 Now I want to talk about the divisions of philosophy. And so let's begin with the term philosophy, which is a compound of two Greek words, Thelos and Sophia. And Thelos means something like being a friend or a lover of something. And Sophia just means wisdom. And so what philosophy is, is who philosophers are, are people who are friends of the wise, or they're people who love wisdom, and they try to cultivate wisdom. Now notice that they are not just selfish. That is, they are not people that claim to be wise. There's a whole other group of people who say, we are the wise people, like the seven sages or this office who say, we've actually got wisdom. Philosophers say, we don't actually have wisdom. We just really like wisdom. In fact, we love wisdom. We have a desire for wisdom, even an erotic desire for wisdom. It's the most important thing to us. We care about it more than we care about riches or power or things like that. We want wisdom instead of those other things. Or we think that wisdom is the key to getting those other things that people think to be good. Now, we can divide philosophy into, we create various divisions of philosophy. And essentially what we do is divide them into different kinds of sciences. So over here, I've given you Aristotle's classical division of philosophy. His major division is between, on the one hand, theoretical philosophy and on the other hand, practical philosophy. So Aristotle invented the distinction between theory and practice. That distinction had not been made prior to him and he made this distinction and made it a distinction within the field of philosophy. Some things are theoretical, other things are practical. Theoretical sciences include theology or the study of the gods, mathematics or the study of mathematical entities, natural science, the study of natural things. Practical science includes things like ethics, economics, and politics. And the definition of these has to do with the ends for the sake of which those sciences are pursued. Theoretical science is pursued for no other reason than or needs to be pursued for no other reason than that it produces knowledge itself. So I can want to learn about God or want to learn about natural things and I don't need to be able to do anything practical with that knowledge. That knowledge just is valuable to have in and of itself according to Aristotle. Whereas practical sciences are undertaken for the sake, we try to acquire those kinds of knowledge for the sake of doing or producing something. So in the case of ethics, let's say that the purpose of ethics is learning how to live well or to be happy or to be virtuous or to get pleasure or something like that. Well, we don't want to just know about what pleasure is. We want to enjoy pleasure. We don't just want to know what happiness is. We actually want to live well. And economics, again, we don't just want to have a general theory about wealth and poverty. We want to have much substance, have a growing economy, have riches and so forth. And politics, we don't want to just have a theory of law and order, we actually want to have a well-ordered society and so forth. So theoretical and practical sciences are undertaken for different reasons. And so they are different kinds of science in his view. Now, technically he recognizes another classification of science. You might either think of it as a subdivision of practical science or on its own called productive science. And that includes all sciences which are undertaken not just for the sake of the knowledge itself and not just for the sake of doing something but for the sake of producing something. For example, architecture, we learn as a science for the sake of producing shelters from weather and intruders. And medicine is a productive science. We pursue it in order to learn how to improve health and reduce disease. And so we can have a technical distinction between practical and productive sciences because practical sciences don't necessarily try to produce anything. They try to change the way, what we do and how we act whereas we in theory have a different classification of things that we make or produce. Yeah. Did Aristotle, did he set theoretical science and practical sciences two different things or is it that practical science is an applied version of theoretical science? Well, they interrelate so there are ethics needs for example to borrow principles from natural science because for example, if we're gonna make an argument that what we should be doing as humans is trying to promote virtue or something that we need to have a theory about human nature and if we're gonna have a theory about human nature we need to study what humans are as natural beings and things like that. So they interrelate but they are not, they are different, they are totally different first of all on the basis of their ends. But they are not just applied, ethics is not just applied theology or something like that. These are actually different domains with different objects and so on. So they are different on every level, every causal aspect of them is different but the most important difference is the ends for the sake of which the knowledge is valuable, is considered valuable. Yeah. Would you say that engineering or industry studies are like belong to productive science? Yeah, we would include those in productive science. That would be sort of like architecture. Go ahead. And the different questions so like in practical science after we have knowledge how do we put them into practice? What's that for? Well for example if we learn by studying ethics that justice requires repaying our debts then we repay our debt and if it requires not stealing then we don't actually take money from our roommates first while they're not looking, I think like that. Now those are very trivial examples of course but we do try to learn things about personal conduct and behavior and managing households and resources and organizing society so that we can do things differently and ultimately so we can live better. Because I learned in a class in comp that comp says that the bridge between the rest of science and practical science is that the only argument or are there also different opinions on that? Well there are different kinds of judgments made according to Aristotle in theoretical science and practical science and there are different standards of accuracy and precision that are required. So in mathematics you have extremely precise requirements and we would expect a precise demonstration of a mathematical proof whereas in ethics when we're talking about how a human should behave in a given situation we cannot give something like a strict mathematical proof. We still make judgments such and such as a good thing or a bad thing or should be pursued or should be fled but we have different standards for how that's proven what kind of evidence is brought to bear on it and so on. And so we can get into details about that later. Now but that's division, I give you as a kind of classical division of philosophy but it's not the standard one that Hellenistic philosophers pursue. They have a kind of simplified scheme where philosophy is divided into three parts. Logic, physics and ethics. And in Greek the relevant terms are logos, physicists and ethos. Now so let's start with logic. The Greek word logos literally means reason. But it also means things like word, argument, ratio, formula, speech. So it means a lot of different things and the field of logic in a way relates to all of these. The easiest way to summarize it is that logic has to do with how we reason. Including how we use language and how all of our different uses of language relate to reasoning, how we get definitions and so forth, how we make inferences, what we would call philosophy of language, linguistics, semantics, syntax, all of this is included within the ancient concept of logic, how we make proofs, what standards we have in different sciences. As I just said we have different standards in theoretical sciences than we do in practical sciences. That's a logical matter according to the ancient classification. What the relationship is between sensation and perception and experience and arts, crafts, techniques, sciences, wisdom, insights, intuition, wisdom and so forth. Also dialectical methods, rhetorical methods, criticism, poetics, all of this can be encompassed under ancient logic. Now, the second division, physics in Greek, the word is physicists. Or do we have any physics majors here? Okay, good, we don't have to worry about any of those kind of people. But because I always trick physicists, because you gotta find somebody you know who's a physicist and ask them what does the word physics mean? Okay, and I have never found a physics major at this great university. They can answer that question. And the answer is that it means nature. What physics is about is nature. First of all, what is nature in general, but before trying to give a definition of that, it includes an examination of, for example, matter, space, time, elements or atoms, motion. The nature of the cosmos is an infinite or finite. If it's finite, then what shape does it have? Is the, what shape does the earth have? The nature of the stars, the sun and the moon, meteorological things like rainfall, clouds, winds, earthquakes, volcanoes, plants and animals. And of course humans in a way are natural things. Since humans are animals, humans are even kinds of plants. So humans are natural things in a way. For most of the Hellenistic schools, the gods are also treated under physics because the gods are considered to be natural entities, not some kind of supernatural entity. And so physics deals with all of those kinds of, all of those kinds of topics. The last topic, ethics, Greek word is ethos, which means something like character. And it's related to a term that means habit. And ethics really has to do with your personal character and your personal habits. But it's in general a theory of personal conduct, virtues and excellences like temperance, self-control, courage, wisdom, piety. I think I'm missing a couple. But also things like how you relate to your family, how you manage a household, how you manage resources in general. So economics, leadership, politics, constitutional, constitution building and framing, legislation, judicial judgment. And in general, happiness, prosperity and success. Trying to come up with a theory about what those things are and how we can attain them. What the purpose of human life is, what the meaning of living is, why we should, first of all, whether we should go on trying to live and then if so, why, those kinds of questions. So all of the schools of Hellenistic philosophy have views in each of these domains. And the Hellenistic philosophical school is an institution that has got well-developed theories in each one of these domains. Okay, so any questions about that generally before I start giving an overview of what their positions are in each of these domains? Yeah? So in order to fall on your logic or ethics? Ethics, basically. But again, as in the case of the interpenetration of theoretical and practical science for Aristotle, there is a logical aspect of ethics. So of emotion. And there's also, by the way, a physical aspect of emotion. Okay, so suppose I was to define anger as boiling of blood in the region of the heart as Aristotle does, or as firing of C4 fibers in some hemisphere of the brain, as we might do now. That would be like a physical definition of anger, a very reductionist or a limitist one. But there is a physical component to anger, right? And this is clear because it affects our bodies and you might turn red and it might make your heart race and things like that. So there's a physical aspect to it. But there's also a kind of cognitive aspect to it. So suppose we define anger as a burning desire to repay pain for a perceived slight or something like that. That also happens to be Aristotle's other definition of anger. Okay, well, that's a kind of cognitive logical definition of anger, of a sort of thought process that corresponds to being angry. And it's a definition. And so what is a definition and what are the standards of definition and how do we come up with those? And why isn't the physical definition enough? Why do we also need this cognitive definition? Or can we get rid of the cognitive definition and just focus on the physical part? We can get rid of the physical part and that's really irrelevant. We focus on the cognitive part. So this is not meant to say that these are isolated spheres. In fact, they all constantly interpenetrate into one thing. And the Stoics have a bunch of metaphors to describe how this works. So they say things like, well, logic is the stone walls around a garden and physics are the plants and the trees that are growing within it and ethics are the fruits on those trees. Or again, they say that logic are the bones and sinews of the animal while physics is the overall operation of these parts and ethics is the soul of it. And another one that I can't quite figure out why they say this, they compare it to an egg where logic is the outer shell of the egg and physics is the white part of it and ethics is the yolk. Somebody could do that for a research paper trying to figure out what the hell that analogy means. I don't know, but the point of these is that they all interrelate. But there is a question as to what order they should be studied in and there's a big debate as it were a metaphilosophical debate about which one should we study first. So some people think, well, we should study logic first because if the people can't reason and understand what definitions are and so forth then they're not gonna be able to learn anything else about philosophy. But physics oriented people will say we need to study physics first because if we don't know what reality is then we wouldn't be able to figure out how we can reason about it. And then other people say, no, you got to teach ethics first because if these people don't have ethics you shouldn't even let them out of the classroom onto the streets, you know. How do you know they're not gonna be bad people? And so there's different positions on how those should be studied and in what order and what is necessary to understand the other things and there were developed pedagogies that attempted to present the schools in various ways. The Stoics had defenders of all three, all permutations of what order they should be studying today. Yeah. Could you just repeat what ethos means? Well, it technically means character or habit really. It's a sort of habit that you, habits that you have. And really what we're concerned with in ethics is do you have habits like you're a self-controlled person or you're a courageous person or are you an indulgent person and a cowardly person? Those are those kind of things, yeah. So the Stoics had proponents of all three, what about the other schools? Well, all schools have proponents of all three. I mean these are just, you need to have some position on each of those to be a school really. You need some concept of reality, some idea about how we reason about it and then some views about the end for humans. It's just that with the Epicureans, the view laid out by the founder of the school Epicurus was not really modified. They thought, yes, that's the order that it should be studied in, essentially logic, physics and ethics. And but they have a totally different pedagogical theory about how people learn and how instruction works and what kinds of texts should be written to support that. So really they have a totally different view about education and that's why, and so they still, there's still a lot of developments within the school but they don't, there aren't internal disputes about the order. So I mean card carrying Stoics will have honest to goodness disputes about which of these should be studied and in what order, yeah. So is the difference between logic and physics, I know this is much later, but it's kind of like the difference between the rationalists and the empiricists? No, the difference is that one studies reason and the other studies nature and those are totally different things. They're just different objects entirely. Because I thought that was kind of similar to that difference. No, I mean, first of all, these are anachronistic terms, rationalists and pure assistants and so forth. These are terms of early modern philosophy which we can relate to these ancient philosophical schools with their much later developments but both rationalism and empiricism in the ancient sense would be theories of logic. They're theories about how we come to know things. Empiricism, we come to know things only through our sensations and perceptions of them. Rationalism, we come to know them through modules and processes in our own minds. And so those are logical theories in the ancient sense. They're alternative in competing theories of logic. Yeah. I want to go back. So what's the definition of wisdom? Well, different philosophers have different definitions of wisdom. Aristotle's definition is that it's a combination of scientific knowledge and intellect or insight. But we're gonna be looking at a lot of different definitions of it. Do they agree on whether wisdom is useful or useless? Does who agree? Hellenistic philosophers? Well, the way the question's put is a bit awkward because I mean, everybody thinks it's useful. In fact, they all basically think it's an end. It's the reason you should do all other things. So in most of these views, in the Stoic view, for example, it's co-extensive with happiness itself. What it means to be prosperous, happy or successful is to be wise, period. And the only people that are happy, successful and prosperous are the wise. And everybody else is miserable and horrible and stupid and so forth, okay? Now, there's other less stringent views than that, like ones where it's actually possible to be relatively wise or to be wise in some respects and not in others. But maybe the one thing that philosophers tend to agree on is that, yes, wisdom is a good thing and it's an end. They have total disagreements on what wisdom is, however. Okay, so that's really, in a way, that's something we're gonna be exploring in all of the texts throughout the class. So it would not be easy to give a brief answer to that. Yeah? Do the Stoics believe that all three were complementary to each other or could there be inherent contradictions? For the Stoics, there cannot possibly be any contradictions. They have a systematic philosophy. It's all interlocking. Every part of it has to be true. If any one part turns out not to work, then the whole system falls apart. And in general, in any given school, needs a consistent theory with all three since they interpenetrate and interoperate as I said. So if somebody modifies a view, for example, in logic or physics, then that would probably necessitate modifications in the other areas. Like a development within Stoicism that says early Stoics say there aren't parts of the souls, the parts of the souls, the soul is a unity and some later Stoics said, no, there's actually an irrational and irrational part of the soul and these parts are different. Well, that required developing different theories about logic and about ethics and about theory of emotions, actually. So, but within any school, it has to be consistent. If your logic wasn't consistent with your physics, then you don't have a school. You don't have a coherent philosophy. So coherence is the first most important thing.