Virtue Ethics and the Golden Mean

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Do you think he's overrated No, absolutely not. I mean, he's an incredibly difficult thinker to get to grips with, but I think once you do and you kind of really get a sense of how his mind works, I mean I think it's absolutely incredible. I don't think the I don't think that that involves thinking that he's right about everything. I don't think you have to agree with Aristotles to think he's an incredible thinker. I think it's just the way that he analyses things the way he makes divisions, he's very, very good at saying, lookook, it's just not as simple as that. We need to complicate this issue further And I think that that's like a really valuable skill or trait for a philosopher And the other thing that he'll do that's really impressive is we'll see him kind of make a first stab at answer to a question And then he'll give a second, slightly more refined answer to the same question, and then another. So there's a sense in which you can see him thinking through the problem And so If you read him in a way where you think, okay, this is a big systematic thinker and you see these kind of seeming contradictory statements, you think, God what's going on here? All these logical inconsistencies and what he's saying But if you get the sense that you've got to kind of get into the rhythm of his thought process and you see him, okay, here's the general statement. Now let's refine it, now let's refine it Once you get into the rhythm of how he thinks, then it's really impressive. Sure. So People will have heard of Aristotle, but maybe especially if they're watching an introduction like this, they might not really know what he's all about. in the fewest possible words to start with, like what's the hype? What's so great about Aristotle? So I mean Perhaps start with a very small bit of biography. So I So Aristotle is a student of Plato. He's as a teenager, he goes to Plato's Academy in Athens He studies with Plato for twenty years, is effectively Plato's greatest and brightest student. So he's coming in that legacy, right? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. And so he's drawing on all of those platonic ideas But then he's challenging them and questioning them and moving them on to kind of the next stage So that's kind of one part of what he's doing But he's also a natural scientist. In fact, I think the best way to think about Aristotle as a thinker is first and foremost biologist He's interested in understanding the natural world. He's interested in understanding organisms, including us and how they operate And so you've got this combination of kind of very refined complex metaphysics that he's inheriting from Plato. and you've got this really down to earth nitty gritty, let's understand the physical world. He's bringing both of those things together At the same time, he's also interested in politics. he's interested in literature. He invents formal logic. I mean, there's no one in history that has invented more academic disciplines than Aristople, right? That's quite an achievement for anyone Yeah. Yeah. That's fair enough. Okay. so I think And the thing is each of these areas form logic and his sort of so called metaphysics and his ethics and They're sort of worldirled unto themselves. So I think the best thing to do is to kind of take them one by one and start getting a fill for the kind of stuff that Aristotle was thinking about. So I suppose like One of the most foundational questions, Pe often start with Aristotle with the ethic stuff. But I always like to leave that till last. We spoke before about stoicism and we did the same thing. Everyone knows that Stoics are people who you know, hold fast in the face of suffering. But let's do the metaphysics first and then see why that's what comes out of it. So for Aristotle, ped fundamental question for a philosopher might be something like what is being what is substance? What is the universe made out of? What is like the foundational nature of reality When it comes to arristotle How how can we start getting a feel for his picture of that? Hm. So I think to come back to something I was saying earlier, his first movie is to say, it's more complicated than anyone else has thought.. So kind of the famous sort of early metaphysician in Greek philosophy is a guy called Parmenides. Yes, who's a big influence on Plato in many ways and Aenzes says well Things either exist or they don't exist. There's no middle ground, right? It's either one or the other And things can't suddenly come to be out of nothing, right? So you can't have existing things suddenly appearing. um And equally, you can't have things that exist vanishing into thin air, right? That doesn't happen either So things either are or they are not. and ultimately Parmenides says, Well, everything just is, everything just exists, right? You can't have a non existent thing And so if you just have existence and nothing can fall out of existence, you kind of just have Pmanent, eternal existence, everything just is all the time, right? And this is all very kind of arrmchair, philosophy wr. And so Platoherits these ideas. Clearly Aristotle and Plato were talking about these things in the academy when Aristotle was young And he comes along and says, Well, look, we need to complicate this. This is a far too simplistic way to think about existence, right? So for instance, this chair exists, it's a thing Um The brownness of the chair also exists, but the brownness doesn't exist on its own. You can't have brownness just like that. You can have a brown chair So the brownness exists as an attribute of the chair. So it exists in a different way to the way the chair exists, right?. So suddenly weve got two ways of thin about What is or what Israel And then he's given that he's interested in organisms, biology and the natural world. The one defining characteristic of the natural world is change, right? Everything's constantly in motion. This is something again that Parmenes kind of is denying. things just are and they don't change. So Ares,, no, everything's changing. everything's moving all the time. And if we look at physical processes and organisms, then these give us really clear examples of this. a sort classic example would be, say the acorn right. So an acorn is an acorn, but it also is going to become an oak tree or has the potential to become an oak tree, And so there's a sense in which the acorn is two things at the same time. It is an acorn and it is potentially an oak tree in the way in which nothing else is potentially an oak tree. Yeah. and that potentiality is like part of what the accorn is you wouldn't fully understand the nature of an acorn unless you understood its potentialities And I mean, you mentioned Palmenides who It's quite hard to sort of interpret him, but he He seems to deny the existence of change. Because he sort of says, as you say, like stuff that is is, stuff that is not is not For something to change would mean that something which is not would need to sort of come into being, you know, for that to be tree that the grows or something, there would need to be something like a tree that wasn't there before. That's something coming from nothing. That doesn't make sense. So Parmenides sort of brings up this paradox of change And Aristotle in attempting to sort of answer this concern starts with this distinction, he says, Well, you know, there are different ways in which something can be And for an acorn, it is an acorn, but it's also potentially tree and you might think, well potentiality isn't like it's not really a thing. it doesn't exist, but The acorn isn't potentially a chicken It doesn't have the potential to become a chicken, but it does have the potential to become a tree. So whatever that is, it's like it's real and it means something, right? Yeah, absolutely. As you said, it's the defining characteristic of an acorn? You don't know what an acorn is unless you know it has the potential to do that. So that is really, really important. And so this kind of really challenges the sorts of thing that say Pen was saying The acorn is defined by what it is not At the moment But what it can become.. So that's quite nice. And the other thing that's also going on here, if you think back to sort of Plato, I mean, lots of people have their kind of sort of caricature of platonic metaphysics, right? There are ideal forms that are unchanging and then the physical world is constantly changing and it's just some kind of sort of shadow of these really existing unchanging things So again, Plato's committed to this idea that the things that really exist U eternal and don't alter and the things that change are somehow secondary and less important. And so again, Aristaot of wants to challenge that and say, no, it's all this changing stuff. that isn't fixed in its being, that's the interesting stuff. That's the world we live in. That's the world we want to understand Okay, so that's Interesting. Okay Aristotle comes along and says, Hey, like, you know, when we're talking about stuff that exists There's sort of potential and there's actual. you know, there's acons are potentially a tree and when it becomes a tree, it's actually a tree and it has the potential to decay or whatever So what Who cares? What does that mean? Why would someone botherort of thinking about about that? okay, and acorn potentially becomes a tree, likeike who cares So I mean, it's just part of trying to understand the natural world, right? If you're trying to do science. I mean then you're going to want to understand how these processes work But I think So I mean, I think one really interesting thing to do in thinking about philosopher is who their enemies are right. Who's the bad guy? Yeah, right. And for Aristotle, I think the bad guy is Democritus, the atomist to her, right? Yes. So So Democritus is kind of presenting what we would now call a kind of reductive materialism, right? Everything can be just reduced down to matter in motion. Yeah. Democritus is one of our earliest the earliest thinkers who believe that the universe is made out of sort of small indivisible I mean the word atom just means indivisible, right? It's unfortunate that we have since split the atom. but by atom literally we mean whatever the most indivisible small sort of unit of stuff is, That's what anatom is and Democritus says The universe is made up of atoms whatever the nature of those atoms are, and everything that exists can be explained in terms of those atoms, which sounds a lot like, you know a modern materialist and this is the kind of thing that Democrus is talking about Absolutely. and you you're all too aware of all of the sorts of problems that that might raise. If you're just talking about dead matter inotion, how is it that some things are alive? How does consciousness grow out of just the interactions of these bits of dead matter, right? So this is Aristotle's sort of big concern that just describing the physical world in terms of that kind of inner matter just That model just isn't rich enough to explain the kind of the complexity and the variety that we see in the natural world, and particularly in biological organisms where So I mean Think back to the Acorn, right? if you're kind of reductive materialist, you break it up, you look at all the components, you see what it's made out of. in theory, that's your complete explanation of what it is That doesn't tell anything about oat treies. Yeah. So it's not really enough. Yeah. it's only a partial explanation, we might say. Sure. I mean, a modern thinker might be quick to kind of criticize Aristotle, that they might sort of say, well, if you actually knew everything about the molecular makeup of the acorn and the molecular makeup of people surrounding it or like sunlight and all this kind of if you actually knew all of those facts and put them together, you would kind of predict tree that a tree would sort of come about few things to consider, firstly, maybe it's not simple as, but also like Aristotle is very early on here. you know, he's one of our earliest people to be thinking about this kind of stuff. And so yeah, sometimes He misses things we now know to be true. likeike it is still undisputedly a genius for his time There's one interesting moment where Aristotle seems to kind of prefigure evolutionily evolutionary natural selection. Like he considers possibility of like Essentially natur selection, he describes, and then he dismisses it for reasons which now we understand the evolution. seem a bit too sort of forthright, but the fact that that was even sort of something that was considered by him is pretty astonishing. So I don't know, I kind of want to Aristotle's reputation against what might be called presentism. I realized that we're de we're dealing with a mind here, okay Um kind of also wanted you said talking about like who his enemies are, okay, so youve got Democratus is the Aomist Youve also talked about how Aristotle was a student of Plato And there are some really important ways in which Aristotle differs from Plato, right? Youve just alluded to this concept of the forms in the context of change, but can you tell me a bit more about what Plato's idea of forms were and how Aristotle thinks about things differently. 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It says different things in different dialogues But He seems to be committed to the idea that kind of really, really secure knowledge that he's after can't be knowledge of something that's changeable, right? Because you think you know it and then you go back to it a week later and it's different. So you don't really know it after all. There's a sense in which for Plato, real knowledge looks like mathematics, right? eternal and unchanging Two plus two always equals four And so he thinks that if all of our knowledge tested look like that, then It's going to have to be knowledge of unchanging ideas And so he thinks that as we look at objects in the physical world. as we look at chairs, for instance, we ought not to be so concerned about the particular chair in front of us, which is going to change and decay and not be there forever But instead, we want to kind of I was going to say sort of abstract, but that's not the right word. We're going to want to try and get to the idea of chair in itself. We want to move from the particular chairs we see to the idea of chairness like. And he thinks of that idea of chairness, if it's unchanging must have always existed. And then there's all the kind of very weird and wonderful stuff about was there a past life when we encountered these ideas directly before we then you know Yeah, Plato entertains the idea that Okay, so I mean the question is, right You've got a chair over there. I've got a chair over here And there's a table in between them, right? There's something that these two chairs have in common They both don't have in common with the table, which is why we call these chairs and that table And the question is like What is it? They're not the same object. Yours is over there, mine's over here, but they've got something which connects them and makes them both fall into this category of chair for Plato, there is this thing called chairness, which both of them must like participate in, right and Our knowledge of what a chair is now must be because we had some kind of prior understanding before our birth entertains this idea that we were sort of existing in the realm of forms, which is a little bit wacky and a little bit weird. But look it's a real problem, right? Because otherwise We've got a bunch of matter And it's like arranged in various ways. yeah, you know, I could callool it a chair, but I could also use it like a table or something to say that there's this Real thing that these have in common that the lamp shade doesn't means there must be this sort of form of chairness that they all participate in. Aristotle is aware of this problem but he doesn't agree with Plato's solution No. I mean, let me give a kind of a more sensible and sympathetic account of what Plato is doing here as well. R. And he as I say, he says different things in different places. so he's actually quite difficult to pin down on this Another way to describe what Plato is saying is, look, for you to be able to go into the world and recognise a chair, you must already have the idea of chair in your head in some sense. So he's effectively saying, that there's certain ideas and concepts that we must know a priori. We must know them before we go out and experience. the world. They're not things that we kind of Concoct off the back of experience. They must be there already, right? So for your viewers who know who are kind of deep into their philosophy already, right he's canned, he's not hume would be a way of describing where Plato is on this, right? So Arior concepts must be there in place already And then there's the kind of the weird and wonderful stories about and did we encounter those a priori concepts in a past life. Yeah obviously can't doesn't go thatite far And But what Aristotle wanted to do is want to bring that idea of form down to earth So for instance, again, I mean, it's a mundane example, but the chair again, right Um Aristot is going to say, ye, the chair has a form. R And the form is simply the structure and organization of the matter that makes it up. right. So these the chairs do share something in common and it's the way in which the matter is structured and organized. But as soon as you destroy all the chairs in the world There is no form left. So the form is dependent on the particular things that exist rather than being some kind of eternal idea that exists independent. So for Plato, the form exists and the objects sort of exist as reflections of the form For Aristotle, the individual objects exist and the form sort of comes out of those individual objects. sort of like flips it on its head and reverses it and says that the The best physical starting point is the objects in the world. from which we get forms rather than the other way round, I suppose is like one way of thinking about it We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, episodes like this take a lot of planning. and last night I was up fairly late reading everything I could Aristotle And I soon realized I just kind of hadn't had enough to eat. but I'd been so wrapped up in my prep that I also hadn't gotten any food in and I didn't really feel like waiting for a delivery or something. So I might have felt a bit stuck. I would have been a bit stuck, were it not for today's sponsor, Hule. That's H U E L. I reached for one of these. 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You get a bit more protein that way too, and it also allows you to control how thick or thin you want your hule to be. I drink one of these almost every single day. And as a new customer, there's a deal on for you. If you go to Hule dot com forward slash Alex O'Connor and use the code Alex O'Connor, then you'll get fifteen percent off. So thanks to Hule for quite literally actualizing today's episodes potential both by fueling my prep last night and sponsoring the show. And with that said, back to John Sellers. So for Aristotle, F is like some kind of structure or arrangement set of matter. So he's got matter and he's got four and these two being put together gives us this concept of hiloorphism, right ome Hilo must mean somethinghing like matter matter and form meaning like and morphhe meaning forms. So you like hylomorphis and the idea that what an object is is a mixture Matter and form. And if you're familiar with like scholastic philosophy, you willll begin to see the influence of this kind of thinking on people like Thomas Aquinas who also sort of felt the same thing. mean, Aristotle is titan of philosophy to the extent that if you read Thomas Aquinas He just refers to him as the philosopher That's Aristotle's name in Thomas Aquinas's work because he was just that significant. But okay, so we've got an idea of Aristot's metaphysics. We've got this thing called hylomorphism. matter and form, we've got a rejection of Plato, and we've got a rejection of Democritus. I think there's one more sort of missing picture before we can talk about some of the implications of this metaphysical worldview which is Aristotle has some pretty specific views on the nichure of causation So he talks about objects which exist and the form in which they exist, but There's also like reasons why things exist, right? Acorn doesn't just exist for no reason in the modern age if I ask you to explain something's cause, likeike if I say what was the cause of this chair? you might say, well it was whoever made it or the factory that made it or whatever A social wouldn't answer it quite in that way, would he? No. So I mean famously, Aristotle is credited with a theory often referred to as the four causes And although in this context I think cause is perhaps a slightly misleading translation. So a better way to put it would be four explanations or a better way still to put it would be to say an explanation must have four different components, right And so one of those components would be what we mean about causation, right Who made this come about? so And so in Aristotle, we call that kind of the efficient cause or explanation. And then we've got the form and the matter that we've just mentioned,. So again You want to understand the chair You've got to know what it's made out of. itss shape, structure Who made it And then the fourth one that you've got to know, in order to understand the chair is, What's it for Right? What's its purpose? What's its goal? the kind of the teleology. The tenos And so again, to know What's the difference between the table and the chair? you need to know what they're for, what function they have. And that he thinks is equally vital to really understand anything. Yeah. And people like it's a sort of common question in philosophy to be like, well you know if I sat on that table Would it just like become a chair? And I think sensful way to answ that is to say, well, what's its actual purpose? Like what was it made for That's like the only real way that we can meaningfully distinguish between the table and the chair in that context because yeah, maybe theyre made maybe they're both made out of wood. they' both got legs and they've both got a flat surface on top of them. What's the difference between a table and a stool Well, it's like what was the purpose it was made with Today if you were to say that thingsings need explaining in terms of like teleology in terms of what they're for people are like a little bit allergic to it. And think Aristotle is like aware that people think about this differently, we understand that a table is made with a purpose But when we look at things that aren't man made, we always talk about chairs and tables and it's easy to see how this applies What about like free You know, like When you look at a tree, you might say, okay, it's got a material use or explanation. it's made out of whatever made out of wood. and it's got a form, it's the form of a tree. and it's got an efficient cause, which is like, you know, the the rain and the soil and everything enacts the change. but 's a tree for? people would say that's kind of a meaningless question. What would Aristotle say? Hm. I mean, in the case of the tree, the kind of organism as a whole, I guess Um it's It's trying to stay alive, it's trying to reproduce in a sense. this is what living things do. So there's a sense in which that's their function, we might say I mean What he's particularly interested in when thinking about these kind of purposes or functions for things is thinking about parts of organisms in particular. So if we think about a human being, right U What's sure What's your liver for? What are your kidneys for? What's your heart for I mean, we can answer those questions, right? They have very specific purposes. They play a role in the functioning of the organism as a. So those look like quite simple examples of things in the natural world, not man made, where we can point to these kind of functions and purposes Yeah So I think it's interesting how like I've read If you read like a biology textbook, like a high school biology textbook or something you'll find Aristotelian language like sneaking in. Or if you look up on Google, like, you know,, What is a heart? whyy do we have a heart? It won't say something like Because of this evolutionary trajectory and this arrangement of atoms which contingently it'll say Bood around the body That's why you have a heart, which is an extremely teleological answer, you know? Like why whyider Why does this exist?y do birds make nests? Wh? And it's all like, o, to do this for this purpose. Why do trees have leaves? Oh, in order to photosynthesize In the modern day We don't like the idea that teleology is like built into nature so much. We sort are typically suspicious of it. But the language rememains And I think it's because people will want to say something like 's kind of true that the heart exists to pump blood around the body. but really what that is a shorthand for saying that an organism which pumps blood around the body more likely to survive if it has a heart and therefore evolve in that creature. It's not really that like ontologically really is For pumping blood. I don't know, do you think like a modern understanding of evolutionary biology undermines the teleological causation of Aristotle I mean that's a really good question. I mean I mean, I think I would say yeah, the heart is for pumping blood. That's literally what it's for, right? We're not again, back to the acorn, you're not going to understand what a heart is unless you don't grasp the idea that it is for pumping blood. But then the big question is Does that imply that it was designed to pump blood Can we reconcile what Aristotle was saying with, say Darwinism, right I think we can I mean If you think about what Darwin was trying to do and this isn't my a of expertise at all, What Darwin' trying to do is offer an explanation for how these preis and functions come about.. Darwin can see that the heart looks as if it was designed and has a very clear purpose. And so his question is, how on earth could that have happened without reference to some kind of brand designer who constructed all of this? And so his explanation of look, here we can show how it is that this object with a clear function came about over this incredibly long process that involved all sorts of chance and contingency along the way. But the end result is something very much with a function and a purpose. Yeah. So in the sense, Darwin would acknowledge that I think it's helpful maybe to think about Like when you ask your question, like what is it for Inantly you're conjuring up ideas of like a creator and God who makes it all happen for a particular reason. I think it's helpful to use the word like function there is much more sort of secular. You can say look We're not saying that like this is what a heart should do. We're not saying it's written into the rules of the universe, that there should be the stinkled heart that has this purpose It's just As a matter of fact is in fact its function. What does it do? Not just what it is, not just what it's made out of and like how it got there, but what does it do? You know, that that's not a bad. theological or supernatural kind of question, it's just what does it do pumps blood around the body and that's what we're talking about this fourth level of explanation, which I think still has place, you know, in our sort of modern metaphysics, but is often sort of understated. but it depends on the context, right? Like I've sometimes said if you If you go into a science like lab and ask somebody like , why is why is that rocket on its way to the International Space Station? And theyll say, Well, because the thrust weighs gravity and gives it escape velocity and so on and so forth But if you ask that same guy like at the pub They'll say, because we want to get to his face, man. It's becausecause we want to get up there and we want to do some science. And both of those can be true at once. And the whole point of Aristotle's distinction here is to say that these are different aspects, different ways of answering the question like How do you explain the existence of this thing, right Okay. That all having been said, we've got basic grasp of like how Aristotle is thinking the world Um One of the most sort of profound metaphysical questions that somebody can ask the nature and causes of the universe itself Did Aristotle believe in God? Um So I think the short answer is yes, he did Precisely what he means by that term is sort slightly harder pinn down. I mean he thinks the world is eternal, he thinks it's always existed. He doesn't think it was created at any point, right And in the kind of early Christian reception of Aristotle, this is a sticking point, right? then they then have to fudge U So so he thinks the world has always existed. It was't wasn't created at any point But nevertheless, he thinks that there must be some kind of I mean, the phrase he uses unmoved mover. There must be some kind of first cause in the sense of something that ties up our explanations.ight. So not a first cause in the sense of bang chronologicales. Yeah, exactly. So not a first cause in that sense. but something that is kind of the origin of the ultimate origin of movement and activity in the world. So we don't have an infinite regress in our explanations,? because he want us to avoid that. So he thinks there must be some kind of Eeternally existing unmoved mover that is the source of all the motion in the universe. And so that's what he wants to call God And I mean, this is interesting because it kind of then connects with things he has to say about the heavens. So Um He said, Okay, we want some eternal movement, right? Movement that doesn't stop and Well Movement in a straight line is no good because that' a start point and end point. So what movement can go on and on forever and ever movement going around in a circle, right? And can we think of any objects that move round in circles that have always been there and will always be there? And he looks up at the night sky and he says, Well, look, there' all these things up there going round and round and round and they don't seem ever to stop and they seem to be been forever So perhaps these are kind of sort of divine bodies in some sense that are underpinning everything else. Yeah It gets very murky beyond there. You see quite quite different from like a modern conception of God and It's interesting isn't it? Because like Aristotle, his views on the nature of whatever God might be. extremely different from something like modern Christianity. and yet, thanks, especially to Tom's Aquinas Aristotle is seen as one of the most sort of influential Christian thinkers, even like pre Christianity, he was like sort of laying a seed So like You said that Aristotle believes in an unmoved mover My understanding is that by motion in this context, We're kind of talking about change, notot just what's called locomotion, which is like movement through space, but anything which goes from one sort of state to another, that's what we might call motion. That's how Aquinas would use this term to prove God's existence. And this was kind of based on Aristotle. and Given what we've just talked about We know that change, any kind of change when something like an acorn becomes a tree as a kind of change be characterized by Aristotle as the actualization of a potential So you've got some kind of potential thing which is not currently actual, but is really there potentially and then it gets actualized and becomes actual. And then as you say, there's like a regress here. And this is particularly sort of focused on by Aquinas later, which is that like in order to actualize something There needs to be something already actual. Like if I want to cool down a can of Coca Cola and I put it in a fridge If my fridge is only potentially cold but not actually cold It's not going to be able to which allowves the potential of the can to becum cold The fridge has to be actually cold in order to actualize that change in the can to make it cold then If the fridge is actually cold, something must have actualized that potential. and whatever actualized that potential must have been actualized by something else. and somethingomething has to be actual in order to actualize But there has to have been something to actualise that And you end up with this kind of regress and Crucially, this isn't the kind of regress that sort of goes backwards in time, like dominoes falling over, but what is actualising potential right now? You know the potential of the cup to be in its position right now as opposed to being on the floor? It's being actualized by the table, which is being actualized by the table legs and so on and so forth The idea is that like If this went on infinitely There would be no ultimate actualization And so there needs to be a so called unualized actualizer or unmoved mover The problem is when you try to talk about this you' using the word actuality and actualising so much that you get completely lost in the weeds. But hopefully people can roughly follow that we're talking about some kind of First element in the causal chain which itself is not doesn't have any potential Because if it has some potential, well, youve got to explain why this is actualized and not that potential, and then the regress continues. It has to be purely actual and has the power to actualize everything else We kind of end up with this unactualized actualizer, the unmoved Mver and Aquinas leans on that very heavily later on say that that first unmoved mover is God But for Aristotle, it doesn't get you that far, right? We're not talking about some omnipotent, omniscient, loving creator of the universe. We're just talking about some kind of divine causal principlple. Insofar as This un actualized actualizer interacts with the world, with us or cares about human affairs, Aristotle has some quite different views to the modern Christian, doesn't he? Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy moocha rarappuccino drink? or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe? orr white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Rappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check Rponssees set upp required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus Yes, I mean, this is something something impersonal, something that certainly isn't intervening in any way, that isn't particularly interested in particulars. I mean, Aristotle's image of kind of I mean, this is where we see this sort of platonic influence still u Aristotle's God is going to be thinking about universal ideas and and forms, we might say, rather than thinking about particularars. So it's going to be contemplating very general bits of knowledge. It's not going to be interested in the day to day activities of the physical world and certainly not interested in anything that we're doing So yeah, it's a very disinterested and abstract type of deity. the fact that the Christian tradition was able to incorporate this with all of the crazy things you find in the Old Testament, for instance, and find a way for this all to sit together is you quite an achievement. I I think so, because of course Aristotle sort of has an interesting history like post his death, right? because his works are kind of for some time and then kind of rediscovered. Can you tell me about that story and particularly like the church's reception of Aristotle's work when it's sort of rediscovered H So I mean in late antiquity his works were translated into Syriac and then Arabic, they kind of their first wave of influences is in the East in places like Baghdad And we see Islamic philosophers really interested in Aristedian ideas and going with them. Um A little later sort twelfth century We see some of Aristotle's works get translated into Latin some of them from those Arabic versions. Spain is particularly important. know Alanderas where you were a lot of Arabic scholars and people from Western Europe Northern Europe going to Spain and learning Arabic and translating texts And people also access some texts from Greek, right from Byzantium, say, and translate those into Latin And when that all happens and people first encounter the kind of full range of oursel' ideas, mean the church is deeply worried about this. I mean here's this guy who says that the soul dies with the ody amongst many other things, who denies miracles. It says the universe is eternal. It says the universe is Eetternal wasn't created, right. So he's saying on the face of it, Aristotle was saying a number of really quite heretical things. Yeah. You' get a group of Aristotedian philosophers who were alost who are very radical, almost atheists in Paris And they're condemned, right? The Bishop of Paris says, no, don't teach this stuff. This is dangerous. And it's then the next generation of philosophers in Paris, which includes Thomas Aquinas Yes who then want to kind of rescue Aristotle, they can see that he's just a genius thinker and they don't want him condemned as a heretic. So they find a way to kind of create this marriage where they can bring the two together. So yeah, it's not an easy marriage to start off with. It takes some time, it takes some work. It takes some one of the Statur at Thomas Aquuietness to pull it off. Yes, quite quite quite m and people can probably begin to see how like Well there's lots of resonance. Aristotle as far as pertains like later Christian tradition laying some seeds that have to then being, you know actualized by Thomas Aquinas But there is also a lot to like in Aristotle when it comes to modern theistic ways of thinking. and one of those is tryrying to account in a world full of all kinds of organisms full of plants and animals for the sort of uniqueness and specialness. If humans Aristotle as you say, is fascinated by biology. and he also knows that Now, what a thing is hyomorphism from earlier is it's matter And it's form. So if you take the right matter and you put it in the right form gives you you know a thing Aristotle writes quite plainly about Right? He sort of thinks about a human corpse, someone who's dead and thinks It's got all of the matter. that a human does And it's all arranged in the right way. the heart's in the right place, the blood is in the b Dead There's something missing. There's something which makes it alive and when something is alive, there's something that makes it human as opposed to a dog or indeed a plant. And so can you tell me a little bit about like Aristol's taxonomy and how he accounts for what a human is and what makes him so special Mm, so I mean, earlier we were saying that when we were talking about hyomorphism, we were saying, okay, form is the kind of structure and organization of the matter. And as the corpse example really nicely illustrates, that's clearly not enough when we're thinking about living beings, right? It' not just the way in which the matter is organized. There's something else that's really vital, like literally vital to give us a proper understanding of what's going on. And the way Aristotle cashes this out is he says, well, we also need to think about what things can do. We need to think about their Pasties their potentialities, right? So I mean, he uses the word potential in different senses, right? So one sense is The acorn has potentially become the oak tree The warm can of Cke has the potential to become cold That's a change that an object goes through But there's another sense of potential. which is using an ability or a capacity that you have. So we both have the capacity to talk and sometimes we use that And sometimes we don't That doesn't involve any change on our part. We're still the same person. but one of them, we're actualizing the potential to speak.. And the other, we're not, right So Then he want to define, say human beings in particular, but also other living beings as U the source of things that have certain abilities and capacities and that then becomes part of his definition of what the form is. So form of a human being isn't just two arms, two legs ability to speak, to move, to reproduce But most importantly of all in the case of humans, the ability to think, right? That's the capacity that we have that no other animals do. So it becomes our defining characteristic. And this is where again it becomes important. I think like the earlier fourfold causation becomes relevant and you begins to, o, interesting Aristotle thought that to understand something you have to know what it's for So what? real cases like this, if you don't have that element trying to account for the difference between a corpse and a living human being kind of becomes difficult. Yeah, you can just say one of them's alive, one of them's And when you start reaching for words, you'll want to say something like, Well, one of them it's doing stuff. Its heart is pumping blood, its brain is firing neur. You're talking about what it's doing. You're talking about like functions. you're talking about what everything is sort of for, what sort of end it's serving, and that's what sort of produces life matter and form, but form includes what a thing does, like it's what it's for U Aristotle uses in trying to distinguish between, say what a human does, and what an animal can do pllants can do Um And like you say, It's about capacities. It's not about actually doing them Right now you're not speaking and neither is your chair. you have an actual capacity to speak in the chair does not. But in terms of type of form or the arrangement of form that something has a human versus an animal versus a plant Aristotle uses this word the Greek word psyche. which is typically translated in the West as soul. I don't know if you think that's an appropriate or an unfortunate translation, but can you tell us a little bit about how people talk about the soul when it comes Aristotle So of course, the English word soul has all sorts of resonances that might make people think that we're talking about something immortal, for instance. And so that's kind of a bit unhelpful. We need to kind of bracket that And I guess in English, psyche has all sorts of kind of connotations as well. So it's always a problem. but let's just stick and use the word soul. But the key point to remember is soul simply refers to What it is that makes something alive?ight. What distinguishes the living, breathing human being from the corpse? And soul is the thing. But Aristotle, like that's how he uses letter. Yeah. So Um And that's not to say that some kind of some kind of soul has departed from the corpse, right? It's not as if it's lost a component. It's just that the corpse has lost its capacities. So in the cases of a human being So The thing that describes how we're alive is really a case of just describing those capacities and abilities that we have. Yeah. like if you have a tower that you like knock over It's it's capacities as a tower, the form that makes it a tower is now gone. but and you could call that the soul of the tower is whatever sort of makes it into a tower. itss form, its capacities and whatnot. If I knock over the tower, the soul has gone, but it's not like it's like floated off somewhere into an afterlife or something. It's just no longer functionally there And Aristotle is going to say that plants and animals have souls too, because they're living things, right? So a plant can be alive or dead. So a plant has soul, it has some kind of animating Um u animating power Um, which is simply to be alive. plants u can like reproduce in their own way. Um Animals also have the ability to move and perceive, so they have additional capacities, they're more complex. And then human beings have those two layers, but they also then have this ability to think. so they're more complex again. So as you kind of go up the scale of nature, you get more and more capacities. And this is what Aristotle means by soul. He's not talking about a ghost in the machine, he's not talking about something continues to exist after you die. he's just talking about The form of a living thing, that is its organization, and also its functions and its capacities. what can it do? And so Plant can do one set of things, Animals can do that set of things plus some more stuff like locomotion And then humans can do all of that stuff with locomotion and abilizing and what notot, but also they can think. All Aristotle means by the soul. Be people might be put off. they might think Aristotle believes in the soul. Oten find people are surprised to learn that that's what he means by soul It's also worth pointing out that of course he didn't use the English word soul, He meant something more specific. So again not very supernatural here. we're just talking about like matter and form. And so the thing that makes humans so special is their ability to to reason. And some people might want to say Okay, but surely this is like a bit of a gradation.ike I've se, you know, I've seen chimpanzees that can like you know, tap on the screen and follow the numbers and stuff. areren't they kind of using reason as well? Like is Aristotle justified in saying that humans are kular form as opposed to every other animal. So when Aristotle is describing human beings as rational, he uses the word logic, rational, which comes from the Greek word logos meaning word or explanation So So humans are distinct in so far as they speak. They don't just think, they also speak,? You might think your dog can think and is actually very clever, but your cat's probably cleverer. But humans speak, right? And then you might say, okay, well other animals like dolphins and things they communicate, communication isn't unique to human beings But The sense of logos that we've got at play here is not simply communicate. it's also explain human beings are the only animals that try to explain the world that they live in We're the only ones that do science. and that's unique to human beings So when Aristotle is talking about rationality, he's not just talking about kind of basic thought processes we could attribute to lower animals. He's talking about the logos. He's talking about we can think and reflect about the world that we live in and we can try and explain it. That's distinctive And that's what makes humans special and Yeah, again, you can begin to see how this might be relevant to Christianity when you consider the importance of the logos, which people might have encountered that Greek term in the context of Christianity in that the log offs is translated as the word. so in to John's gospel in the beginning was the word and that word is logos. It's the same word being used by Aristotle to describe reason here. So you know, some overlaps beginning to beginning to kind of form, perhaps U But o, so we've got The mes physical view and hylomorphism four causes And we've got Aristotology on the Soul, which is actually pretty like empirical and materialistic, essentially and That gives us a kind of like metaphysical picture of what Aristotle is talking about, I think. One thing that we haven't mentioned yet, which people often start with because it seems a bit more like meta is something you alluded to earlier, which is that Aristotle invents formal logic Aristotle is this great scientist and biologists and apparently a metaphysician and you pre Christian thinker and whatnot. But at the same time He doesn't just want to think about proposions he doesn't want to think about true facts like grass is green and animals have limbs, he wants to think about how facts relate to each other and how they combine to produce arguments, to produce new knowledge Today in philosophy arguments all the time. We try to learn things by saying, well, if this is true, And this is also true. then we can conclude that this kind of thing is true and Funny as it might seem, this isn't really something that massively existed before Aristotle, right? That's true. I mean we mean we see some arguments set out in some of the very early Greek texts and We see lots of arguments in Plato's dialogues where Socrates is arguing with people But there's no real kind of formal account of, you know You see Socrates make an argument in the dialogue and you think, yeah, that works, or you think that doesn't work. But how do you know, right? You're kind of just going with intuitions What Aristotle wants to do is formalize all of that so we can really see when does a conclusion follow deductively from the premises? When do we know that we've got a necessary truth, right Um And so what he wants to do is abstract all of the kind of distracting detail from the arguments that we're making and just look at their structure so we can see Does the conclusion follow from the premises? So kind famous example, these syllogistic arguments that he codifies for the first time, all A's are B, all B's are C, therefore all As are C, right? If you slot in facts in the first two that are correct, the conclusion is going to be correct, necessarily, and there's no getting around that And if you can string some of those arguments together into a longer piece of reasoning then you can start to come up with really quite complex pieces of knowledge. It's a way of, I mean Again, famously in Plato's dialogue, Socridates is arguing with all these guys that we usually call sophists who are sort of presented by Plato as trying to pull the wool over people's eyes and, you know We're all familiar with sophistry today Aristotle really wants us to say, okay, I'm going to give you the tools so that you can really you can really uncover that when you encounter it and you can see whether someone is giving you a good argument or not. Yeah. And so to be clear here Like if you if you have an argument of that form, like all As a B All B's are C, therefore all A's are C You could say that argument is valid, like it's true. Yeahah, that follows from the premises, but there's no content there. like it's like algebra, right? It's like algebra, but for argumentation. it's like There's no content. we're just talking about the overall structure. And Aristotle comes up with a bunch of different essentially like forms of argument. he sort of in the form of like As and B's and ifs and all this kind of seven and ors and ns and whatnot. and lists out basically bunch of different valid syllogisms where if you plug in the fact, you'll know what the conclusion is And That's like a pretty significant contribution to philosophy, right? But I mean, it's incomplete, right? Our sort of conception of formal logic today is not urely're aotelian, but it's a starting point Yeah, absolutely. I mean,'s a hu it's a huge achievement. If he had just done that and absolutely nothing else, he would be A really, really important philosopher. Yeah. But to have done that and then all the work in biology that we're talking about, effectively inventing biology as a discipline in the process Not to mention all of the other things that he does then it becomes you just unbelievably impressive. I'm beginning to see as well, I'm hoping people can begin to see that when you introduce Aristotle and you want to sort of start talking about him you kind of want to I ask you at first like, you know, what's all the hype? And it's like gosh, well, it depends on what you're talking about because he's invented logic, which is totally separate from being probably the preeminent biologists of his era, like his his study Oh of animals And't he like sort of live near a lake or something and he'd go down and spend his time like dissecting the fish and stuff like that. And that no one else was doing at the time. Yeah. I mean, after he left Plato's Academy, he spent some time on the island of Lesbos. Yeah. And I've never been, but apparently in the center of the island of Lesbos, there's a huge lagoon, kind of s huge body of water in the center And Aristotle spent a couple of years there. U dissecting fish on the shore of this lagoon, you know And again, we're back to We're back to our kind of four causes. You open up a fish, you pick out all the different Bs and pieces of it. I can see what this is made of, I can see what shape it is But if I don't know what it is for, I've no idea what this is, right? Is this an eyeball? Is this a liver? Yeah. I need to know what function they have in order to understand how this organism works. Yeah. And so I think that's where I think it's the hands on empirical science of dissecting fish, which is where many of these ideas were first kind of crystallized. Yeah, I find it so interesting the thought of like how There' different ways of interpreting what it means to say what is something for? likeike what is an I for to see and it feels like You'd almost trick people. like in the context of philosophy if you speak to like a modern atheistic materialists and say like Does the eye have a purpose? They'll want to say Ohh, well, you know, no, no, not really. it just sort of exists and it has the appearance of. But if without priming them, you sort of went up and you said, Hey, C you tell me about e Ie, people like, o,'s, it's the organ used to see and What I want to say is like people might think Aristotle is a bit antiquated because he's sort of holding ono this teleological nature that has been gone since evolution. But I want to say that like I agree with you from earlier that evolution doesn't do a away concept of function. It might do away with the idea of there being some like built in teleology by design I don't think it necessarily does away with the idea of of it being meaningful to say that like the function of a biological part is really part of what makes it what it is. I think we really can retain that If we just use quite like plain language about it. you know, the table has a function to hold things up, and that was invented by humans. The eye has the function of seeing and that was developed by natural selection. One is designed, one's not, but they both have a function in a meaningful sense. So Having said that I want to ask you what the function of a human being is. And what I mean by that because I want to I want to sort I wont say wrap up, but it's probably the biggest subject of Aristotle's that is most popularly discussed is ethics You know, we've got an idea what he thought about the world But he's also famous for his Kicomakian ethics makes a good life. and in many ways his idea of about like what makes a good life and what humans should do is not about like divine command or some ontological rules built into the universe. But again, this question which we keep coming back to like What are humans for? What is their function Introducing Taco Bell's new jalapeno citrus salsa with bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guailo chiles. Usually, you add sauce to the food, but when the sauce is this good The food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth That rolled quada, notot a rolled quesada anymore Now it's a sauce shovel Taco Bell's Jalapeno citrus salsa, Get it with any item on the cananttina chicken menu whileile it's here. The participating in US Tacobll locations for a limited time only while supplies last, contact store for availability. At Ollie, we've got wellness down to a science. From PMS to pregnancy to menopause. Our women's wellness line offers science backed support for every stage. No judgment, no shame, none of the stigma. Just supplements designed to meet you wherever you're at. Ollie, choose science over Shame Find support at a retailer near you or on Ollie. com. That's ollY. com Yeah, absolutely. And I think I think I think you've been absolutely right for us to discuss it in the order that we have, because I think you need to understand the biology first before you can understand what's going on in the ethics. And so famously at the very beginning of the N comomician ethics, he gives what we often call a kind of a function argument, right You want to understand what a good human being is First youu to got to understand what a human being in general is What it for? And then what's his function And once you understand that good human being will be one that fulfills that function. Right. So if the defining characteristic of a human being is rationality A good human being is going to be one that is rational and exercises those capacities Um and Aristotle thinks there are two different ways in which we can engage in rational activity, Two different ways in which we can be good human beings And these relate to two different types of virtues Um that he describes in the book So the first set of these we might call traditionally they're called moral virtues. we might call them character virtues, something like that Um And these are primarily concerned with managing our desires and our appetites, right? So We're animals, we're biological creatures. we are We're animals with rationality added, right? We don't lose our animality just because we're rational beings So we have all those desires and appetites that any other animal would have, right? We're all motivated by pleasure and the fear of pain. This is just the human condition And so Aristotle says, well, one way in which we can be rational is develop the right kind of character traits to control those desires and appetites, right? You know We have this inbuilt desire for food. we always want food. know there are good evolutionary reasons why we always want food. But we don't want to let that just run out of control So we want to develop the virtue of moderation where we can keep a check on those appetites. And that's one way in which we can live a rational life, right? Another example would be say courage, right? Again, good evolutionary reasons for us to run away from dangerous situations, right? Very sensible. But there are some situations where it might be important for us to face danger and to step in for a variety of reasons. So we want to develop the virtue of courage so that we can use our region to manage kind of very sensible, inbuilt cowardice that we all have. So there are those ways in which we can be rational by by managing those non rational elements of ourselves, right A second way we can be rational and this comes back to what we were saying earlier about kind of explanation and doing science. is what Aristotle calls intellectual virtues And so this would be the trying to understand the world that we're in, trying to contemplate the universe, to do biology, to think about God, to do philosophy, do metaphysics, the things that we've been talking about rightight now, right? So that's another way in which we can be rational So So a good human being And this is, I think the key most complex question in Aristotle's ethics, which I don't think is resolved at all which is Which of these, if at all, is the most important? Do we have to choose between the two The obvious thing to me, it seems, is to say, well, obviously, the ideal human being is going to be rational in both of those senses, right? You're going to have those virtues of moderation and courage And also you're going to engage in that kind of reflective activity But the way that Aristotle phrases it right at the end of his book on ethics to describe this in terms of two different ways of life So he talks about a political life, someone engaged in their community who has those virtues, who is a good social animal, we might say. And then he also talks about someone living a contemplative life, someone who's just engaged in this kind of theoretical reflection U And you can see how that might connect with sort of monastic ideas in the later Christian tradition, the person who isn't involved in society because they're just engaged in intellectual pursuit. And so he kind of presents it almost as if there's a choice between these two different ways of life that you could live. They're both rational in a sense. they're both praiseworthy. But how do you want to live your life, what do you want to do What do you want to do And I think Philosophy often has an autobiographical element and I think in this instance, it's clear to me the life that Aristotle wanted to live, which is just to be engaged in that kind of contemplation, reflection, the life that he did live, right Yeah doing science and thinking about these big questions. Firstly, just as a point of interest as people might wonder, why is it called the Nicamakian ethics Um That's a good question and shrouded in mystery. There's another book called the Eudemian Eethics. Um It may be that those books were originally addressed to those people. It may be that they were edited by people with those names So in both cases, we've got a kind of a pile of lecture notes. In fact, some of the books that make up these two works overlap. So it almost looks like one is a kind of an expanded version of the other. Yeah. So it may have been that these were the names of different editors Aristotle had a son called Neicomachus. So it's conceivable that he's maybe his son put all these lecture notes together after his death. But yeah We don't know for sure. Iming. Okay. So We're talking about the function of a human being and it's like the employment of rationality People might be confused because they're thinking, well, I studied Aristotle in school or uni or something. and I remember them talking about Eudimonia. and I remember them talking about the fact that that kind of meant happiness. And I thought that for Aristotle, the ultimate aim of ethics or the ultimate aim of human life was was this happiness that people talk about So happiness, not in the sense of a subjective feeling of being happy in the way that we use English words, but happiness in the sense of having lived a good life right? Something a bit more objective, something a bit more substantial, right? somethingomet that other people can say about you right. Another term that people sometimes prefer to use to translate your daimonia as flourishing as opposed to happiness Yeah, whichich might better capture the kind of we're driving at. That's right. and in a sort of very famous English translation sometimes it's just translated as a good life. Yeah, right. So That's what we're after. So How do you live a good life Be a good human being. right engage in rational activity So Happiness isn't about kind of feeling good inside as only It's about vualizing your potential being a good rational . and that's what happiness looks like. And as it happens, he thinks that if you do that, you will feel happy, right? That happ the feeling of happiness, the feeling of pleasure These will be the consequences, the byproducts of fulfilling your potential as a rational animal. And how does that come out in practice? L what I mean, different ethical theories about how to live, lead to quite different sort of practical outcomes, how you spend your time and whatnot. like How much does Aristotle get into prractical, here are things to do with your life. H are things to believe, here are ways to behave. Does you get that specific Um Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned the idea of a choice between two different lies, right? Do you want to become the research scientist or the monk or do you want to be actively engaged in the politics of your community? So he kind of presents that as one choice about how you might live But he also gets really into the nitty gritty of um, u of um of everyday human life, we might say. So I mean, one example, he has quite a lot to say about friendship He thinks friendship and our social relationships are really, really important not just friendship in the way that we use the word He's also thinking about romantic partners, he's also thinking about family relationships. He thinks these are absolutely fundamental. and she goes into a lot of detail analyysing this in a really quite kind of sort of psychologically perceptive and astute way. Yeah. So in that sense, he's interested very much in the nissy gritty. What does he think about friendship? I mean, I've heard he's got, you know a sort of sort of interesting and broad views about friendship and aret like what does he actually say So I mean, for instance, he draws a distinction between a kind of s genuine friends versus what he calls friendships of utility Right. So we have relationships with some people which are really just Give and take relationships, right right U And there's nothing wrong with that, right? You know, relationships that we might have where we kind of, you know meet someone in a shop, right? You know, you're there for a reason, you want something from them. they want something from you But you want that to be a good friendly interaction, but it's just 's just a transaction. Yeah. There's nothing deeper to it than that And then there are real friendships, right? where you can really rely on the other person and it's grounded on care and concern. You're not trying to get anything out of that person And so again, this is Aristotle, the scientist, if you like, I'm going to analyze human behavior and human relationships, I'm going to see how they differ, and I'm going to classify them. And this is a useful thing to know because you might think that someone is a true friend and you can rely on them And they might think you're just a friend of utility and it's just about exchange back and forth And you need to have a sense of know you need to know what relationships you're in and where you stand. and you can only do that if you've made these classifications. Okay. So friendship, fair enough. I'm also thinking about I'm trying to think what people might have heard about Aristotle that they might want some elucidation on. And another thing that Aristotle is known for in the context of ethics is what's come to be known as like virtue ethics. Typically if you're like a student of philosophy, particularly high school or undergraduate, you kind of learn there are different ways of thinking about ethics. You could be a consequentialist, in which case you care about the consequences of an action, like utilitarianism orr you're a deontologist who thinks there are like rules to follow Divine command theory And then there's this sort of third option which sits in the middle, which is virtue ethics. and it's about what the virtuous person What does that mean? What is virtue? What is a virtuous person And how does it connect to what we've spoken about so far So Virtue ethics is focused on developing these character traits like courage, moderation, justice and a range of others that he discusses. Genosity will be another example And so the thought is, if you want to live a good life Don't think of it as there's a set of rules you have to follow, right? Or ten commandments or Aanteian commands. Instead, what you want to do is develop the right character traits so that whatever situation you find yourself in, you've got the skills to deal with it. And rules can be a bit too black and white, they can be a bit too blunt and you know people will be familiar with all the sorts of paradoxes, the Kantian, you know, the do you lie to the person at the door? Yeah, that's right. The the lunatic comes to the door trying to kill your friend. Do you lie about whether your friend is there or not And if you think that it's all about rules, don't lie, never lie, right? then you get in these kinds of problems Whereas if you're developing the right character traits and you find yourself in that situation, then it's like, well, on the basis of being you know being just and fair to my friends Given the specifics of this situation right here right now, I can use the character traits that I have in order to decide what to do rather than just kind of unthinkingly applying a rule And Aristos was quite clear about this. There are no straightforward rules in life because every situation is unique. So we need to judge each one as we find it And so virtue ethics is about developing the skills so that you can cope with those very different random situations. And what about this idea that these virtues sit in the midst of two extremes? We sometimes hear Aristotle described as believing in what's come to be known as the golden mean. What's all that about Yeah. so I mean, he thinks thinks a lot of he thinks that Vices are often extremes, right? If If you go to the extreme, you're probably going wrong. right? The right thing to do is probably somewhere in the sensible middle, right which might not sound very sort of exciting or sexy But maybe it's true, right Right? People often think that, you know, want you want to push things to the limit, but actually maybe not. So he thinks that a lot of virtues can be understood as existing in between two two vices. So moderation is an obvious example that it's somewhere in the middle Um Courage, he thinks is in the middle between cowardice at one end and kind of recklessness at the other end And for a number of other virtues, he thinks this is a really good way to think about them. Genosity is going to sit somewhere between kind of sort of stupidly giving all your money away or being really stingy and never giving any money away at all. So there's going to be a sensible middle ground. Yeah. I mean know we all know people who I like virtuous to a fault. I think I was so used to thinking of the idea that There's like good and bad there are good ways and bad ways to behave and as long as you're doing the good things, you should just do as much of it as you can. But then you come across the person who like too brave, the kind of person who always wants to stand their ground and get into a fight or wants to stupidly run into the burning building even though there's no hope of saving anyone or whatever. And you're kind of like you know, it kind of makes you a bit uncomfortable or someone who's like so, so kind that like it's almost like, uncomfortable. Like you sort of, you know, I don't know, you'd be a little bit uncomfortable in your chair and they're like, Oh my goh, Oh, I'm sorry let me let me fix that Let me fix it. can Let me get you a pillow do you it and you're like, it's bit uncomfort. It's too much But obviously I mean, it's obvious that too much in the other direction is also bad. and so It's somewhere in in the middle. And this is not a sort of unique insight to Aristostle Buters sort of central path and the Cfucius sort of has the same idea. It's sort of quite like well established in many ethical systems that Temperance, mediation, being in the middle is key. Yeah Absolutely. I mean, you know, another example, for instance, if someone is incredibly selfish, that's clearly a vice If someone pays no attention to their own personal needs to the point that they neglect themselves, that's clearly a vice as well. There's a sensible middle ground where people are looking after themselves but not to the point of selfishness. So again, that would be another middle ground example But I mean, Aristotle isn't kind of dogmatic about this. he says, well, there are some things that are clearly just wrong and there's no kind of moderate version. I mean a nice example he gives his There's no moderate way to do adultery. Adultery is just not the right thing to do. So there'll be some exceptions. but he just thinks it's a useful way of thinking about what the right thing to do is it's probably going to be somewhere somewhere sensible and central. Even then like with something like adultery. I mean, I know if you're talking about like a physical act, it's pretty black and white, but even then like On the one side, there's the person who has a wife and just just doesn't care and will like you know talk to other women and meet up with them and do all sorts of stuff. But then on the other side, there's the person who might be like terrified to talk to anybody of the opposite sex for fear that, you know, they they're somehow doing something wrong because they got a wife and they won't even talk to their to their best friend's wife orbe because I don't know, like just going to you can kind of imagine even that going going too far and that really what you want is where in the middle like,ah, I can have a wife and I can talk with women and have friendships and relationships with with them without committing adultery. L even that itself seems like it sort of sits on a continuum and that mediation is is perhaps kind of kind of key. But what I'm interested in is that these specific virtues to us sound perfectly reasonable. like yeah bravery sounds good, couourage sounds good, you know, generosity sounds good The way that we got here metaphysically is to talk about the fact that there is such thing as a human being and it has a natural function and that function is reason. And thinking as philosophers, we have to get rid of our assumptions that we know what's good and what's bad Why is generosity reasonable. I mean, it seems like nice, it seems great. everyone likes generosity and generous people, but like Isn't it rational to be self interested, like why not? if you can get away with it, if The only thing we're really talking about here with Aristotle is just what in fact serves the function of rationality Why generosity? Wh bravery? Why these particular virtues? Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club withith cool finds and like a whole community. It's a club. Of course, Jason, it's in the name. Sam's Club Yeah. Come join us S's cllub. Chronic migraine, fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life In Botox, onnabacha Linum tooxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with fourteen or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection s side pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, astma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugarics's disease, myasthenia Gravis or Lambd Eaten syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit Botoxpronicmigraine. com or call one eight hundred four four Botox to learn more M Yeah, that I mean, that's a really interesting question, isn't it? I think I mean, There are two different places where Aristotle comes close to giving kind of a definition of human being, right? So one of them is to say rational animal Another one is to say Social animal. Yeah, right Some animals live in in packs and herds Others are more solitary. Human beings live in packs and herds, right? We live in tribes, we live in villages You know, when we're born, we're this long, we're utterly useless. And if we were left on our own, we'd be dead within a week, right? So necessarily we're brought up in families So we our very survival depends on other people. So in order to survive, you have to get along with other people. So kind of socially positive virtues like generosity and justice, right not running around killing everybody is actually really, really important for our survival abbsolutely fundamental So you know we live in a culture where we've been encouraged to think that we should all be ruthless individualists and we can survive on our own That's just a lie, right? I mean, really, it's a lie. We're all dependent on each other in all sorts of ways that we might not immediately notice, right? People grow the food that I eat ople filter the water that I drink I've never met these people, but I couldn't survive without them. So we're all dependent on each other in all sorts of really complex ways. and obviously today, those ways are even more complex than arristotle could ever have imagined So getting along with other people is essential for our survival. So that's if you like kind of the biological origin of those sociable virtues, we may say. So do you think that Aristotle's ethics is ultimately descriptive. I mean, like When we think about ethics, it usually sounds in this sort of mystical way that we don't quite understand. Well, you just should do this. There's this should component of the universe that you just have to abide by. whereas with Arsistotle, it sounds like he's just saying case. It is in fact the case that you're a human in fact has a particular function and is in fact served by doing these particular things, which kind of seems to reduce ethics to description, maybe. Yes, I mean, you can certainly present it in a very kind of descriptive way. This is Aristotle, the biologist just describing this strange species that he's encountered. He just happens to be one of them. Yeah right. But there's also, I think, a kind of a normative element that comes through as well. So Adult human being doesn't control their appetites and desires and who never really thinks through their decisions Aristotle is going to say that's a bad human being. They've gone wrong, right? They've failed to be a human being in the full sense of the word because they're not actrualizing their distinctive defining capacities. And that feels like really Judgmental right. And in a sense, you could say, okay, it's no different from him saying this eyeball iss broken. descriptive It's a bad table. Yeah, exactly. But it feels as if there's a bit more normative force to it than that also. Yeah. Itertain only feels like that, But then I think it can also be quite attractive to people who are suspicious of morality and maybe they're not realists about ethics and they think it's a little bit sort of wishy washy For Aristotle maybe like, I mean if I say that's a bad table, I'm not saying it's an immoral table, I'm not saying the table should hold things up in any other sense than just, well that's what's for and it's not doing it. And that Aristotle's ethics could in theory be reduced to that kind of thinking such that it's not mystical,' suuper like It's divine, it's not supernatural, it'shing like that. It's just look, there's a There is in fact a way There is a function that you're supposed to serve and you're not serving it. And that's all that ethics really means, whichich seems like a sort of easier pill to swallow then accepting this new ontological category of thing called should and ought that sort of floats out there somewhere and we can't quite sort of pin down. quite attractive. I know that I Alsta McIntyre has that book A virtue which seeks to sort of rehabilitate virtue ethics and point out that basically What he thought had happened is that What we mean when we talk about ethics and should and should not and good and bad, it's just like a different language to that which like someone like Aristotle was speaking When he says wor it's like good and bad, he just means him totally different way to the way that we do, which is why we kind of think ethics is a bit are weird and different and out there whereas Maybe for Aristotle. It's just a case of defining our terms differently and realizing that it's not that profound Yeah. and Given the kind of close interconnection between Aristotle and Christianity in the Middle Ages and after, and we talked a bit about Aquinas earlier We've used words like virtue and soul, which are both very loaded terms, again coming out of that Christian tradition And so I think one thing that might put Some people off Aristotle is thinking that he's kind of stuck within that model, right? Yeah But if we can kind of ditch those terms and ditch those associations and think, hey, this guy is a natural scientist, he's a biologist, he's trying to understand organisms. And off the back of that, he's producing what's ultimately a naturalistic ethics.. We then end up with a completely different image of who this guy is and why we might want to