 Let me start by reminding you about their view of the virtues and vices. So the virtues relate to different kinds of objects. For example, there's a virtue with respect to doing appropriate actions, and that virtue is called intelligence or wisdom. There's a virtue with respect to distributions of scarce resources, and the virtue related to that is called justice. And there's a virtue with respect to standing firm in the face of adversity, and that virtue is called courage or bravery. And finally, there is a virtue with respect to the having of impulses and desires, and that virtue is called temperance. Corresponding to those virtues, then, are their opposite vices, and there's an imprudence in justice, cowardice, and wantoness that appear at the bottom of those columns. Now, each of these virtues can be further analyzed into specific virtues. So we don't just generically talk about intelligence or wisdom. We talk about deliberative excellence, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and so forth. For justice, we talk about piety, which is justice with respect to the gods, equity, good-heartedness, fairness, et cetera. Courage breaks down into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, and cheerfulness. Temperance into organization, orderliness, having a sense of shame, and self-control. Further, the vices break down into several sub-categories. Although I haven't given you details on those, you can find those details for yourself by following up the reference. Now, notice that each of these virtues has a definition, and I want to examine these definitions carefully. So the definition of intelligence or wisdom, the Greek is phronasus. I also gave you the Greek. You can see phronasus, decaiassune, or greia, sofrasune, and so forth. The definition of intelligence or wisdom is knowledge of what one is to do and not to do, and what is neither. Or the knowledge of a naturally social animal of good things, bad things, and what is neither. And then the definition of the corresponding vice of imprudence is ignorance of a good thing, bad things, and what is neither. Or ignorance of what one is to do or not to do and what is neither. Similarly, and I'll start reading this to you at some point, but there's a point to me emphasizing, look for what is common between all of these definitions, even ones that correspond to different kinds of objects or are active in different spheres. So justice is defined as knowledge of the distribution of the proper value or worth to each person. Courage, knowledge of what is terrible and what is not terrible. And neither. Temperance, knowledge of what is to be chosen and avoided and neither. The opposite of temperance, wantonness or whatever, which is ignorance of what is worth choosing or avoiding or neither. You're using the word ignorance, which I thought meant something more along the lines of not being able to know. Ignorance is you're not like, if you're ignorant of something, you haven't been taught it or haven't had the chance to know about it. So is that exactly what you mean or do you mean like? That is exactly what I mean, but ignorance can be with respect to a specific object. So I could be ignorant of your middle name or ignorant of the Pythagorean theorem. Because you haven't had a chance to know my middle name or whatever. Well, even if I have had a chance, which I have had a chance, I just haven't followed up on this, and I'm still ignorant of it. Okay, so ignorance is not stupidity. See, philosophers make very fine distinctions between these things. Stupidity would be kind of dull-wittedness and an inability, a seeming inability or unwillingness to learn or something. Whereas ignorance simply means you don't have knowledge in that field or with respect to that object. So you're not implying any sort of willful ignorance or willful lack of knowledge? Not necessarily, although it could be. But it could just be that you haven't been habituated properly, or even yet you could be a child and you're not yet. You're still afraid of the dark because you haven't learned that there's nothing that is in the dark that isn't in the light and that there aren't really monsters in the bed or whatever. And so that's still a kind of ignorance. Okay, and the solution to that vice of cowardice is to teach you and explain how that works, and then once you know, then you know what is terrible and what isn't, and that that isn't something, and so you don't suffer from that. Okay, yeah? With regards to the stoats, the notion of knowledge, are they assuming that you're going to act upon that knowledge? Because for the definition of courage, knowledge of what is terrible and what is not terrible is neither. Does that necessarily mean you're going to be courageous? Like, could you be knowledgeable of it, but then not act upon it? According to them, that's impossible. So they deny that the phenomenon of weakness of will, so-called weakness of will, or to put it briefly, weakness is possible. So to them, all vice is due to ignorance. If you know what is terrible and what isn't terrible, then you will not fear it. You will fear it if you are ignorant of that. And there's no cases of, for example, you knowing that there really aren't any monsters under the bed, but still fearing that there are monsters under the bed or something. So the important point here is that it's an intellectualist theory of virtue and vice. And it's a cognitive theory of virtue and vice. And that's why we can give these definitions of each one of them and why each one of them is defined in terms, as you say, of knowledge. So if I know in their theory what somebody is worth, what somebody is owed, if I know and understand that, then I will give them what they're owed. And if I don't, that's because I must be ignorant of it. The case where this is most difficult, as the term weakness of will implies, is in the case of temperance. Aren't there cases where I know that eating the chocolate cake would be bad because I'm on a diet and yet I just go and do it anyway? I know that smoking is bad for my health. I've read all the studies. You have to be an idiot not to know it. But the first thing I do when I walk outside of class is light up a cigarette. So according to them, that phenomenon is not actually possible. There must be something going wrong with the mind when that happens. You must actually think temporarily or something that this is good for me. Like you think, oh, I know it's bad for me, but it's good for me in the short term otherwise I'll go crazy and kill all my friends if I don't have a cigarette right now. And so there's some kind of weird, confused thought. And in every case where we indulge in vice, something has gone wrong with the mind because, again, it's an intellectualist and cognitive theory of these virtues and vices. Now, furthermore, just to give a further controversial, complicated aspect of it, as I've said, all of them are forms of knowledge. So the only people that are virtuous are the people that know enough. And the only people that know enough are sages because you can't actually have any of these virtues in isolation from one another. So this is another thesis of theirs, which we could call something like the unity of virtues, which is that to hold any one virtue, to be a wise person, is also to be a temperate, just, and courageous person. And to be a coward is not just to be a coward, but is also to be wanton, unjust, imprudent, and so forth. And so since one must hold all virtues in order to hold any virtue, then one cannot have any vice and still be virtuous, and therefore any form of ignorance precludes you from virtue, and there is no intermediate state between virtue and vice. So it's a pretty strict and pretty demanding moral theory. Only those who are morally perfect are actually moral. Those who are not are all immoral, which, and it follows from their being immoral, that they are unhappy, unsuccessful, they do not have eudaimonia. Further, all of them, and I should just say all of us, because none of us in here appear to be sages, although some of you could surprise me, but I'm not, and I don't claim to be. And so therefore, and I don't know anybody that is, and so everybody I know is a miserable, foolish wretch, and they're all equally. Since there's no degrees here, like some of them are better than others, okay, there's no degrees of difference here. It's a categorical difference between virtue and vice. And the person who's really doing their best to become good but isn't good yet is just as bad as the worst, most hardened criminal who doesn't care and isn't trying to be good, because they all lack the necessary virtue. So that is those two theses, the intellectualist thesis that virtue is a matter of knowledge and vice is a matter of ignorance, combined with the unity of virtue's thesis, that one must possess every virtue in order to possess any virtue. From that follows their extreme denial of degrees of goodness. And so they make these comparisons, for example, they say, if you're drowning, okay, you fall off the ship and you're underwater, or you're scuba diving and your tank fails, and you are trying to reach the top, or reach the air, it doesn't matter if you get really close to that, and you're just a couple of inches from it, the result is exactly the same. You're still drowning. So being virtuous is like being pregnant or not. It's not like some people are kind of pregnant, or a little bit pregnant, but hopefully not too pregnant. You either are or you aren't. Okay? And being sober, there is a fact of the matter as to whether you are sober or not, and so they compare it to these things. There are degrees here. You had stated that there isn't really a middle ground between virtue and vice. Correct. Could the pursuit of knowledge be sort of considered a middle ground? No. Well, because I'm saying like they didn't have it before, and they wanted it, so they go for it. Yes, so that's what you should do, and in fact that's the entire goal of life is to select things in accordance with nature and in accordance with virtue, so as to become a virtuous person. That is the entire goal of life. So the goal of life is to literally become a sage. It's to choose every individual thing that you can and make every individual decision in accordance with that. And then it might so happen that you find out one day that you've been making all these decisions correctly and very easily and so forth, and that you are there for lots, and you do in fact have all of these virtues. But that's something that they say is to be selected, meaning you select all the intermediary necessary things and get that, but that's not actually what needs to be sought. What needs to be sought is making the right decision in each of these individual cases. So this relates to another controversial thesis of theirs. Their stochastic account of the end. The end is to do everything as good as we can and as in accordance with virtue as possible if the outcomes of these things do not end up being good. That is irrelevant to the overall end. So they make a comparison here between an archer where the goal of being a good archer is to do everything in accordance with the art and skill of archery. And so to take into account the wind direction and all of that when you're aiming at the target. Now, if after you release the arrow, the wind direction unpredictably changes or somebody physically moves the target away, you may or may not actually hit the target. But that's irrelevant. What's relevant to being a good archer is doing everything in your power in accordance with it, not what the eventual outcome is. And so this is an anti-consequentialist philosophy. The consequences of these things are irrelevant. What matters is the means that we take and the choices that we make contributing to them. Okay. There was another question over here, but first what's your name again? Veronica, please. If their goal is to align with virtue as much as possible, but they don't believe in degrees of virtue, do they believe that their life has as much, I guess, meaning as someone that isn't pursuing it at all if they never achieve anything? This is the only source of life's meaning because these are the only things that are actually good. But they can't, they don't believe in the degrees, so they can't really give worth to what they're doing unless they achieve the end goal. Well, what they're doing is worthwhile because remember how I defined worth and value. What's worthwhile and what's valuable is either good things themselves or things that contribute to good things. And so it is worthwhile for me, for example, to pay my roommate back the $5 that I owed him in accordance with justice. And so I should do that. I should choose that intermediate action. It doesn't mean I'm a sage if I do it. I might like to think I am just because I repay my debts or something, but that doesn't mean I'm perfect in every way. But still, every one of those acts is a valuable thing to do and that's the only valuable thing to do. Doing something like not repaying it so that I can spend the $5 playing video games, which might be more fun or something like that, that's actually worthless. That's totally worthless, right? And furthermore, it might be anti-worthwhile because insofar as it precludes me from repaying my debt or something, then I'm trading something that's worth everything in the world for something that's a vice where I'm just indulging some morbid obsession I have with playing space invaders or something. Okay? Yeah. So if it's an all or nothing kind of thing where you're either wise or you're not, does that also mean you can never relapse? Like once you're wise, you can never make an unlikely decision? Yeah, that's true. Why is people never, never, never turn back? Why would they? They figured it all out. But it's going to fall back then you would never rise in the first place. Yeah, then the only way you'd fall back is if you were confused, you were a sage and everything and then you thought, but I'm just going to have chocolate cake even though I shouldn't. And so it turns out you thought you were a sage. And this happens a lot. In fact, everyone I talk to seems to think they're a sage but they're all these confused, miserable fools. And so, but so Luca's exactly right. The great thing about being a sage is that it gives you absolute constancy and self-assurance and so forth. But there's this strange psychological idea that it happens immediately or all of a sudden and you don't even notice it. So here they compare, like take somebody like a piano player or a flute player. They don't at some point go, okay, now I'm officially a good player or I'm a great flute player or I've got my degree in flute playing. It's just that they play and play and they practice and they work and then one day it occurs to them, I'm just a master that I can play all of these things. I can play spontaneously. I can always hit the right note. I never fail. The other people are coming to me and trying to be trained and do it and so forth. And so I'm a sort of master of this instrument and it just occurs to you. But it's not like what you should not do if you want to be good at playing the flute is set out to become a great wise flute player. What you should do is concentrate on practicing and choosing every little decision in accordance with that, like how much you practice and building your own instruments and concentrating everything on that goal. Yeah. Is it possible to be a sage if knowledge is an infinite thing? What do you mean if knowledge is there's an infinite amount of knowledge? Well, knowledge is by definition finite and that sentence right there contains a bunch of redundancies because a definition is a kind of finitude. It's a limited thing. What a definition is is a set of limits and so knowledge has a definition and knowledge basically is a collection of definitions and so all knowledge is necessarily limited in that sense. Now, there are an infinite number of particular and irrelevant facts like I don't know if you have an odd or even number of pairs on your head right now and that applies to everybody in this room and then also everybody everywhere else. There are all these facts and so forth that one cannot possibly find out but what it means to be wise is not to know every individual irrelevant fact it's to know how to live in accordance with nature how to select those things that contribute to what's actually good and that's limited to the ways that we act and so forth so we don't need to know the temperature in a certain region of one of the moons of Jupiter or something in order to be wise we just need to know how to live in accordance with these virtues and that's all extremely definite in fact I've given you all the definitions of it all you have to do is live up to every one of those definitions on those virtues. So I'm wondering if the final end of the life is to live up with those virtues and live up accordance with nature why those philosophers are teaching their students and teaching other people because that action is now part of the feeling they're virtue or having knowledge of. It could be. Why do you say it's not? So I'm wondering why it could be like teaching other people who do your own virtue? Well, because suppose people deserve to learn and so I'm giving them what they deserve like I could come in here and just do stuff and not really teach you anything and just go through the motions but you actually deserve to learn and it's my responsibility to teach you given the roles that I've taken on so I have to make these selections about don't give them a bunch of fake, misleading information be really careful about how I'm presenting all of this and so forth and it would be wrong for me not to do so because I would be depriving you of something that you deserve. But furthermore, there's just a much more general point I want other people to be virtuous. In a way the question is why do we care about education? Why would anybody care about other people being educated? And the reason doesn't have anything to do with so that they can get jobs so that they can drive fancy cars or live in big houses the answer is because I don't want a bunch of stupid people around me contributing to a stupid political situation where the state is governed wrong and if the state is being governed wrong and there are injustices happening then how could I care about anything else other than trying to improve other people for my own sake? So the reason we care about other people being educated is because we don't want to be harmed by having a bunch of ignorant people who don't understand what's just and unjust right and wrong. And so we first of all want to improve them on that scale because it's in our own interest and another thing is that as far as philosophers go they want to create other philosophers so that they can improve their students and so forth as well but they also form a community of wise people they and the gods form a single community that goes beyond the human community where all of these virtuous actions are perfectly carried out. You're motivated to teach as an instrumental towards developing this kind of knowledge as well so how do you learn the relevant logic and physics to figure out what nature is like? You can't just sit down and open a book and start reading it you have to be a student of it yourself and being a student of it and being able to continue studying it means continuing to be around that means eventually they may take on responsibilities doing grading and then running sections and then eventually your own courses and so forth. You are extremely motivated to deal with other people and care about other people in fact all of these virtues are actually defined as essentially social relationships and in terms of social relationships and the Stoics emphasize that if we go back to the impulse and what we initially want to do they also describe bonding between parent and child like between mother and child and how this is a natural thing there's a physiological aspect to this and it is in accordance with nature and that's just one example of a social bond all these other social bonds are also real and part of nature and that includes our bond with the rest of humanity with the rest, actually the rest of rational life in the entire cosmos presuming it exists somewhere else but if it doesn't exist somewhere else it's at least all of the humans here who are rational those I actually by the time you become a sage you've expanded your circle of concern beyond yourself and beyond your immediate family and beyond your immediate community and beyond your city or your state to encompass the entire world and all rational beings within it and so that's why you want to teach because you care about other people and in order to manifest these virtues one must do so now just a quick note on the emotions on the other side of this I've broken this down according to the matrix that I described to you yesterday so or on Wednesday each one of the emotions just like the account of virtues and vices the account of emotions and passions is also cognitive meaning each emotion has a definition and corresponds to a certain way of thinking and we can say how those are generically so a whole class of emotions arises from thinking that I've got some good thing that's present to me but being confused about that because it's not actually good or thinking that there's some good thing I don't have that I really want that isn't actually good that gives rise to a whole other class of emotions again thinking that something that's happening to me that's bad that isn't actually bad gives rise to a third class of emotions and thinking that something bad might happen to me that isn't happening yet that isn't actually bad gives rise to the fourth class of emotions and then corresponding to each of those classes is an approved good form of feeling except there is no approved good form of feeling that corresponds to the emotional state or passion of distress and pain but if we look at each one of these definitions and then the definitions of the sub-emotions that fall under them we see that they are all cognitive so forms of distress include pity, grudging, envy resentment, etc envy being defined as a pain at somebody else having good that one desires for one's self so if I look at my neighbor and say he has a better car than I do or he has a greener lawn than I do and that's a really good thing and so he's got something good that I wish I had and so I show this ridiculous conversion about what's actually good and what's bad but that could give rise to a feeling of envy for what he has but notice that the emotion or passion is a product and a result of a certain way of thinking, a certain form of cognition and every one of the emotions is similar and so there is a solution for these which is to change the way people think, to change their minds, to go through and explain to them what the difference between good and bad actually is and what kinds of things they should be indifferent to and having a fancy car or having a very green lawn is an indifferent thing, it's not a good or a bad thing and so I should not be thinking of it that way and if I don't think of it that way then I won't suffer from the corresponding emotion and so it follows from this that sages who know what's good and what isn't good don't suffer any of these emotions so they don't in the stoic view actually feel any pleasure or pain or desire or fear now that claim about the extirpation of all emotions which we can summarize with the word apathy which literally means it doesn't mean what you think it means which is I don't give a shit and I'm just sitting here and I don't care about anything that's the sort of modern version of what apathy is the ancient stoic version of it is that you've ridden yourself of suffering from emotions like distress, fear, desire and so forth and so apathy is actually an extremely positive state it's a great thing sages are completely apathetic people and so this is what gives rise to the caricature of the stoic not crying in a funeral what they're doing is they're not in distress about it because they realize that life is not good or bad but it's something we should be indifferent to and so the person that died didn't really it's not a bad thing for them and it's not a bad thing for other people that they died in fact it's all in accordance with nature everything that happens is in accordance with nature and everything is faded and what the sage does is realizes that and realizes that this is actually the plan and this is all working out and it's all rational and so actually stoics manage to enjoy themselves at funeral they feel joy at funeral they think this is great father Zeus' plan is really coming together here this is all working exactly as it should confused people who don't understand what good and bad is tend to cry and weep and think that there's a problem with what's going on here and stoics don't fall into that didn't Seneca say that when it comes to things like grief over a father losing a child that there was some acceptable and natural grief yes so Seneca that is true Seneca does actually say and I could quote it for you I think that it's okay if you end up crying in a funeral but that's just because Seneca is kind of a wimpy compared to the grief he's got this decadent Roman almost epicurean approach to these things as opposed to the manly Greek one that doesn't cry