 Good morning. I am your punctual, Casper, the friendly ghost, the ancient philosopher Aristotle. I feel like more like your butcher, but it's a little bit of a problem. I'm an ancient philosopher Aristotle. Yesterday I made a couple of points in response to some of my contemporary critics, and I want to continue with that theme and once again address a couple of the critics who have basically challenged certain features of Western thought, which can really be laid at my feet, for I tended to be the originator or the one who wrote them down, and so I'd like to address them. Some of you may have heard that there is a movement afoot called postmodernism, which in areas such as literature or literary criticism parades itself under the name of deconstructionism. In philosophy it is modern pragmatism. There are all sorts of isms, but really it has an ancient name and that name is skepticism. The meaning of skepticism in this context is that the human mind is never able to come up with anything that cannot reasonably be doubted and therefore is not to be believed. It is a fundamental assault on our rationality. What irritates me as a polemical level is that those who put forth this idea, the skeptical idea, call themselves postmodernist and they're about as post as, I don't know, soup is post. The fact is that it's an ancient thought, it's always been with the human species. There is nothing as persistent as humanity denying itself and it is simply a resurgence in a different garb of an ancient theme and that is that you and I as human beings are really unable to know things. In my time it was called peronism for the philosopher Perot. Later it became agnosticism, humianism, all kinds of skeptical thought has circulated throughout the history of human thinking. It's nothing new. Its origin lies in the kind of persuasive belief and here is again where I have to caution that those who are often wrong are not necessarily stupid or even mean. The origin of this skepticism is a fairly interesting thought. It is that the human mind as it tries to contact the world, as it tries to come to grips with it, is a kind of a sledgehammer that intrudes on the world. So for example as you're looking at me the idea is that you're looking itself creates me or at least a sufficient part of me that when you come to have certain ideas as to what you hear from me or what you see of me these ideas really cannot be trusted to be of me. There are kind of a combination of some stuff from here and some stuff from there combining into a created reality. I hope I'm making myself clear about this that somehow you are wearing intrusive glasses that the human mind is not so much an instrument of discovery, an instrument of identification, but it is an instrument that imposes itself on the world and so the meanings that we have of anything whether it's as complicated as what government is or as simple as what a pebble is, all these meanings are not really objective but relative, subjective, intersubjective in some ways a form of distortion of what goes on. Now this could be the beginning of a very long lecture which I'm not here to conduct right now. Let me tell you one fundamental problem that I have written about in my various writings from as far back as the fourth century BC. The most serious problem with this view is that it cannot even trust its own tenets. It cannot even trust his own tenets because remember what it tries to say is how does the human mind relate to the world but it says that the human mind relates to the world by distorting it therefore what it says about how the human mind relates to the world has by its own terms also to be a distortion and thus it's a non-starter. It defeats itself, it destroys itself. When you mention this to some contemporary advocates of this drastic form of skepticism they swallow hard and say I told you so we can't know anything. Now in order to get us out of this dilemma the first remedy and this is what I'll leave you with is to trust your common sense before you trust any philosophy. Because philosophers first had to be human beings they had to know some things about their world before they began their theorizing. This is true about physicists, about chemists and philosophers. What is unique about philosophy is that it tends to go so deep about the human condition that every generation has to rethink it. It's not the same with chemistry, with physics, with botany. There you can build on the past with reasonable confidence and you don't have to do the whole history of science in philosophy that won't do. You cannot ask the next generation of human beings to take untrust, untrust and sheer trust on the authority of their elders, such important things that philosophy deals with. That's one of the reasons that philosophy doesn't make progress in the ordinary sense. Philosophy always re-asks and tries to re-answer all of the major questions. Thank you.