 So today we're starting Aristotle's Metaphysics. We're going to spend two days on it. We could spend it in time as a master, which is what some people do when they're in graduate school. They go over line by line and look at it very carefully. We're only looking at the first book. So you might think of this as we're peering our head around the corner of the door, listening to Aristotle and his students as they talk about some really fundamental, but difficult to understand stuff. And I don't expect that anybody's going to immediately get this like that. I didn't myself immediately understand all of this, the first, the second, the third, you know, time that I read it. And I'm still finding more and more stuff in this as I go through it myself, which is why it's a classic work. You know, every time that you approach a classic work, you'll find a little bit more to contribute, a little bit more that you hadn't thought of before. So Aristotle starts off with this famous quote, usually translated all men desire to know. This is a classroom, which is about three quarters women. So I mean that you don't desire to know, just men do. Aristotle actually had some kind of sexist views. He thought women were naturally inferior to men and all sorts of stuff like that. But that was, you know, in part his culture and in part because of some strange commitments on his part that he didn't have to be stuck with. The word that we translate as men in older translations actually means human beings. It doesn't mean male. It means human beings. So all human beings desire to know. But that doesn't count. Well, what do they want to know? And why do they want to know? Do we all desire to know metaphysics? How many of you have signed up for this intro to philosophy class because you want to study metaphysics? Nobody? Nobody said, you know, well, I know it's a required course. Let's say it wasn't a required course. How many of you would have taken this course? One, two, yeah. You know, we want to know other things. How many of you want to know these? You all do it, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't be in college because what is college about? Getting to know things. So what I'd like you to do, just for a couple minutes, I'd like you to get out a piece of paper and I'm going to ask you a couple of questions that I want you to write down some responses. And these are all pretty simple. I don't think that they're going to require an awful lot of self scrutiny or anything like that. The first one is, what do you want to study? All of you are freshmen, so you haven't set a major yet. But I'm guessing that all of you have some general idea of something you might want to study. Some of you are probably here precisely to study this thing or that thing because Marist has a lot of, you know, pretty good programs. So all of you have some sort of idea. What's the one thing that you, right now, at this moment, are planning on majoring here, majoring in here at Marist College? So that's the first thing you need to do. Did everybody get that down? Okay. Now, I want you to imagine for the moment that you won the lottery. Originally somebody died and left you, you just stayed or something like that. You are never going to have to work again in your life. Let's say you're actually going to stay here at Marist College. I imagine you all like it here, right? It's not bad. Food's good. I can tell you that because you're in your cafeteria compared to other places I've been. So you're independently wealthy, but you're going to stay in the school. What would you study? Or maybe you wouldn't stay in the school. Maybe you'd go somewhere else. But let's say you were going to study something. What would you study? What field? This will take a little bit more time. Those are the questions you said. So would we change or study if we got all that money? You might, or you might not. So you're saying what we would want to study if we had? If you didn't have any worries about money or time or any of those sorts of things. You're actually sort of getting ahead to the question I was going to ask by sort of a show of hands. How many of you, if money was no concern whatsoever? Would study exactly the same thing as you're planning on studying? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. 16 out of, there's about 24 people here. So that's about 60%. That's unusual, actually. A lot of the places that I've taught before, most of the people that were there were going into fields. And why were they going into the fields? Because they figured those are where the jobs are, or they're profitable. And they're not particularly interested in this particular thing. But it's a means to an end, earning a good living. Usually not the case, say with art students, music students, because it's hard to make money with those, and very demanding. But a lot of students, yeah, that's what they do. Okay, so I have one other question for you. I want you to write down what you think you're too most indispensable for your life or how you live. Your two most indispensable pieces of technology are. Is that a pretty easy one for you to think of or not? Hard when you have to narrow things down, though, isn't it? That's why we don't say like the five top ones, that's easy to answer. And you don't say just the one, because then, you know, people constantly do that. Okay, so the third question I'm going to ask you about later on. First question, let's start with that. What are you guys actually studying? You're doing criminal justice, I know, right? So I'll just abbreviate that. Communication. Okay, we talked about that after class. Communication, what are you studying? I'm undecided, but I'm my goal for business or psychology. Okay, business, psychology, yeah. Biomed. What is it? Biomed. Biomed. How is that different then? Is that like a combination of biology and medicine? They have a pre-med major here, so it's a bio-med on a pre-health check. Okay, so you're like on the med, on the medical track, then, yeah. Graphic design. Graphic design, okay. You do that through an art department here, or do you do that through the fashion department? Art, it's really cool. Okay, so I know that I've got this, they have these interesting signs up there. Property of fashionology. I didn't even know there was such a thing as fashionology, but apparently there is. I know fashion, but didn't know it was anology, yeah. What are you going to study? I'm undecided. Okay, no idea, no yearning or anything? Did you have, did you have anything that if money was no object, you would actually study? Social work. Oh, that's interesting. That's what my sister does, yeah. And you don't make a lot of money in social work. That's one of the things I think holding people back, but there are some things that are very rewarding about it. Who else? What other, yeah. Education? Yeah, okay. Anybody else have any other ones that aren't up there? All right, those classes. I'm fashion merchandising. Fashionology is a store. It's like a student-run store. Okay, so it's not like a class or anything. I thought maybe it was a business class. You know, in food studies, they have, and I didn't know about this until I got involved with culinary people. They have this whole field called gastronomy, and it's like the study of the history of food and all that, and I was like, wow, why doesn't it just history of food? No, it's gastronomy. So I thought maybe fashionology was something like that, the types of fashion. So fashion, I'm just going to put down fashion. What else? What else are you able to study? What other fields are people going? Did anyone else have anything that's not up here for your majors? Who had anything for what they would do if there wasn't any, you know, money was an object? Who had anything else besides these that they'd study? Yeah. This is awful. I'd probably go to beauty school and do like makeup in here, but I don't want, I didn't want to stay like where I was, and I wanted to move, so I wanted like a, I wanted a natural major. What do we call it? There's a word for it. That's right. My mom, uh, cosmetology. My mom used to be a secretary in that place called the School of Aesthetics and Cosmetology when I was in high school. And so I'd go there and I'd do free air cuts and all that sort of stuff, and she was always trying to get the girls to, uh, she'd pay a little extra to cut off as much hair as possible because back then it was, you know, cool to have long hair. That's, that's probably, that's an E. Yeah. So I should know how to spell it. You know, another reason I should know why to, or how to spell it, it comes from a Greek word that actually means beauty and also the, the cosmos, right? Did anyone else have any other things they could pursue? Anyone be a musician or yeah, that's something you would pursue if money wasn't an object? Okay. Nobody had like things like art or music or Oh no. I would switch to elementary math. Okay. Education. That's, what, what are you majoring or planning? I'm a bio major. I want to be a pediatrician. Okay. Anyone have anything like, um, I think any other sciences that they would like to study, but they're not planning on studying or any of the humanities, anyone want to be a historian, write literature, make music, any of these sorts of things? Anyone want to go to culinary school? They're going to have a cook really well? Actually a lot more than that, but learn how to run a restaurant, learn how to break things down. Okay. Well, this is a good list to work with. Aristotle talks about, um, arts and skills, disciplines we call them, and how they developed over time. Um, how did they in fact develop? He gives you sort of a story and this tells us a little bit about what metaphysics is going to be because we're, we're concerned with what wisdom is. Wisdom and metaphysics are going to be connected. Metaphysics comes very, very late in the game. Um, and one of the things that you, you know, if you're taking an Aristotelian approach, you would do with things. We're going to talk a lot more about this next time. Is you ask the, the why question? Why are things the way they are? Why are things what they are? Um, why do we pursue them? And for each one of these, these arts or sciences or skills or techniques or whatever you want to call them, we can ask, what is the point of it? What, you know, and this may be different for you than what the point of the actual skill is. Um, somebody might want to become a doctor in part because they want to heal people. That's what the goal of medicine is, right? Or they might want to become a doctor because they, you know, saw, um, what's a medical show? I'm sort of blanking on things, CSI, but that's more forensic. What's another one? General Hospital? General Hospital? Yeah, so, uh, more scrubs. You know, they see scrubs and they say, yeah, that's the life for me. They're pretty miserable. I do too, but, um, I wouldn't want to live their life. Um, so you can ask remedies. What is, what is their point? Why do human beings do this sort of thing? And you might say just to make money or, you know, for some internal, you know, gratification lesson, for instance, you might become a chemistry, you might become a chemistry major because you really enjoy playing with test tubes. You know, um, I knew, I knew a kid in high school who used to steal all the chemistry equipment and, uh, he was, he was, he was really enterprising. I once saw him take a, uh, a leader beaker out by sucking in his stomach and then, you know, putting it under his sweatshirt and, you know, by the end of the semester, half the stuff was gone. Um, you know, what he was doing with it, I don't know. Um, he just seemed to like, yeah, I don't think he was cooking meth because this is back before that. Meth became popular in the nineties. This is back. If he was doing chemistry, he wasn't doing it for the reason that chemists actually do it, right? What, what do chemists actually get out of it? Why are we interested in chemistry? Well, it produces all sorts of great things for us, like pretty much everything in this room, including our bodies. They've all been modified by, by a lot of chemicals. Um, business. You can say, why, why do people go into business? I want to make tons of money. But if that's really your case, you shouldn't go to business school. You should probably just start a business. You have a better chance of making lots of money unless, you know, you're going to be a big executive or something like that. Maybe it grooms you for that. Um, but really, what is the point of a business? It's not just making money. Why do they give you that money? You have to give other people things in return. How do you have to give them? There's a catchphrase. Goods and goods and services. And if you're not doing that, you won't stay in business. Or if your goods and services aren't, aren't very good, compared to the competitors, you won't stay in business. Business school is about learning how to, how to manage that sort of stuff well, or how to market it, or how to finance it. Um, communications. Why do people study communications? You can go into a lot of, you know, communication and psychology. Those are two degrees that are very, very portable. Most of the people who get a psychology degree don't work in psychology. They work in some other field. Um, why is that? What, what does psychology also, another way communications provide the person who studies it? Understanding of what? Well, um, maybe critical thinking. Reasoning, certainly. Um, but something even more basic. What makes people tick? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was just saying, like how people think, like a psychology degree, help you to understand people better. Exactly. So you might actually be a good person for business if you've got a, a psych degree who really studied the, the topic. Um, it could have therapeutic purposes. You might be trying to heal somebody. Um, social work is related to psychology, apart because, you know, what social work actually is, is getting people resources, um, and helping them unscrew up their life for the most part. When you have a social worker involved, it's usually because somebody's really screwed things up or a whole bunch of people screwed things up. And, you know, it helps to know how they, they did it and why they did it in order to fix it. Um, what's the point of education to teach other people, to teach other people where your topic is all this other stuff, right? Education is kind of a funny field in that way. You can actually get a a doctorate degree in education, but in order to really be an educator, you have to know some subject really well besides education. Otherwise you've got nothing to teach anybody. But, you know, there are good ways to teach people and bad ways to teach people. I knew, um, when I was at Fayette Hill State University, um, one of the old school professors, his pedagogical method was to yell at his students and to slam things around. And he gave them a lot of work and then he would just yell at them. And I actually called security the first time that I was down the hall from him, because one of his students was raising his voice too. And I thought that there was like a fight breaking out. That's not good pedagogy, right? That's not good teaching. What did, you know, you've all had good teachers in the past. They soon, right? What did they do that helped you learn? What do you remember about them? They were probably nice, but that's not what makes you a good teacher. Okay, patience. So they did the same thing over and over again with you, right? Walked you through it. Anything else? Did they seem prepared for the class when they got there? Or did they just kind of make it up as they went a little far? I've known some people who do that, who literally don't know what they're going to say when they get into the room. Fashion. What's the point of fashion? There isn't going to. What's up? Well, everybody wears clothes. Yeah, we all do wear clothes. We don't have to wear fashion clothes, do we? You could all wear the same thing that I'm wearing. We're gonna have, this could be our uniform. You could all have a maroon. This is a maroon, right? Does this color work? Yeah. A maroon shirt, brown pants. You could all have vests like this. Maybe you guys don't have to wear ties. You know, we take it easy on you until you get your B.A. or B.S., right? Or B.P.S., I know some of you are doing B.P.S. degrees. So it's not just about clothes. It's about marketing. Well, that's more the business end of it. Yeah. It makes people feel better about themselves. Yeah, that's key. People buy clothes because they think the clothes look good. And, you know, a lot of that's subjective. And, you know, what looks good for you might not look good for me. Back when I remember my mom used to have lots of clothes. And there was this book that came out that was really influential in the 1980s for fashion. And it divided people into four seasons. You might be a spring or a summer or a fall. And you have to figure out which one you are. Because if you're a summer, I forget how many this worked. You have to wear these colors. And if you're fall, wear these colors. Well, what was going on there? Yeah, it sounds kind of complicated, doesn't it? Very complicated. And you don't understand what that was. Yeah. I didn't understand it myself either. And she tried to explain it to me. Well, what was the point behind it? What was the end? The purpose? It was to have people look good. And why do people want to look good? Because then, like you said, they feel good. We enjoy things. We get pleasure out of things that look good. That's aesthetics. Cosmetology. Makeup. Why do people wear makeup? Just because it's part of the uniform and you have to wear it? No, because people want things to look nice. Why do we care about, look at this classroom? This is not a particularly aesthetically pleasing classroom, but it's not bad either. The doors at least are painted. The walls are painted. I've taught in places where that's not the case. And those things affect people, the values of our lives. But how our life has lived out, whether it's felt to be a good life or not, depends in part on those things. There's some legitimate value to it. Musicians produce things that we like to hear. Cooks produce things we like to eat. You could just eat oatmeal all the time and take pills, and you'd probably be okay. If you didn't take the pills, you'd get scurvy. There was actually a girl when I was in graduate school down in Southern Illinois. She got scurvy. She tried living on potatoes to save money. So all she ate was potatoes for like two months, but she got scurvy. I think it's scurvy. Well, if you have vitamin C deficiency, which is very hard for us to have in this society because everything's got vitamin C loaded into it, right? But all you eat is potatoes. There's no vitamin C in potatoes. They get it at C because they didn't have any vitamin C to consume. So all of these things, all these arts, they all developed at one point in time to meet some need, to satisfy something. Education, you know, 150 years ago, you couldn't specialize in education. Business, you know, we only have MBAs and we can actually get a PhD in business. Until recently, in Europe, you couldn't get an MBA because they felt that that's not something you can actually teach. You have to learn that on the job. Each one of these things developed as a discipline in time, and they didn't all develop at once. The world that we live in is the product of a lot of different things happening over and over and over again, progress being made. That's what Aristotle's talking about in the first part of the metaphysics. He talks about a couple different motives for why people develop arts or skills. And one of these, and you have to do this, is what he called the necessary. Medicine is useful, keeps you alive. Most likely, you know, for any given human population nowadays, if you didn't have modern medicine, half you would be dead by now. I know I certainly would. We didn't have all the things that modern medicine provides us. You'd have died in some epidemic, or when you broke your arm, you would have gotten septic or something like that. You wouldn't guess why they're dying of scurvy in part because they didn't know, right? Yeah. And people were dying of scurvy just 200 years ago. What else are absolutely necessary arts or skills? Making pottery. That's one of the first skills that develops. Agriculture. Nobody's farming. Then where are we going to get our food? What's the other alternative? It's in gathering. Any of you want to go out in the woods and look for berries and hunt squirrels? Sounds kind of romantic, you know, when you're involved in a row and stuff like that. But when you actually have to do it, it's not fun, especially when you don't know what you're doing. There's actually a great book and movie, very controversial, called Into the Wild, have any of you ever seen that? Yeah. I saw that recently. I'm thinking about writing or something about it. Because my reaction was, god, thank you, man. A lot of other people were like, oh, yeah, he's this hero. What are other necessary arts that we end up pursuing? Well, you know, we have food, agriculture, we have storing things, medicine. What else do we need? Architecture. Yeah, at least building houses and not architecture necessarily and building the Washington Bonds. Construction, I guess. House building, you know, making clothing. Somebody had to actually figure out how to weave this stuff. Do either that or you're going to wear bark. Or animal scares. Some people do. You know, not like oak bark or stuff like that, but some people do wear bark. And then once we get past the necessary and useful, and these things start to make our lives better. This is a sort of history of human progress. Then we get to arts that give. Now it's no longer just a matter of having clothing. Now it's a matter of having good-looking clothing. Now it's no longer a matter of just having food to eat and learning how to cook it. If you put the meat on the fire, it's easier to digest. That's sort of necessary stuff. Now we start thinking about how do I make this actually taste good? How do I please people? How do I do things that are pleasant? And those produce a lot of other good things. And that makes our lives better yet. And this isn't, again, a story of human progress. And those who can do this are more highly regarded, Aristotle says, than those who just supply the necessities or do things that are merely useful. They're seen as being closer to wisdom. Eventually, what all this offers us is through this, we have vision. We are able to take it easy. We don't have to work as hard. We have surpluses. We have resources. Maybe not everybody in a society. As a matter of fact, in ancient societies, they were all slave societies. Just about every single society that developed has nothing gathering enslaved somebody. They may not have called them slaves, but most of them have that. And that was the way it was for quite a long time. And even when we had industrial society, did everybody share equally and the benefits of it? No, and they still don't even completely today. All things are pretty good here, historically speaking, compared to when you could have died of scurvy. We can multiply instances, and I want to get through this. We have leisure. What does leisure offer you the possibility to do? You could just take it easy. Enjoy yourself. Is that the kind of action or response that continues human progress? Some people will do that. Maybe even most people will do that. Societies in which some people say, now I'm actually free to, I just called leisure too, didn't I? Societies where some people start to say, you know, I don't have to work for a living. I'd really like to study this. I've always wanted to learn about this. There are some things that are intrinsically, there are some things that people study, not because they're going to get something out of it, but because they want to know about that, because the object itself draws them in. So if you actually do enjoy mathematics and you start making progress in that, when I can understand that, because when I was an undergraduate, I was both a philosophy major and a math major, and I ended up going to graduate school for philosophy. But I understand the allure of these elegant, beautiful, complex problems, concepts, all these sort of things, that once you put in enough time, they start to sort of unpack themselves for you. Just like any of you that are, did any of you play music? Those of you that are musicians, you know that more time that you put in with that, doing boring things like scales and all that, suddenly things open up for you, and you see things, or rather you hear things, and you feel things, that you didn't before, and you come to understand them. Those are things that are intrinsically worthwhile. Given the chance to pursue them, people do. What often keeps them from being able to do that is being occupied with this stuff. Now, Aristotle talks about metaphysics in this life. Metaphysics is the one that's sort of at the top of the scale. So let's, for the rest of the period, let's talk about what is this metaphysics stuff, or discipline. I mean, in our society, like I put it out in another lecture, you know, some people think metaphysics is crystals, or past lives, or stuff like that. And that is a certain type of metaphysics, but that's not philosophical metaphysics. That's just exploring the occult or things like that. Actually though, before I go into this, I did ask you that second question, the third question. So what are the most important pieces of technology? So the internet and the phone? That's interesting that you said the internet, because that is technology. And that's not yours, you don't own the internet, but you certainly make use of it. Yeah, I think about all the things that had to take place before the internet could come up. And then your phone, yeah. These things are awfully handy, aren't they? When I came here, it's a Marist one day, and I forgot my... This is a day that I was here for the whole day. I forgot my phone at home. This has all my email stuff on it. It's how I access half of my social networks. Of course, I use it to call people as well. Take pictures, store data. When you leave something like this behind, you feel kind of naked, don't you? It's almost like leaving for men this behind. And have you ever misplaced your wallet? That is scary, isn't it? This is also a piece of technology, though. The reason why I asked you this question about technology is I imagine that most of you probably said things like this, right? How many of you actually said your phone is your most important piece of... Every single one of you? Yeah. But this is technology, too. Anything that human beings have made through art or craft or skill, Greek techné, that's where we get technology from, is technology. This is technology. This is a very complicated technology. It ties in with an entire network. Even this business card, you have technology surrounding yourself. It's not just electronic devices. You're wearing technology. All of this stuff was produced through these massive supply chains. This doesn't grow on trees, right? Or you don't find this in the wild. This is, I think, a cotton shirt. So somebody actually had to pick the cotton and get all the seeds out, and then turn it into cloth, and then the cloth had to go to the factory where it was actually sewn, and then I had to come through the supply chain over here where I could buy it in the store, and now I'm wearing it. This is all technology. You are constantly surrounded by technology that came from all of these arts. Now, with all of these arts, they all have a certain resciences. They all have a certain circumscribed thing that they're looking at. If you're looking at things from a business perspective, you're leaving some things out, right? You ignore certain things. If you're looking at things from a chemical perspective, you leave some things out. If you're a psychologist looking at people's emotions, you may look at them in a very different way than a neurologist watching grain states. If you're an artist, you look at paints in a very different way than a chemist does, right? In all these cases, these arts and sciences are telling you questions about what and why. What things are, why they are the way they are, why they are that thing. Metaphysics is the science or the art, however you want to put it, that studies all of it. And here's where we make a sort of shift. Metaphysics is about being everything around you, yourself included, your thoughts, everything you will ever encounter in your existence. Everything you're not encountering in your existence is being, being of one form or another. Here's a human being. Here's another one. There's another one. We have inanimate beings, right? We have other inanimate beings. We have beings that you can't see, like the thoughts in your head. They have existence, right? Your memories. Okay, you might, you know, get very technical and say, well, my memories existed, my brain, my brain is a bunch of neurons. Okay, that's a kind of being. Your experience of it isn't, though. It's not something corporeal necessarily, but it has being. The words that I'm speaking have being. Metaphysics is not confined to studying just one kind of being, or studying being in one particular way. It's looking at being, as another physician later on said, being as such. That's a hard concept to wrap your head around. What do all these things that you experience, some of them you don't even experience you just think of, like numbers, what do all of them have in common? That's what metaphysics studies. And one of the things that metaphysics does is it looks at what we call, and this is a concept you're familiar with, let's take a real simple instance. So I've got this, what do we call these? Cup jackets, collars. There's a word for it. Oh, sleeve, good, okay. What just happened? The cup, sleeve fell because I dropped it. Is that the whole story? Gravity pulled it down. An event take took place. We can look at that and we can say what are the causes? Of these sorts of things. Let's think about another thing. I'm going to pass this around later on. This is one of my favorite books. And I don't just mean favorite in the sense that I really like this particular book in general and I could buy another copy of it. Like, I like Shakespeare's Hamlet and it doesn't matter whether you give me one that's got gold leaf or on an iPhone or something like that, I like Shakespeare's Hamlet. This is actually a book that has this particular object I really like. This is one of the ones I read when I actually had a little time to do so. And one of the reasons I like it is I can get something out of it that a lot of people can't and I saved this from destruction when they were throwing it out. The library was actually getting rid of this. In part because very few people can read this anymore. It's Grimm's Fairy Tales. And it's in German. And I'm going to pass it around. You can see it's in the old German script that most people don't read it anymore because the Nazis kind of screwed it off for everyone, right? The Nazis used this script so after that they didn't teach German kids how to read it anymore or how to write it. It's called The Fractur. Now, how did this come to be? You can ask that in a lot of different ways. Think about this physical object. You can ask a lot of questions about this when you ask. First of all, what do we know about this? What can you tell me? It's a book. It's a book, right. So it has a certain shape or structure or form, right? A book is different than say an iPhone. Can you open up an iPhone? Well, you can take the cover off. The book, you can actually open and go through it as a particular structure, a shape to it, right? Remember when I said books were before they were this sort of thing? This is what we call Lebellum. What were they? Scrolls, right. They had a different form, a different shape. But you notice it had the same function, didn't it? What is this made of? Yeah, for the most part, I think the, I don't know, I mean, I guess the outside cover part is a different kind of paper, I think. Oh, there's some other things, ink, glue, you know, whatever else is in books. I don't know, I'm not a bookmaker. That's a different question though. What is it made of? Then what is its shape or form? What else can you ask about it? How did this come to be, this particular physical object? What sort of processes had to take place? Yeah, now that applies to all of Grim's fairy tales. What about this particular object, this physical object? You know, it's made out of some stuff. Can you just take a bunch of paper, put it out there, and say, here's your book. Yeah, there's a publisher, and the publisher does a bunch of stuff to it, right? They originally, the pages are not like this. They're these long things, and they stamp it with a printing press. Nowadays, these laser printers are a clean process, but we don't say efficient. Yeah, but it's the same idea that you take the paper and you change it in some way, and then you put it all together. I think this book is actually not just glued, but sewn. You can actually see that when you look at this older books. This is why older books tend to last a long time. They're actually sewn into the cover. So somebody actually had to make this object. And then you can also ask, what's the point of this? Why does this object exist? You can say it exists in part because it's made of paper and all that. It exists because it's in this shape. It exists because somebody actually took the time to fabricate it. Why did they do that? What's the point of a book? Some people think the point of a book is to sit on the shelf. Every generation, there's a lot of people who buy lots of books and they put them on the shelf, and they think this is going to make me smart. Because now I own the knowledge in this book. Do you really own the knowledge in the book? No, you read it. There you go. Not until you read it. The purpose of the book is reading. There might be other purposes to give pleasure. Grimm actually, or the Grimm brothers, do you know what one of their reasons for writing this book was? Anybody a student of Germanic languages or anything like that? These are all fairy tales and household tales, house marriage. And these are stories that have been told orally by lots of people for generations. And because of the industrial society, the Grimm's realized, hey, the people who are telling these stories, they're going to die out. And they're not going to pass these stories on. These are some really great stories. So we had better get with these people and write these stories down. And that's exactly what they did. And a lot of the things that you see coming from, say, Disney, are Grimm's tales with some of the gory parts taken out. You know, like Cinderella, for example. This may gross you out a little bit. In the real story, Cinderella's sisters don't just have a bad time. They actually, like, you know, try to cut their heels off so they can fit into the last slipper. Grimm's world is a lot bloodier than ours. It's nice. It's, in some ways, it's more fitting, you know. They were really mean to her, the heart thing. Grimm's world is a world of rough and ready justice, we might say. But for any object, you can think of it for this. I don't just mean this cup. I mean this coffee. You can ask about its being. You can ask about human beings. Do they have a purpose? You know what they're made of, you know. You know how they come to be, right? Because you all had health class and they taught you sex ed, right? Even if you didn't have that, you heard it on the playground, I'm sure. Or Mom would have had explained it. You know what the shape of human being is, what the form of human being is. You recognize that every day when you look in the mirror, if you quit recognizing it, you'll have a awful start. Is there a purpose to human beings? This is another question we can ask. We're not going to answer that one this way. We're going to answer it. So these causes, Aristotle talks about them in four ways, the four causes. And he's got special terms for these and I would like you to learn these terms. And you're going to want to practice with this, to think about this a lot. And I created a handout that'll help you with this. There's, for any given thing, when you ask what it is, you're asking in part, what is its essence? What is its form? What is it that makes it what it is? So if I say human being, and I want you to point out a human being, all of you can do that really quickly, right? Any person in this class. What do they all have in common? What is their form? There's a couple ways we can look at this. You don't have to answer that right now. I mean, one would be the shape, right? If somebody comes in here and they've got tentacles, they might not be a human being. Somebody comes in and they've got 18 eyes, or spider legs, or something like that. I mean, they could be a superhero, or a super villain, perhaps, right? We have these imaginary things, but in real life, we would be tempted to say they're not a human being. Somebody comes in and they've got, they're on all fours, and they're hairy, and they have a long snout, and lots of teeth, and they bark. Is that a human being? Probably a werewolf. Could be. Probably just a dog, but it could be a werewolf. Could be a human being dressed up in a strange costume. So there are certain things. The thing has what we call a formal cause. It has a particular structure. Why is this a book? And I mean, this wouldn't work because it's this coffee. Why is this a book? And this is not a book. This is made of paper. This is made of paper. This has a particular structure, right? It's things put together in a certain way. Think about your human body. Or think about, well, let's not gross you out, actually. Think about cows instead. All right? You guys like hamburgers? I love hamburgers myself. You are eating a piece of the cow and you do hamburger, right? One reason a lot of people don't like to eat hamburgers because they think of the poor cow. They say, oh, you know. What's that? So, you have a cow. I mean, yeah, I am not a big animal rights person. I'm not a vegetarian. I like to eat things that lived at one time. So, you take a cow. How does it become a hamburger? Well, you cut it into a bunch of pieces. And some of those we throw away or we give the dogs, you know, like the bones. Or actually cooks roast those to make those into soup. And then we take parts of the meat. And is the meat still the cow? Yeah, but the meat doesn't have the structure of the cow. The meat's just meat. Same thing with, you know, a dead person. Their corpse is no longer animate. It's lost something that made all those organs and bones and all that hold together. And, you know, it's not going to do anything pretty soon. You can talk about what things are made of, though, as their material cause. That's why they are the way they are. Think about meat again. Hopefully, none of you have ever had bad meat, right? But, you know, if meat goes bad, it's not really the same thing. It's material structure has broken down or has changed. Would a book like this made out of what could substitute for paper? Some sort of plastic, right? It would still have the same formal structure. Let's say it has all the letters. I should pass this right to you guys to take a look at this. I brought it in specifically so you guys could, you know, actually look at it and think about these causes. It would have a different material cause, though, wouldn't it? Let's say we can actually, you know, in a science fiction world make a human being. Exactly like, say, Mr. Kuhn, a replicant of some sort. We'll make him out of non-human things, you know, make him out of plastics and rubber and who knows what else. But he has exactly the same characteristics as Mr. Kuhn. It still wouldn't be exactly the same thing, wouldn't it? Because it wouldn't have the same manner. They would have a different material cause. What else? We can talk about what Aristotle calls the efficient cause, that which makes the thing come to be. And when some efficient causes are sort of unintelligent, right? When I dropped the sleeve, did gravity think, oh crap, I got to get on this? Girl, let me pull this thing down. Gravity is not an intelligent cause. But it is an efficient cause. It makes things happen. When there is some sort of intelligence at work that we can discern, when there's some sort of purpose, then we have what we call a final cause. Aristotle says, he might be right about this or he might be wrong. But this is the thought I want you to try on for a while. If we take all four of these and we understand them thoroughly, we understand them adequately, we understand what a thing really is. Much more than just saying, ah, that's a book. If you know that the purpose is to be read, a bookmaker, structure of a book, paper and glue and stuff like that, now you actually know a lot more about that object. Let's think about this in a few other cases. And then we're going to do a lot more of that next class. A sickness, a disease. What is it that a physician actually studies when they're trying to figure out what's going on? Let's say a virus. You're all familiar with viruses, right? We've all had them. Had enough basic biology to know that a virus is different than a bacteria. What is a virus actually? What is a virus? It's something that makes you sick, right? Does it want to make you sick? Viruses don't have wands, actually. They do have the final cause of it. Do you know how a virus actually does make you sick? It's different than bacteria. Viruses go inside your cells. They're really, really tiny. As a matter of fact, there's debate about whether they're even alive or dead. Don't they try to change like the DNA in your each soul cell? Like I said, they affect. Exactly. They go inside the cell and they inject a bit of their DNA into your DNA or a dog's DNA or whatever, you know, pig's DNA. And what does that do, then? Let's develop that cell. It screws up the cell, but it screws it up in a very distinctive way. What is the... Why does the virus actually do that? They use the cells reproduced, so it spreads. Say that again? The cells reproduce to the virus. The cells reproduce what? They don't reproduce themselves. What are they? Like copies of themselves. Copies of what? That virus. Exactly. Cells normally make copies of themselves, right? The virus comes in and it takes over the code and it makes hundreds of new viruses.