Wisdom (Metaphysics 2016)
Lecture 9: Aristotle's Six-Part Description of the Wise Man

Transcript
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We had that interlude, that scene interlude, okay. Now, Aristotle's going to work out a six-part description of the wise man, and the order in which he gives the six parts of the description perhaps is from the more known to the less known, right? So let's see if we can gather up these six things that he says. We think first that the wise man knows all things so far as possible, not having a knowledge of these in particular. So it's impossible for a man to know all things in particular, right? But because he knows the, what, universal, he can know in some way an infinity of things. Let me show you my knowledge of an infinity of things. No odd number is even. How many things have I taken in there? How many odd numbers are there? Yeah, no odd number is an even number, right? I'm really something, aren't I, huh? Truly. Yeah, yeah. And notice how in our famous definition of reason, huh, the first thing that our teacher Shakespeare taught us, right, is that reason is the ability for large discourse, right? And the first sense of large is, instead of discourse, that is to say, is that it's about the large, right? And the first sense of about the large is about what? It covers a large area, right? You know, one of the dialogues of Plato, you know, when the young Socrates there is talking to Hermenides, I guess it is, you know, he imagines university would be like a big sale, you know. But it covers a large area, right? Odd number or number covers, you know, large area, right? Infinity of numbers, right? So if the wise man is at the end of reason, right, his knowledge is going to extend to what? Yes. His discourse is going to be the largest of all, right? The most universal of all. And that's why we learn in the fourth book of wisdom that wisdom is about being in one. And being extends to everything that is in any way whatsoever. Is anything before God? Nothing is before God. But nothing is only a being or reason, right? Yeah. It's kind of funny that we say nothing is before God. I was talking about that. Yeah, that was my joke of my teacher. I told you that, Kisurik. You see, philosophy is the only subject where you can get paid for talking about nothing. Oh, I'm sorry, no. It was Cardinal Pell. And Cardinal Pell just starts grinning wildly as Dawkins is going on and on. Dawkins gets a little disturbed. He goes, why are you grinning at me? And Cardinal Pell says, because you're spending all this time talking about nothing. Because he wasn't clear that nothing is actually nothing. Some scientists now are saying you get something out of nothing, right? Even the early Greeks, you couldn't do that. But the prophets have been trying to tell us that for a long time. Yeah. So that's kind of most known, that the wise man knows everything, right? He suddenly said about somebody who's really imminent in his field, right? Then we think, why is the one who's able to know things difficult and not easy for a man to know? To sense is common to all, hence it is easy and nothing wise, right? I saw a dog today, right? No big deal, Perkwist. What's the big deal? Now, isn't that something we think in general? Not just we, editorial Aristotle, but that men in general think that the wise man knows things are difficult for man to know, right? Don't we think that? We admire somebody for knowing something that's not easy to know, don't we? Einstein understands the whole universe in some way, right? It's not easy to do, right? So you see what Aristotle is saying when he says we, right? Now, the third thing he says. Further, we think, wise in every science, the man who is more certain, more sure, right? Now, do we think of the wise man as being more sure or more certain of what he's saying than other men? I'm not too sure about something. Don't I go to see a wiser man or a man I consider wiser than myself, right? Now, is that Laval there, huh? Charles de Connick and Monsignor Dion were the wisest men there, right? But de Connick deferred to Monsignor Dion, right? And I know my friend Warren Murray went up to study at Laval, and he had a background in experimental science. He had a degree in chemistry and so on. He was going to work with de Connick because de Connick was the man who taught the philosophy of nature and knew something about science and so on. But de Connick made perfectly clear, crystal clear to Warren, that Dion is the greatest mind up here, even though I come up to study under him, right? So anyway, I was writing my doctoral thesis under Monsignor Dion, right? And there was some, you know, difficult matter that I was involved in my thesis there, and I thought I'd go and ask de Connick what he thought about this, right? So I asked de Connick what he thought about it, and he says, why'd you ask me when you got Dion for your thesis director? And I said, well, I wonder what you think anyway. He says, okay. So he told me what he thought. You know? So we tend to go to a man who we consider to be wiser when we're not, what, sure about something, right? And after I came down and was having a doctorate and I was teaching an assumption there, at Thanksgiving and at Easter vacations, I'd drive to Quebec and see one Sunday on. I'd have a package of questions, you know, to ask him, you know, and so he'd sit around for two or three hours and ask him questions and I'd take him out to dinner and then he'd say goodbye until next vacation. But you go to ask a man who's, what, you think he's wiser than you are about things that are, what, difficult to know, right? So you think the wise man is a man who knows things that are, what, difficult to know and not easy for man to know. Now, if you think about this, huh? This isn't the third thing he's saying about the wise man. He's more certain. And the second thing you see about the wise man, they know things difficult, not easy for man to know, right? There's a little tension between those two, right? Because the wise man is knowing things that are most difficult for man to know, right? Would he be most sure in what he says? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But would you say that he's characterized by being more certain in his knowledge than other men? I mean, I can count the number of chairs here in the room where I might have to count twice, but make sure I get them all, you know? But wouldn't I be more sure of the number of chairs in this room than somebody would be about the first cause? Huh? The cause of the causes of the cause. How far back it goes? You see a little tension between these two? Now, I compare that to the tension that you have in the premium to the three books on the soul. I think I mentioned before that Aristotle begins the premium there by saying that all knowledge is good, we think, you know? But then he looks before and after in the fourth sense. But one knowledge is better than another, either because it's about a better thing, right? Or... because we know something better? Okay. Those are two different criteria, right? But then he makes the statement that the knowledge of the soul seems to be better than most other knowledge in both of these ways. It's about a better thing, about the best thing in the material world, and it's also better in the sense of more searching. You say, well, how can we put those two together, right? Because he himself says later on, it's one of the most difficult things in the world to know what the soul is. So how can the study of the soul excel both in the nobility of what is being known, right, and have an excellence of what? Certitude, right? There's a tension there between the same, those two things. Well, the solution to this is that it's not exactly the same way that it is both, right? And when we study the three books on the soul, how is it that we know these things that we know in the three books on the soul? Well, it's not by cutting open, you know, frogs in the lab, right? It's not by electrifying the frog's legs and seeing how it moves and so on. Wait for a second. Did you feel fall asleep during your... Put my eyes over. We had a professor in college, and he'd come in, you know, and maybe he'd pick up this or a big book and let it drop, you know, and every jump, you wake up to class, you know, and he's... Now I'm not having your attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, students come into class, I have them, you know, out last night or something, whatever it is. They're really half asleep, you know. Not at TAC, obviously, right? But in the average college, I mean, you know, you've got a class of half asleep. So he'd drop it, put it, jump, you know, so. So, he's a great, great English. He's head of the English department. He was a great guy, you know. I told you that my old teacher, you know, defined the poet as a man with his brains kicked out, which infuriated, you know, most of the teachers of literature, right? And Colwell there was the head of the department of English. He said, that's the first definition of a poet I agree with, he says. Well, no, no, you have to... Shakespeare is unique that way, huh? Because some words of Shakespeare we admire for the wisdom of them and probably just because of their poetic excellence, you know, he has, you know, two excellences there, right? Magnificent poet. Going back to the example there of the dianema. Everything we know in the three books about the soul is from our inward experience about being alive, right? So we all experience within ourselves, right? Life, huh? And that says a great suititude because it's inward, right? Even those crazy modern philosophers who think that matter doesn't exist, you know, but... You know, they know about the inward experience of man, right? You know, they just don't know about anything else. They're corresponding to it, right? But there's a suititude there, right? There's nobility in what you're knowing, eventually, the soul itself, right? It's not exactly the same thing that is what most certain and what is most noble, right? Now, in the fourth book, in the fourth book of wisdom here, Aristotle will defend the axioms, huh? Now, the axioms are the statements that are known through themselves or by themselves, but they're known through themselves by all men and therefore, they're the statements that are most, what? Certain, right? But the wise man knows them better than anybody else and one way in which the wise man knows them better than anybody else is that he knows that the words in the axioms are all equivocal, but equivocal by what? Reason. And therefore, in the fifth book, you know, you find out the central meanings of these words and their order and so on, right? So the wise man can, what? Defend them, right? Yeah, so he's most, yeah. So I've given you my sophism about the axiom that the whole is more than the part. Can I give you that? Last time? Did you get it last time? So, let's see, please brief it here. You call it. Well, I quote my mother, you know, and my mother didn't like it when I said man is an animal. I said, well, mother is not just an animal. It's an animal that has reason. Mother said, well, that's better, she said. My mother never went to college, but she said, that's better to eat. That's better to eat. And so animals are only a part of what man is, not the whole of man, right? But animal includes besides man, dog, cat, horse, elephant. So sometimes a part includes more than the whole, you know? There's no always truth. The whole is more than the part. Now the axiom, there's an argument against the axiom that none of the students in my class at least can answer, right? But it kind of, and I used to play around and say, you know, what if Aristotle came up through the floor here in the classroom, you know, what would he say? You sophist breakfast. Deceiving your students by the fallacy that I said was the most common kind of fallacy. And you're mixing up the, what? Sense of the word whole and part, right? So when you say that animal is a part of what man is, you're thinking of the whole definition, right? Of man, which is a composed whole put together from the genus of animal and the difference of reasonable, right? So animal there is being considered as a composing part of the composed whole, the definition. When you say man includes, I mean, excuse me, animal includes besides man, dog, cat, and horse, you think of animal as a universal whole. It's said of more than dog is said of, more than cat is said of, more than, see? So in a composed whole, always is more than just one of its parts. It's put together for more than one of its parts. And a universal whole is always said of more than one of its parts, right? But you're mixing up the two holes and parts, right? If you want to consider animal as a composing part of what? The definition of man. We'll look at the whole definition. You'll say it's bigger than just animal, right? As my dear mother pointed out. But if you want to consider animal as a, what? Universal whole, which is a whole set of its parts, right? You'll see it's said of more than man is said of, right? So this is what happens, right? With the fallacies. So the wise man knows the axons better than anybody else, right? Because they're all composed of words like whole and part that are equivocal by reason. And the wise man distinguishes the central senses of such words and orders them, right? So Aristotle spends the whole fifth book of wisdom distinguishing the senses of these words and showing the order, right? That's where Thomas learned how to do that within and out, right? So imitate Aristotle, right? And he's the most imitative of the animals, right? It's kind of amazing. So in knowing the axioms, you can see the wise man is the most sure, has the most certain knowledge of anybody. But insofar as he knows the first cause, he's the most certain in knowing that, right? But he's knowing the best thing there is. We'll find out. So the wise man discourse is the largest in both of the first two senses. It's the most universal. And it's what? About the best thing, right? About the best thing, right? About the best thing, right? So that's the third thing, right? And the fourth thing, he's more able to teach what? The causes, right? Now, is that less known than more certain for the wise man? You think of the wise man as being more sure of what he's saying, right? Is that more known to us than that he teaches causes? If you ask the man in the street there, you know, whom do you consider wise of you, right? You know, we speak of somebody who's got it all together, right? He's the expression, right? You know, if he's a wise chef, he knows all about it, right? Like all these, yeah. But you might not think of cause at first, right? He'd think he's more sure about what to do, right? Okay? He's more known. He'll be able to teach the causes, right? Okay? See, we don't think about that so much. But maybe those two things, certain and more able to teach the causes, kind of go together, too, because the man who knows the reason why something must be so is going to be more sure, right? So when Aristotle defines the greatest syllogism, he calls it demonstration, right? And the definition of the demonstration, Procter Quid, is a syllogism making us know the cause and that of which it is the cause, then it cannot be otherwise. So those two kind of go together, right? Certain and being able to know the cause, right? Why is a whole more than one of its parts? Where every whole is parts, in the plural. That's why. I'm not very sure about that, yeah. A whole didn't have any parts, and they call it a whole? Personally. You spell it different. A-2-L. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about donuts. It's interesting that logic reflects the thing we see about reason. Reason is the part of us that can know itself, right? Does the I know what an I is? Not really. But reason can know what reason is. And so Shakespeare's definition of reason is an example of reason coming to know what it is, right? But in logic, you know, we have a what? We learn what a definition is, and there's even a definition of definition. Interesting, huh? Definition is knowing itself. You can say that in a way. I mean, the reason is knowing what a definition is. If we read Chesnans, he begins at a university. I think it's supposed to be Oxford. Yeah. And he said, now it's raining, but there's rivers and streams and the ponds. And he said, that's so appropriate for a university because it's just a reflection. Oh. Water's the perfect need of a university. I'd better than say they're all wet, yeah. Depends on the school, maybe. Depends on the teachers. It's kind of funny when I was driving in. There was a license plate on the car in front of me, right? And we stopped there. And it said, D-R-F-U-N-K. Dr. Funk. I said, that just didn't happen. Someone must have ordered it. It's a truck, you know? Dr. Funk. Maybe it's, maybe it's, must be some kind of, you know, disrespect for the higher, so I've got to be careful with what I say and do today. I don't want to be Dr. Funk, you know? Now, the next thing. And the science is the one for itself and for the sake of knowing, that's to be for itself, right, is more wisdom than that for the sake of its results. Now, this is something maybe you would be hesitant to admit, right? That the wisdom is knowledge that's for itself, right? That's not for the sake of doing something. You know, I'd say, like, what good is that, you know, that sort of thing. So it's less known, right? He can do something less known. But notice the thing that he gave in the first reading there where he said that the arts that are for pleasure, right, seem to be more, what, perfect, right, than the ones for doing something, right? So we think of Shakespeare as being, what, wiser than the carpenter, right, or the cook, right? And so on, right, huh? Most of you probably think that, right, huh? And A. Fort Seorio, the Greeks, you know, when they called the Antonimusia, the poets, the makers, right, huh? They saw them as being wiser, huh? Even Homer, I mean, even Plato speaks of, you know, Socrates of Homer as being the teacher of all the Greeks, right? Well, that's quite a, but his thing is for pleasure, right? Shakespeare says at the end of some of the plays, and will strive to please you every day, you know? Or Mozart said, you know, music must never be displeasing to the ear. Or in other words, cease to be music! Do you know Peter Karyani? He used to have my house last night. He's joined our, he's back from, I don't know, is it, what? He was at TAC a bunch of years ago, maybe four years ago. Yeah, yeah. Peter, he used to... Karyani? Karyani. Yeah, even four years of time, you know, at the TAC, you know, but he was in the, he's a friend of Richard, you know, my other student. Oh. They met when they were in the Marine Corps in Okinawa, you know, so they met, they became friends. But he's back. Yeah, so he came there last, last night, Tuesday, I mean Tuesday, 19th. But he was telling me about my brother Marcus's talk on music. I don't know if my brother, Mark, you guys are talking music? Yeah. He was saying, Marcus was saying, you know, that there's no philosophy without music. He's saying, well, why did you, why did Marcus say that, you know? So I was saying, well, truth is the harmony of reason with things and moral virtue is the harmony of what, sense appetite with reason and so on. So we'd foster in tune with harmony, right? That's the way you first appreciate harmony in good music. But you'd also speak, you know, of the fact that music is so beautiful, right? Do you play the what? The cello? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're deeper than the violin, right? Yeah, Mozart would like to play the deeper, well, he played the violin too, but he played the next one that we thought. What's the next one to the violin? The viola? Yeah, Mozart, yeah, he played the string quartets, you know, and he'd get together and play the string quartet together, Mozart would play the viola, you know, and so on, so, yeah. And he's describing one of the evenings there where his father had, some guys were to play a quartet, you know, and Mozart was pretty young at the time. And he said, just listen, well, finally, he said, you tell I was so-and-so. Finally, so-and-so put out his violin, and Mozart just took over the part, you know, almost like self-taught, you know. How old was he then? Yeah, well, just a little kid. Just a little kid, you know. So the one for the sake of knowing is more wisdom than that for the sake of its results, right? Now, like you said, my notable excursion earlier in the night, day, right? Is God wise? But does God have wisdom? He is wisdom, right? See? It'd be more correct to say that God is wisdom than to say he has wisdom. At least you've got to be careful if you use the word has, right? Because God is whatever he has, right? So if you say God has love, it doesn't mean that his love is something added to his substance, right? It is his very substance, right? And if you say God is wise, that he has wisdom or something of that sort, you have to say, well, that's not really the ordinary sense of has, right? Because God is what he has. He's wisdom itself, right? And so what does the word philosopher mean? Yeah, lover of wisdom. Sophia is a Greek word for wisdom, right? I told you my little joke there with my grandchild Sophia, right? I tell her philosopher means I love her, Sophia, so I love you very much. And she's now known, you know, the trade name is Lady Wisdom, right? I showed you that picture of Lady Wisdom looking up from her books today. Yeah, it's really, really a mixed powder phase. It's a wonderful thing, you know. If God is wisdom itself, then the philosopher is a lover of God in some way, right? It's kind of interesting. What is the origin of the word philosopher? Do you know the origin of the word philosopher? Who was the first man that called himself a philosopher? Maybe not the first philosopher, but the first man to call himself a philosopher. And what was the occasion for him calling himself by this name? Do you know that? I think of a joke which I won't share, but no. It's about the phylogen calling himself, but no. Yeah, Pythagoras. Pythagoras. Yeah, yeah. Pythagoras, Pythagoras, yeah. Pythagoras, you know, discovered wonderful things like the Pythagorean theorem and other things besides that. And they were calling him wise, right? And he says, don't call me wise. God alone is wise, right? And I'll repeat this later on here, right? Either we should say that God alone is wise, or if we say that man is wise, it's in a very imperfect way compared to God. Only God is fully wise. Well, then they say to Pythagoras, well, what am I going to call you then, right? See? He says, well, if you've got to call me something, call me a lover of wisdom, right? So in the origin of the name philosopher, right, there is not only what the name itself etnologically is composed of, you know, phylo, which means lover, right? And Sophia, wisdom. But there's also humility, right? Placing yourself under God as the truly wise one or the fully wise one, right? So that's interesting, huh? That there's humility, right, in the origin of the word, what, philosopher, right, as well as what is the etymology that it says. You have all these words in English, you know, that are like, philologist means a lover of words, right? I was reading a book, a little book of things from Pope Benedict, right, and talking about John Paul II, right? He said he started out as a philologist, he says. But then you have words like, say, philanthropist, right? A man who gives, you know, and dows things and does many things for mankind. So it means a lover of man, right? Philanthropist. But philosopher means a lover of what? A wisdom, okay? Wisdom is a knowledge of God, huh? I always tell my lady wisdom there. Wisdom is a knowledge of God in both senses of the word, knowledge of God, huh? This is amphiboli. When you have a speech that has two meanings or more, we speak of amphiboli, right? That's the technical word, terrible Greek, means two ways, right? And equivocation is one word, right? One word has many meanings. So we speak of the equivocation, the word before that we study, huh? But amphiboli is a phrase that has more than one meaning, huh? I'm very fond of these phrases like the word of God, right? What is the word of God? Well, there's a treatise there, I mean, a document in Vatican II called Verbum Dei, but what are they talking about? Verbum Dei. Well, they're talking about the scripture mainly, right? So the Bible is said to be the word of God, right? Somebody asked me, what is the Bible, Mr. Brookless? I'd say it's the word of God. It's the written word of God. Yeah, but now you could also say that the son of God is what? The word of God, right? But there's a harmony between those two meanings of word of God, right? Connection between the two. That the word of God in the sense of the Bible is chiefly about the word of God in the sense of the son of God, beautiful like that, huh? Or my teacher Shakespeare, right? Instead of speaking of the philosophy of nature as the philosophy of nature, he calls it the wisdom of nature, right? Oh, I love that. The amphibody of wisdom of nature, right? Because it could mean the wisdom about nature, or it could mean the wisdom that nature shows and what it does. When Aristotle was studying the animals and the parts of animals and so on, and he talks about how we get a little insight into the mind that made these animals, right? We see his wisdom and so on, right? So the wisdom of nature, in a way, is the wisdom of God, right? You don't know that too much anymore. But the wisdom of nature could mean then the wisdom that nature reveals and what it does, and then it could mean the wisdom which is about nature, right? Thomas says in some cases, you know, philosophy is what? A synonym for philosophy is wisdom, right? Okay? Although if you take the origin of philosophy, you can see that it's kind of human wisdom, right? We wouldn't say that God has philosophy so much. We would say that he alone is wise, that he alone is fully or perfectly wise. So when I say to Sophia that wisdom is the knowledge of God, right, has two meanings. It's a knowledge which God most of all has, or it's a knowledge which is what? About God, right? Isn't that beautiful? And of course, you get to study God's knowledge, as you do eventually in philosophy and theology, you've come to realize that God's knowledge is primarily a knowledge of himself. And it's by knowing himself that he knows all other things. He doesn't derive his knowledge of other things from that, right? God doesn't have to wait for me to do what I'm going to do today to know what I'm going to do today. So God's knowledge is very much a knowledge of God. Beautiful, right? The knowledge of God is a knowledge of God. I'm not repeating myself either. I'm using knowledge of God in two different senses, right? And now you come to the sixth and last thing, right? And the one ruling is more wisdom than the one, what? Obeying. Now that came out after he had come to a knowledge of, what? The man of art being wiser than the man of mere experience, because he knows why and the cause and so on. And then he said that the chief artist is even wiser than the, what? The handicrafts man, right? And then you start to see the idea that it belongs to the wise man to direct others, right? And in Hugo's definition of reason, right, is the ability to understand reason and direct itself in others. Because you see a connection between reason, right, and this highest perfection of reason, right? If it's characteristic of reason to be able to direct itself as the existence of logic tells us, right? The art by which reason directs itself. And it can direct us in our actions, right? And you can direct by your reason other people, right? Your children and so on. And then if wisdom is the highest perfection of reason, you'd expect wisdom to especially be able to direct others, right? Now, sometimes I used to give a talitical argument that logic is wisdom, right? Heaven forbid, right? But I said that logic directs us in all the sciences. in defining and reasoning and syllogizing right then in logic we learn how to syllogize and things of this sort so if the logician directs all the other sciences then he's the wise man right yeah yeah so the conic to natural philosopher is not as wise as mansylian the logician right what is logic wisdom you see well as thomas explained in the commentary on the 14 books of wisdom and he quotes here with approval of eros right about the affinity between logic and what wisdom and two things or two ways in which logic and wisdom are similar is one their universality right you've read the categories of aristotle those are the highest genre right he knows just about everything there right in general doesn't he just like the wise man wisdom and logic are what most universal right they're very similar in that respect and then logic is about immaterial things right and wisdom is about what immaterial things things that don't have any matter or don't have don't need to have any matter right that's two ways in which logic and wisdom are alike a third way is logic the logician seems to direct everybody else right even mistakes right i mean the logician explains that our fallacies in language and fallacies outside of language right he goes through there's actually what 13 kinds of mistakes that are stone kids right i kind of joke he's the holiday we 13 became unlucky you know there's no 13th floor in some you know i told you i tell you my uh my in-laws there on 13 gauge lane right that's my my my wife was living when i first went out of there you know 13 gauge lane i guess when they moved in there they assumed at the town hall that they want to change the number because who would i be at 13 well of course 13 is somehow lucky number for my my in-laws so they they kept they wanted to keep the name 13 on the house right 13 gauge lane so a person was lucky number because it's the 12 apostles yeah that's why it had to be unlucky but anyway uh so the magician teaches us you know about the mistakes we can make right common mistakes and so on and the fallacy of equivocation right so he's a neither wise man right that's three ways that they are similar right so this comes up in in the uh 14 books of wisdom at different times like for example in the the third book of uh wisdom the whole book is dialectical and aristotle reasons on this side and that side about all these simple questions of wisdom right but at the beginning of this he he has a beautiful explanation of why we need dialectic that's what i criticized descartes for right not seeing the need for that um and thomas goes through those reasons that aristotle gives there right for doing this whole book of dialectic and he says for these reasons aristotle in other books you know has some dialectic right but there's a difference here that in the other parts of philosophy the dialectic is particular so like in the books of natural hearing you have a dialectic about place and then you have the determination of truth about place and then later on you have a dialectic about time you determine the truth about time right but here in the what third book you have the dialectic of the whole you know so that it seems to be this dialectical book a chief part of wisdom this shows the affinity between what logic which dialectic is a part right logic uh utens um it's a principal part of wisdom of course aristotle compares wisdom to dialectic in terms of universality so in the dialogues of plato which are mainly dialectical you can have a dialogue about just about anything right because even compared to sophistry right we have the appearance of wisdom but you have universal to it right that's where i always point out the first thing you know what are you a wise guy what are you a know-it-all even that pejorative sense of wise you've got the idea that he knows all things right any wise guy you know it all you keep on making jokes and whatever i say whatever i say you he twisted some way to to make it look stupid or funny or something now of course as i point out huh the wise man um in the first reading was explaining the what natural road and that's even more basic than the road of what logic logic teaches the common road of reasoned out knowledge but the wise man talks about the natural road so he's even more directing us there's ways that these two sciences are similar right now thomas took this huh do i give you that premium to the nicomachean ethics of thomas yeah and he's going to divide human knowledge on the basis of what the order that it considers he quotes this sixth thing here about the wise man and he in latin it says sapienti sest ordinari it belongs to the wise man to order things right and thomas gives the reason why it belongs to the wise man to order things or a reason right because wisdom is the highest perfection he says the reason of which it is proper to what to know or as my teacher shakespeare says to look before and after right thomas didn't quote shakespeare because yeah yeah yeah very good very good very good see see how wise he is looking before and after now okay so a lot of times i tell people you know that um what if you know what reason is that'll help you to know what wisdom is right but again if you know what wisdom is which is the highest perfection of reason that characterizes something and tells you something about reason too right if you know the reason is the ability to look before and after you wouldn't be surprised that the wise man most of all knows order right but if you perceive that the wise man most of all knows order right that the chief artist right is wiser because he directs others and so on then you might see that seems to be characteristic of reason right so that appears both in aristotle i mean shakespeare's definition of reason and hugo's definition of reason right okay i gave it to you it's the ability to understand reason and direct oneself another did i give you you yeah yeah and hugo's a plagiarist and i think he got the idea of its ability to understand and reason from thomas's premium to logic right no he's kind of he's he's quite recent oh okay okay and he's influenced by by uh you know the premium to the nickel magnetics where reason directs itself and directs the uh will directs us in our making of exterior things right and hugo by the way means mind yeah yeah i remember one time we we had a book of etymologies and uh and we're looking at etymology of people's names right so finally they came to me right and they said that what a super you mean i don't know where it comes from you know and looked it up it meant mind thank goodness you have some stupid apology you know so he sums up and says such and so many are the thoughts we have about wise men and wisdom right so you know what a wise man is that'll help you know what wisdom is and vice versa so the six part description the wise man is he's the man who knows all things in some way right in general but not in particular right he's what things he knows things that are difficult for men to know and he knows what he's more sure he's more able to teach right knows the causes more and he has knowledge that's more desirable for its own sight and that he bosses everybody else around he directs everybody else yeah it's good i was going to reason from the six-part description you know to the wisdom being about the first causes right now the first cause was just one but this description is valuable for many other reasons besides right just as knowing the natural road it's good right i mean if you're in logic and you say now which is more known to us syllogism or induction what would you say induction yeah but induction is an argument from many what singulars to the universal right syllogism starts from the universal right so in the syllogism you have the two great principles the set of all and the set of none right and the syllogism is based on the set of all or the set of none so it's based upon something that's seen universally that could be the first argument we know no but induction is an argument from many singulars towards universal right well now if you know the natural road of sensing memory experience right then now it's universal you can see how induction comes before syllogism comes before syllogism right no one right it's not as strong an argument as a syllogism right and uh actually before syllogism before induction is the argument they call example right now the word example is equivocal right example can mean what a singular used to illustrate the universal or can name an argument from one singular to another singular of the same kind so example is an argument is more known to us even than induction it's easier to use right my brother mark and i are from the midwest so we weren't used to seafood at all and what do you get on friday we get you some seafood on friday you know so you try different things we're in the grocery market there's supermarket and there's there's um they call them uh the funny thing that uh lobster legs and like that right so my brother's that's why we tried these right so we um made him for dinner after this dinner my brother mark grew up and uh he was disgusted so he said i'm gonna go out and see a movie so it's a movie in town so he goes out to see the movie after two or three hours he comes back to the apartment where we had and uh smelled the thing fill up a second time and you think you're about uh you probably never bought that again yeah never bought that again yeah so um this is an argument from one singular to another singular is the same kind of the universe yeah yeah solution yeah yeah not that monsters are related to cockroaches cockroaches are the ocean lobsters and crawfish and all that's what they're all i mean i think warren murray told me of some biologist he met you know who who studied with cockroaches and i guess they're they're resistant to atomic radiation or something and so he thought they're kind of at the top of uh evolutionary scale yeah yeah because we're able to to you know i mean evolution is because you get something that can survive in this environment right or you live in an atomic world now so the cockroaches are really at the top you know crazy uh biologists you know they have that kind of a narrow mind that's highly specialized though because i suppose a stone could could survive a time of war too actually very well though that if someone's doing orders why don't people read aristotle and thomas more they don't want to do it themselves right they want to be directed right i remember when i started getting interested in in philosophy in in high school my brother richard was four years older than me right so he was already a philosophy major right he didn't start out philosophy majors in english or something but then he became a philosophy major and so i was always picking up little tidbits you know philosophy from him and my cousin donald you know was a history major he became a philosophy major and so two of them you know were little troublemakers but anyway but uh i remember you know getting interested in reading thomas you know the time and aristotle you know and so on and my friend rodney milk you know he said uh i talked to him about it and he'd say yeah well my own philosophy says you know he doesn't want to be directed by somebody right huh you know he's not going to be directed by someone else who's presumably wiser than he is right so these are what people think a wise man is like yeah well we'll go back to the first reading that just a little bit of help here right huh as you go along the natural road there right from sensing right to memory right and then from memory to what analogy universal and then within the analogy universal starting to know why right huh and then finally you see that that there can be what uh chief artists and uh subordinate artists right in different things so macarthur is wiser than the officers that are obeying macarthur right and maybe they're wiser than the guys lower down right now chain of command they should be wiser right and then you begin to see that maybe it's going to be the first cause right now and so on the first and then but notice there you're talking about one man direct another that's the last thing you came to right in the order right by the first thing you you come to is that he knows all things right that's the beginning of art or science that you know the universal that's kind of first known right and what distinguishes that from experience right which is only knowledge of what singularism and you know the fifth thing there that it's not for its own sake you know you know you know martha would not make me approve of that right and uh but as christ says mary has chosen the better part and it shall not be taken away from her because the practical life will end with death and then if you're been reasonably good right then you'll begin or have the speculative life to the full right you're not going to do anything with god in the sense of change him or make anything he's going to contemplate him for and praise him right so people don't kind of maybe appreciate that it should be now for its own sake right huh yeah that's why i was thinking that five seems to be a more abs uh