 Let me begin with the first shocking revelation, Aristotle probably didn't have a beard. Despite the famous image of him with a big bushy chin beaver, the lips of which a hipster would die for, he was described by ancient biographer Diogenes Laertes as having, quote, thin legs and small eyes, he wore fashionable clothes and rings on his fingers and he was shaved. Now, maybe the bus maker was portraying the philosopher he imagined him to be. Why sage philosophers were supposed to have a beard, right? Or maybe Diogenes Laertes embellished. His biography is to be taken with a truck of salt at the best of times, but then why would he say that Aristotle shaved? Because, as was the case with the other philosophers in the biography, philosophies wore beards, right? It is entirely possible he looked more like this than this. Aristotle was born to a well connected father and a wealthy mother in Stagari to the north of Greece in 384 BCE, 15 years after the execution of Socrates. He moved to Athens in 367 BCE and became part of Plato's circle. He received teaching at Plato's academy, though it wasn't the formal education we might think of these days. For the next 20 years, he lived in Athens, arguing, learning and teaching until Plato's death in 347 BCE. He travelled around the region before being called by Philip II, King of Macedonia, to tutor his son, a young whippersnapper who would soon grow up to be Alexander the Great. In 335 BCE, the wisest man in the land left the side of the most powerful man in the land to set up his own school, the Lyceum. Eventually, when Aristotle had been poisoned and anti-Macedonian sentiment was at full height, Aristotle left Athens again, retiring to his mother's estate at Chalicis at the island of Webuia. According to our aforementioned paragraph, Aristotle wrote over 150 works containing over 550 books, of which only 30 were the short ones survived today. And these are likely the rewrites, if not edits, of a man called Andronicus, who got hold of them over 200 years later. These are the dry esoteric works. They were perhaps guides of fellow tutors, perhaps jottings of thought on the fly, perhaps research notes, or as is a popular idea, they were lecture notes taken either by him to be used in tuition or perhaps even by his students during tuition. His works, apparently, were much more poetic, publicly aimed, and beautifully stylish, but these exoteric works have been lost to us. One thing lost when people consider a philosopher's works is time and place. Aristotle was raised in post-war Greece and tutored in the post-war Athens, where many of his teachers, including Plato, had witnessed and been part of the most brutal of conflicts. These were followed by political oppression, first by the Spartans and then the regime that followed, regime that put the great Socrates to death. He himself had been parted to and adviser to another tyrant, Alexander, whose conquests and maya today were pretty much detested at the time outside Macedonia. Unlike the war-born philosophy of Plato in his republic, Aristotle became a man of empiricism. He was influenced by Plato, that's certain, both praising and criticising him, but his direction of travel was quite different. As the famous painting shows, Plato looked up, out, at all the wordliness of forms, while Aristotle looked down at the earth and the material. This was the source of his logic. It was not an abstract that exists beyond reality, but a description of what he saw, but Aristotle's system is kind of a strange one. I've mentioned that the works we have were edited if not rewritten, and we lost his more exoteric material. But this was a process intended, it would seem, to give a balanced account of Aristotle's work. And it presents works from throughout his life that while ordered in one sense are fluid and flexible, or aporetic as it's sometimes called in another. Aristotle basically was a puzzle solver and saw puzzle solving as a philosopher's job. He may have simply gone from one puzzle to the next to the next without an overall vision and sometimes, as in metaphysics, that's what he looks like. But some of his works are more solid and structured, such as the prior analytics. His work flits from aporetic to structured dogma and back again. Certainly the statement Aristotle was aporetic is both true and false. Aristotle divides his knowledge into chunks. It was an analytical type of investigation that works not unlike modern science, placing items within groups, reducing them into sections and segments and making it simpler to look at. Alexander conquered the known world piece by piece, tactic by tactic, country by country. And so did Aristotle's mind, in a way. He wanted to systematise each section of knowledge within a set of guiding rules, as had geometry been systematised previously. And this meant marking things, ordering things, putting things in boxes, saying this is this and that is that and in so doing creating abstract, timeless labels. And this is from this that he absorbed the notion of logic, of deduction, of inductive reasoning, of how labels can be placed and how they cannot. And this is where adaptations of the laws of thought, what are often called logical absolutes, stem from. Aristotle's form of classical logic rests upon a set of laws that eat Aristotelianism has christened logical absolutes. These laws of thought are best known as described by Bertrand Russell. 1. The law of identity. Whatever is, is, or A equals A. 2. The law of non-contradiction. Nothing can both be and not be. Or A does not equal not A. And 3. The law of excluded middle. Everything must either be or not be. Or either A or not A, but not both A and not A. Actually, the first person we know of to suggest these ideas was the pre-selocratic philosopher Paramindis. He said that never will this prevail that what is not is. Aristotle, as I've shown in a video I did some time ago, applied these ideas to the natural world around him. He realized that that tree is that tree. That that tree was not that fish. And that something either had to be that tree or that fish, but couldn't be both that tree and that fish simultaneously. It is key to his system of classification of species and the reduction of understanding to clear and distinct concepts. This idea, clear and distinct concepts, had reach. Even when Aristotelianism was on the way out, one of the great destroyers inadvertently I would suggest, of Aristotelian thought Descartes, claimed to be searching for clear and distinct beliefs. Je pense d'en j'y suis, I think, therefore I am, being the most foundational clear and distinct belief he claimed. These laws of thought all seem rather good and immutable and well, absolute. But there are problems. And I'm just going to look at some. Let's start with some individual problems. Well, A equals A is a nonsense, a tautology with absolutely no value whatsoever. If I were an alien cyborg who never seen organic matter before and saw a dog, and that's my fellow alien cyborg, what's that? And they said, oh, that's a dog. And I said, what's a dog? And they said, a dog? It's a dog. I suspect my response would be somewhat sarcastic. A equals A has no explanatory value. Hegel cleared this one up by suggesting we skip this pointless law of identity, and instead we look at the second law, the law of non-contradiction, because we can define something by what it's not, not what it is. So we skip the first law due to its uselessness and go straight to the second. So what about A does not equal not A? First, it could be claimed that this is identical to the law of the excluded middle. If this is the case, there is another problem, as what is true and what is false are often based upon parameters we set, whether I am fat or thin is dependent on a value claim, not a truth claim. But if my society have decided the parameters are true, then that all goes out the window. On one level, the statement I am fat is true. On another level, it could be false. Bertrand Russell, whose versions of the rules of thought we use, disagree with this idea of the insta-subjective truth, and that the law of non-contradiction excluded middle were the same. It all comes down to how he defined truth. Truth would call A a representation of a sense datum. In other words, when we say that sock is smelly, the sock is an object, the smell is the sense datum, and the smelliness is our sensation of the sense datum once we appraise it. So smell does not equal no smell. Something can either smell or not smell, but cannot both smell and not smell at the same time. Smelly, on the other hand, is a value judgment drawn from appraisal. If one person thinks that smelly-smelly in the other suite, neither of these laws is applicable. And that takes me to the wider overall problem, if considered analytically the law's work. In other words, if you freeze the object A in time and make it abstract, then indeed, the abstract A equals the abstract A, for what that's worth. And indeed, mathematics and much of science relies on such an abstraction, and on placing ideas beyond time. Scientific laws are a fantastic example of this. The problem happens when you bring many of these ideas into the real world, because in the real world, there really is such a thing as time. Paramindy has originally suggested his version of these laws in response to Heraclitus. Heraclitus is the man of no man ever steps into the same with a tricefame. When discussing non-abstract items that exist in the real time-dependent world, A equals A doesn't exist, because A only equals A for a single point in time. The following point in time is changed, even if only at a molecular level. That tree may still be, at an abstract level, that tree. But in reality, it is not that exact same tree. It may have dropped a few leads, it may have grown a few micrometers, it may have been moved by the wind. Hegel suggested that in this instance, a more likely law is a law of contradiction, that A equals not A. They're just a few reasons why the laws of thought are, if not wrong, certainly not absolute. And finally, we have to remember that these rules are axiomorous. The reason they exist is to support a logical structure. The one way looking at it is classical logic, or Aristotelian logic, as some people call it. They aren't the only axioms out there, and many other axioms have just as great a claim to being absolute. For example, here are the stoic axioms for their logic, just as absolute. So now we're going to discuss this. Is there such a thing as an absolute truth? Why is it that these Aristotelian ones seem to be the ones people go on about when they're not the only ones? And do I have enough in terms of alcohol? Back to, well it's not really a studio, it's whatever it is, the broadcast.