on through the rest of the reading now, Christoph is going to give eight arguments against any sacred son. And you might number them first so we can refer to them. The first argument is in the bottom of page four, the last paragraph. Which is a little different. Okay. If then, unlimited as unlimited is unknown. Okay? That's the first argument then, okay? Then, just number them. Second, third, fourth would be in addition, right? Fifth would be further, right? Then six would be, it is not knowingly said, right? Seven would be, nor does he rightly take the coming to be. And then the eighth argument is better to take fewer and limited beginnings, which Empedicase does. Okay? That I'm numbered properly there? Now, Thomas divides these arguments in all the Aristotle's order there. He says, you have seven arguments, the first seven ones, against what? An exegress's position considered by itself, right? And then the eighth argument is refuting his position in Capurice into Empedicase. Okay? So Thomas divides the first seven against the, what? Last one, right? Okay? The first seven arguments, he divides the first five against the last two, right? Because the first five arguments are basically refuting what's essential to the position here an exegress. Where six and seven are dealing with more particular difficulties, right? Okay? More particular difficulties need to be able to avoid it because you're no more careful, right? Okay? But the first five arguments are dealing with the difficulties inherent in this basic position that there's infinity, eventually small pieces, everything inside of everything. So as I say, Thomas then divides the first seven arguments against the last one, and the first five against the sixth and seventh argument, right? Okay? Now, I sometimes group these a little differently because I used to make kind of a comparison between the critique of an exegress here and the modern science, right? Okay? And sometimes I put eight and five and one together, right? Okay? Because eight and five and one has something in common with the whole of modern physical science, starting with Galileo, Kepler, Luther, right? and going down to Einstein and beyond God. But they all seem to have in common and it's useful to explain these three arguments. They all seem to touch upon what we call the principle of fewness, huh? Or sometimes called the principle of simplicity. Now, if you read Galileo and Kepler and Newton, you'll see that they have this principle of fewness or simplicity. And Einstein in the 20th century still follows that principle, right? And he says this is the underlying idea of all the natural science in the Greeks right through our work, right? Okay? But the principle of fewness could be stated by saying that fewer beginnings, fewer causes are better if they are what? Enough. Enough, right? Okay? So, Straser-Lutern, for example, if you look at his rules of reasoning that he follows, right? That's the basic rule, huh? Nature says it's pleased with simplicity, right? It affects not the pompous and perilous causes, huh? I think we gave you that text earlier, right? We saw Galileo, right? He's investigating the actual accelerated motion when you drop a stone and it falls to the ground going faster. He looks the simplest way it might, what? Increase its speed, right? So, right away, the mind goes that way, right? Kepler spent ten years trying to find this simple, what? Geometrical figure to fit the movements of the planets, huh? So, he tried to find the simplest, what? That still fits the facts, right? So, Kepler came up with what figure? What? Now, the ellipse is not as simple as a circle, but the circle went into difficulty, right? The Talians saw they were constructing, what, circles? The top of circles, the top of circles, the top of circles, right? You had something going around something and then imaginary center and it's going around that and imaginary one. It's starting to get too complicated, right? So, notice, the circle by itself is simpler. When you start adding circles on top of circles, it gets kind of complicated. Why, the ellipse is like two centers rather than one, right? And so, each point on it is, what? Not if you just have a point in the interior called the center, like the circle, but the sum is obviously, what? Same, right? So, here's a man that's been 10 years looking for a simple thing, huh? So, it's very clear that Aristotle, the eighth argument is reasoning from that sum. And we saw that argument earlier when he talked about whether there's an infinity of beginnings, right? He says, Pentecostal introduces an infinity of things in order to explain how you can keep on going forever, right? And Pentecostal explains the same thing by what? Just earth, air, fire, and water. Well, if you can explain the same thing with four principles instead of infinity, that's an obvious example of what? The principle of fewness, right? Okay? Now, basically, it's because Anaxagoras is trying to explain things coming to be by a kind of straight line coming to be, right? So, if you keep on getting things out of that plate of grass, a little more cow, a little more lion, a little more man, a little more worm, and so on, to keep on taking things out of there forever, how many things do you have to have inside there to go on forever? Yeah, see? But, Empedocles has, like, a circle, right? Where love brings together earth, air, fire, and water, and eight, what? Separates them, right? We can go on forever doing that, can't you? And so, I used to say to kids at Christmas time, you know, you buy your child or your nephew toys, you know, buy them a bag of blocks rather than a finished toy. Because the finished toy gets broken the next day anyway. So, you've got to buy another one, right? Another one, another one, right? You buy a bag of blocks, you can build something out of it, knock it down, build something else, knock it down, you can go on forever, right? There's something superior about that. So, I call this as the Empedoclean principle of buying a Christmas game, as opposed to the ex-Korean way, right? You see? In other words, you've got always something new for the kid to use them today, right? You've got to have an ex-Korean principle, an infinity of toys to keep them... But this is a much better activism. But the other example I give is what? That of the rich man who wants to get his exercise, right? They're running on a road, he wants to run every day, he's going to run forever, every day, he's going to run in a straight line, how long does that have to be? Yeah. But if he, it's wise, like they have a tractor around, right? Circuit of thing, more or less, you can go running forever in a circle, right? And yet the circle is what? Fine line. You see that? Superiority of the circle to the straight line. And so you get this, people caught up now with the idea of recycling, right? That presumably doesn't use our resources in the same way that straight line production does. You see? You can recycle things, you can go on, it seems, right? There's a priority to that, right? You need it in economic terms or in terms of memory on the things. Because resources are not infinite, right? Once you realize resources are not infinite, then you've got to recycle or you're going to run out of them, right? But on the other hand, if you see in nature things never run out and you've still got this idea of what? The straight line motion, you're going to need an infinity of things in there, to go on forever. So isn't it simpler to explain it this way than to explain it this way? So notice, you can invoke then the principle of funism. If Empedocles explains with earth, air, fire, and water, and love and hate, right, how you can go on forever, he explains the same thing that Anaxagris requires infinity of the gains to go on forever, right? Then you can invoke the principle of funism, right? Of course, our mind kind of naturally inclines to this simpler explanation. I told you, my standard example in classes, you know, you assume it's the same guy coming in to teach the class each day and it's the same. Even though you could explain this by assuming that there are, what, a number of people that are look-alike, right, each of which has the same training education, that's very complicated. If you don't see any need to say it's a different man, it comes up for each Tuesday, right? You know, you've got hundreds of left-alikes, right? If I can explain it with one man, why not do it? The mind of an action client is that a simple explanation. You know, I take the famous dispute between the ancients and the moderns, you know. What's the cause of day and night, huh? Is it the sun going around the earth, or is it the earth turning on its axis? But notice that both of those guesses as to what is the cause of day and night, they both assume that there's one, what? Sun, right? Rather than a new sun every day, right? Well, why a new sun every day if you can explain 265 days and nights with one sun? That kind of circular thing, right? Whether it's the earth turning on its axis, or the sun that's on the earth, it's a circular body. It's a straight line, right? Rather than thinking of the earth maybe being stationary here, a new sun that's shot across, you know, each day, you know. That is some kind of recognition here to shoot across the sky and so on each day, right? But that would explain day and night, right? A new sun being shot across each day, right? You see? Being extinguished over here, as they said sometimes, you know. In poetry, you know, the sun is extinguished there. But that's going to require eventually an affinity of suns if peace and nights go on forever. Do you see that? Okay. Okay. You see how the eighth argument is very clearly based upon that, huh? Well, I look at your company if you see it. Okay. Yeah. You want to do something? There you go. Now, let's go back to the fifth argument, right? Now, notice, huh? I think the fifth argument is explaining how really complicated is this position of an exchange. Because he's saying inside of everything, there's an infinity of infinitely small pieces of everything else, right? And if you see that's true of everything, then inside each one of those infinitely small pieces, there must be what? Infinity of infinitely small pieces of everything, right? And inside each one of those, there must be what? And this is going to go on what? Yeah. It could hardly be more complicated than that, right? You see? There must be something wrong with that, right? Instead of service, right? Okay. And I think I quoted, you know, the passage there from Max Born, right? He said, the genuine physicist, right, believes often in the unity and simplicity of nature, despite any appearance of the contract, right? And the context where he's making that statement in the book there, The Restless Universe, right? He's talking about the periodic table of elements, huh? And the periodic table of elements was saying there was, what, I guess originally it was in 92 and then they had some more, but... Roughly a hundred, right? First matters, right? That's too many. That's too many, right? There had to be something fewer than that behind that, right? See? Well, that's nothing compared to infinities of infinity. There must be something wrong with this, right? Okay? So, again, that, you could say, is tied up with the principle of, what, fewness, right? Okay? Now, notice that argument was not found back in the readings, in reading what? Eleven, right? Remember in reading eleven we asked, is there one beginning, or infinity of them, or two, or three, or that's another, right? And Aristotle gave four arguments against there being an infinity of them, right? Okay, well, he uses, well, actually, before, if you take the order of his readings, eight to the one, we'll see, he used in that part as well, right? By five was something peculiar to Anaxagos, right? Because there is not only infinity, but infinities of the infinities of the infinities of the infinities of the infinities, infinitely, right? Okay? Now, the first argument, huh? It's more hidden there. That's why I reversed the order here. The first argument is more hidden. The first argument is saying that if the beginnings are unlimited or infinite, then we can't know them, right? And you say, what's wrong with that consequence? Okay? It's too bad we can't know. I think what Aristotle has in mind is the fact that man has a natural desire to know the causes. And as Sir Isaac Newton said, and the others who say, that nature is pleased with simplicity, it affects not the pompous, superfluous causes. Nature does nothing in vain, in other words, right? So if nature gave us a desire for something impossible, then nature would have done something in vain, right? It would have given us something superfluous, right? Okay? So therefore, our desire to know, our desire to understand the causes, must be, what? For something possible, right? You can see that in all the other natural desires. The desire to, what? Eat and to drink and so on, right? Which is natural to us and other animals. It doesn't mean we always get food, we don't always get water. But it's not impossible to get the food or water, right? See? Why would nature give animals hunger and thirst if there's nothing to eat, nothing to drink? It would serve no purpose, right? It would be superfluous, right? So likewise, if nature gives us a substantial desire to know the causes, it must be in some way possible to know them. But if there's an infinity of them, would you know them? Would you know a word that had an infinity of letters? Could the best speller in the country, the one who won the spelling contest, you know, once they have a cross, they got to be here sometimes, and they have a national competition, right? Would he know how to spell a word in an infinity of letters? He'd never finish. No, he'd never know that word, right? So I sometimes put the eighth and the fifth and the first arguments together because my students can't take too much into account, right? And it enables me to emphasize that principle of fewness, right? And it is relevant to, in a sense, understanding those three arguments. At the same time, it's pointing out something that Aristotle's critique of Anaxagoras has in common with the physical sciences from Galileo, Kepler, Newton, through Einstein and beyond. Thank you, Dr. It just popped into my head that when you said, when you talk about a word of infinite letters, I just thought, well, what about the value of pi, you know, 3.14, et cetera, et cetera. We know something about it. We do a lot of work with it, but we don't know it. You can't write it out. That's true. That's what we call it irrational, right? All right. Yeah, true. Irrational, all right. Yeah. There are some of the talk, too, about, you know, online, which is, I think, that the continuous is divisible forever, right? Okay. But you can't, what, actually succeed in dividing completely then, can you? Okay. So we know it in that way, right? But not as infinite, but going through one by one. You can't know it, huh? But in a sense, pi kind of results from what the fact that the discovery of the Greeks, right, that not every line has to every line the ratio of the number has to a number, right? And if you're looking, you know, the pleatism, right, you would be trying to see what? That every line, right, has the ratio of a number to a number. That was a great discovery, one of the great discoveries of the Greeks, huh? That's led, if you look at Keith Snopes through book five, right, that led to book five there of Euclid's Elements, huh? Because originally the Greeks kind of assumed that every line would have to every line the ratio that a number has to a number. And therefore you could, what, or at least the one has to a number, or the one. And therefore you could, what, kind of have a similar understanding, right, of ratios in lines and in numbers. But then they found out that not every line has to the line, right? So since you're trying to know there, what is it, in that sense, right? But it's, you could have an approximation there, right? Right. Okay. But let's take another example. It is true that a straight line is, in mathematics, is divisible, what? Forever. Right. Okay. But you can't, what, divide it forever, right? Okay. But does the mind have a natural desire to do that? Okay.