Hey everybody welcome back to the new thinkery if you hear my voice that means David's not with us. We haven't heard from him so he might have slipped from this mortal coil but thankfully we've been replaced by a far wiser third Greg who's joining us today. Well he also goes by yeah it's a big guess not in stature not in physical size I mean maybe he's that anyway he's also a David he goes by David to his friends but he's CDC Reave a very famous academic philosopher well known to our folks I'm sure for a number of reasons he's the Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill his work is principally in Plato and Aristotle and Greek philosophy generally he has more books than Alex has follicles of hair but I'll just name a few philosopher Kings with Princeton Press 1988 Socrates in apology Hackett 1989 substantial knowledge air cells medics published with Hackett action contemplation and happiness and essay on Aristotle with Harvard press blindness and reorientation problems in Plato's Republic published with Oxford press Aristotle and practicalism Nick McKingethics book six with Harvard and many of those have been translated other languages for what's worth in addition to his own monographs he's translated so much Plato and Aristotle it's difficult to get track of quite frankly he's done Plato's Cratteless Euthapology Crido Republic Mino laws for goodness sake that's just play on the air style he's done the politics and she then revised that's what they make of King ethics the metaphysics which Alex and I were just falling over before we start recording the anima physics rhetoric generation of animals with the history of animals part one and parts of animals part one dick yeah well you guys are making this up you damean ethics and then he has a book called air cells theology which is a source of primary documents in aerosol the deal with aerosols and stuff from down and called aerosols chemistry which includes passages from coming to be in passing away as well as my personal favorite the meteorology and the text that we're discussing today is entitled aerosols dialectic which includes aerosols topics and sifics for reputations professor Reeve very generously made this text available to me in my reading group as we were working our way through the argan on this over the last year in fact and so I reached out to him he was very generous and then I thought you know we should have him on the show to talk about this book so the only last thing I'll mention before we kick it off for the show is so tonight we're talking about aerosols dialectic but really exciting we'll talk about this more to the other show is he's actually the general editor of a brand new project of all of aerosols works slated for completion this year to be published in the year 2025 with Hackett so quite the undertaking and that's just what he does in his spare time you know just translating all of aerosols so thank you professor Reeve it's a pleasure to have you here pleasure thank you for allowing me Greg you left my favorite part out of the along with education to go ahead but I know that you've turned down a visiting professor yes yeah offers are Princeton and Yale and they are worse for the way according to you right absolutely yes I have actually my notes that's what Alex is laughing at and also you tell it read college which the official model which is sex drugs and rock and roll or something like this right that's what they say and locally else yeah exactly but now you're a very wonderful school I've totally enjoyed my 25 years there I was very wonderful place so yeah sure I'm just a professor maybe the place to begin is maybe two questions why this particular text or why these texts why did you translate them and maybe just if you could give an overview I realize that's a lot to ask like what are they about aerosols topics and subspersedor validations away the way to think about them is this I think when you reach the end of the posterior analytics you discover the science for Aristotle is kind of ideally a sort of deductive or syllogistic system starting from definitions of essences as first principles and then deriving by syllogisms all of the rest of the science that theorems you might call them and that raises the question of how do you defend the first principles Plato raises this question already first president if you've got it if you're a first principle person first principles really are where the rubber hits the road so speaking you really you have to say something about well you can't derive them from anything more primitive because they are the most primitive things their first principles or so I call them starting points and dialectic tells us right away that it has a path or a route towards the starting points of all philosophical sciences so that's a whole of them really per hour so the question is what is dialectic to him Plato makes the same move at the end of book six of the of the republic says mathematics is great it does all this derivation from first principles but when you ask about to defend those first principles another treatment is obvious or as hypotheses and that's like good enough what do we need instead dialectic so what does dialectic do well one of the things it doesn't do is provide you with something from which you derive the first principles it can't be anything like that rather what it does is it defends the first principles by showing you how to refute any objections to them so the first principles are taken from a sort of empirically satisfactory that is they really do work out the starting points of all this empirical knowledge that you've got that question else though how do you justify them how do you get a clearer sighted understanding of them and I think the way to think of that is though so as it were the lens the lens of your mind that was kind of scratched by our re-i as our sort of custom problems puzzles you can't solve and what dialectic does is it cleans off the graphics so now you see clearly what before you had only a b-footling kind of vision of so I think a very good example is take suppose you've got parameters telling you that nothing moves and here's a argument for you such a but can't be moved here can be changed right nothing can happen here's an argument for you and now you know now as I was first move is to say which I think is the right move well you know you can't have arguments for everything and in this case which is too well often either arguments we can just feel things but this is the first kind of thing and the other is how do you dismantle the argument so how do you as you don't untie but not that the argument ties in your understanding of the first principles of physics which are the things moving change so that's what dialectic that's why dialectic is so important and in a way why it comes after the posterior analytics so in the last chapter of the posterior analytics you just hear that you have news understanding of starting points and first principles but you're not telling anything about how this does that and so notice that what this what dialectic does is it doesn't justify the first principles it gives you a clearer vision of them gets real the obstacles to them otherwise they're thought to be secure as first principles yeah just a small point news news comes into the end of the postural analytics as you mentioned I sort of joke on your furthest is like new sex market not because it comes in and just saves everything right at the end yes news for the folks at home of our non-greek audience just means intellect or maybe even thought more generally or something like this yeah it's a little more than that and it's hard to find a good translation I like understanding oh yeah that's good but you just can understand the first but yeah yeah yeah sorry and I think it is and I think actually you're your new sex mechanism appropriate because it is a kind of deus I mean it is a divine element in us and that always makes you a little suspicious right I mean if it's miracles are going to be forthcoming before you know it and I think it's very important to see that regardless of its divine origins that's got we know we can do a pretty good understanding of how it operates without bringing God yeah if I could if I could so you got very quickly to the end of your introduction where you discuss the question of whether dialectic is a science for Aristotle you point the passage where it seems to point in two different directions and it's so if science is concerned with demonstration alone then it wouldn't be a science but in so far as the first principles or starting points are not subject to demonstration must they be circular dialectic would be the only way to have clarity about the first things now this is let me to a question on the one who you want to say since demonstration is demonstration starting from the first principles and working its way down that is science par excellence but if dialectic is the way that we clear the ground and come to an understanding or intellectual however we want to translate of the first principles is dialectic primary only temporally or also in terms of like absolute status do you understand the question I get the picture well I mean I think the answer is we probably need to distinguish to be clear about it something like photodilectic which is sort of like how we how imminent this is what we this is where we are now so these puzzles have come up we see how to resolve them undo them and in that sense we get a proof for sarah's not a cause of the first principle itself but of course there may be puzzles we don't know that haven't come up yet but clever people are working on right on and then as soon as they come up the first principle is again on now we're understanding about our waivers because we don't see how to resolve the first principle as our commitment to those weaker because we have committed to other things from which is also we follow now what are we going to do and I think that that's our that's always speak the human situation right there can always be new puzzles but what understanding is that's where we are so that's what proto dialectic is when we saw the puzzles we've got understanding of the first principles tomorrow we lose them because new puzzles are in the ideal right all the at the limit all the puzzles are solved yeah well maybe I should um you kind of already touched on some of these questions about how these two works relate to the organ as a whole but maybe you can say a little bit about to this or a few things and I'll ask a couple questions for one is so dialectics this is in the second chapter and you also mentioned this in your introduction that one of the things that dialect does it sort of seems to clear the way for the philosophical sciences but also it also is useful in training yeah and arguing with others yeah so I was wondering and then even in this word of tations you know my first reading of that text or is that well here's how these nasty folks argue yeah but then there's also some passages where it's like well here's how you actually can see all what you're trying to say oh yeah and this is how you can you can get some of your and that makes the number you're like man is this book teaching you how to yeah wait for me to do this well as oh I mean that's a shameful takeaway I really I completely condemn what you've said yeah though there's some truth in unfortunately or fortunately sci-fi so the point I was though as an intellectual training dialectic enables you to work on either side of a question right so it's not dialectic per se but so I was on the side of the angels dialectic as a craft or sweet causal kind of practical so productive science I think it's way to tell you how to produce arguments and how to undo them right in response to various interlocutors so you need to be able to play both roles you need to be a good devil's advocate you need to be a good angelic advocate to play out those two roles so per force you're going to learn how by learning how to do something on the side of the angels you're also going to learn how to do it on the side of the devils what determines how you will use it is not the craft itself of what dialectic itself but your character so to grasp the right to see things in the right way you need as you want to you feel yeah you need a good natural yeah kind of good you need to be a good character to do that so it's just like everything else in the hands of madmen atomic weapons are really terrible things I also was really terrible thing I should say because gonna use the do awful things to people in the hands of people of good character it serves the human good or tries to make things better the statistical refutations is a slightly different kind of book from the dialects put together with dialectic and I was always refers to what I was part of dialectic part of the dialectic part of the topics but it has in mind the pretender the scientific knowledge so a big part of freedom for us I think there's a very still enormously important very important part of intellectual freedom for us or epistemic goodness is that we're able to detect for tenders to expertise as an author a lot of them so what do you know just claim that they know how to do things because the world is full of them every time you open a newspaper you have somebody telling you they know how to do things or that you're doing it all wrong you need to do it a different way I know I think the the sophisticated refutations I teaches you how to detect pretend groups and in that sense it's part of as we would say liberal education not in the in the sense of which there are political liberals but in the sense in which a free person has the intellectual freedom but doesn't make them slaves to experts and so they know how to tell so to speak they're good at detecting fraudulent claims to expertise and that's what the statistical refutations about as I am not the softest outer unmasked the softest but as you say rightly in the process you can't learn how to be a little better at being a self-stirself and there's no way out of that that's about your character it's not about your expertise I have so many questions about I mean one so I'll go I've got sort of deeper psychological questions and more one of the things that comes up is about when dialectical problems emerge and those are said to emerge when you know there might be disagreements among the wise or between the ordinary and the wise and then there's the question of who counts as the wise and who's notable for wisdom and as you point out and you know this goes back to Socrates it's in Plato's office right you know this office likes to dress himself up as a philosopher yeah yeah so there's a difficulty maybe a practical or social epistemological problem of trying to clear up these issues and you can clear it up for yourself I suppose if one's a philosopher there's another question there but we'll only there is there a way out of this problem is there a subtle give us any navigation about how to overcome the problem and potential because as you know you open up twitter you look on like it's a lot of pretenders right yeah so I think part of it now takes us off into that other dimension of Aristotle's thought is political ethical thought it was a big part of what we're asking is something like this how in a corrupt political system how we're not a corrupt constitution it was our our intellectual or epistemic ability is going to be exercised and that's kind of one one question and a different one is what would they be well how would they be exercised in a good political constitution so if you're like there's a lot of epistemic work that's done at the constitutional political level and that has downstream effects on how much epistemic work you have to do as a citizen or as a thinker or philosopher so when the market was uh still vacated with pretenders the task goes way up so we have we have ways to do this we have well university degrees we have all kinds of ways to certify yourself and betray and we have all of those kinds of things and that's immensely important as you want to be selected our dentist doctor or teacher anything else we rely on a huge body of certification when that gets undermined as I'd say to some degree that's being undermined today in our political system the effect is a kind of epistemic chaos it's not clear who you should listen to so what so Aristotle is sort of imagining us you know so ah so now here we are well educated people so it's a very important notion in Aristotle is to pay by do when that's the well educated person and that's a good grip on how these bodies of knowledge are supposed to work so they can when somebody says you know whatever it is you know thin thighs in 30 days or you know I just you know they make the massive market of self-help books bogus cool thing you know you just think that's impossible so you don't you don't think okay because it's by the back you know you're you're you're you're having a good sense of what's credible and what is it and that's what our good education is supposed to kind of produce a good the kind of education that makes you free of that kind of junk well increasingly I think we've drained a lot of the content out of general education and liberal education so that no longer provides the kind of intellectual strength that enables you to kind of filter out a lot of the noise so there there's a whole set of issues that are on the table when you raise that very good question about you know what are we supposed to do though yeah this is something that came out really well in your introduction just the sort of ethical political dimension and I kept finding myself thinking of the end of the politics right where the importance of the liberal education and trying to produce somebody who's maybe like a foreigner right the the philosopher I'll just say if you want thin thighs you can order them on Amazon they'll be there overnight you don't have to buy absolutely yep yep and you can go to Mexico and have them fill it too for hardly anything just so it fits you might die in the process but yeah yeah um gosh how about some big questions how about that it seemed like okay all right let me start with a real big one what else I'll get right um I think that's you know it sounds too hard a question and I think it's too hard a question to just come up head on it's very good but you have to kind of back off divide and conquer in pieces so I think so I think one of the things that Aristotle got pretty much right in my this sort of way view is general philosophical methodology sort of how to do philosophy I think Aristotle is the master really of methodology I mean the person who comes closest and actually somebody like can't right because really ours the theory I mean all the method comes pretty much from Arizona I think but the methodology goes very much kind of double entry bookkeeping you introduce an ocean to explain something good oh that goes over on the debit column now you've got a new notion tell me about that if I can't do that you're you're uh you're uh you're explaining things in terms of things that are not yet uh clear enough and articulated enough for you to be able to use them as tools so you incur a cost every time you introduce a concept to do some explanatory work for you and Aristotle really is a master I was like I've keeping track of all of those things and then giving you an account of each one of them it's a stunning you know of philosophical thinking I think so that's like the part where I say Aristotle gets right now the other part is like oh you know Aristotle's I think an imperissa is pretty much at every level he's always looking at data and metadata and metadata and metadata and so on but of course as data setters uh as antique right he doesn't have the epistemic engines that we do he doesn't have microscopes telescopes MRIs x-rays any of that stuff and so his data set what he's trying to be true to when he theorizes is so very constrained or constricted relative to our data set so we wouldn't expect that he would get it right on all of these points where the data is doing a lot of the work and Aristotle himself is completely clear about this right until we're very limited on the data we have when it comes to astronomy so on it was naked eye astronomy by and large then we got more data we'll know more similarly about the microscopic can only get so far down with the naked eye and then you're lost no so you're a biology no breaking and it's very important to keep in mind yes oh but it's a matter of what the data set it up is uh then it's unfair so speak to say to Aristotle you didn't get things right right because the data set was limited on we should do much better than he'd have given the data given our far larger so data uh of course the plenty of things that Aristotle gets wrong and that's not surprising either so one of the things I think it was really soft and though he's not really impervious of us uh he he tends to as we all have to rely on other no-wears and researchers we can't do it all ourselves so you know Aristotle takes this we get this from the topics where he takes the judgments of people who've investigated the matter seriously and relies on it until he has good reason not to and that sometimes he's relying on people who are not right observers or who have uh as we say ideologically contaminated vision or theoretically contaminated vision they don't see the world the way it is but that doesn't make you not an impervious right I mean we all do that and we would be stifled if we didn't rely on you know the information transmission from others and other reliable sources and finding out what the reliable sources are because we were saying a real challenge so that's a kind of that's why I say well what do you do right I think though on all of these questions for example just to take a different move to different character or you know the politics I mean Aristotle actually said but let's see how they do it and whether it works or not so we collected all these constitutions we have the Constitution of Athens and then fragments of other constitutions but we know we collected some hundred whatever it does 126 or I can't remember exactly what the number is but a bigger 100 uh constitutions and and look to see what was good and what was bad in them this was the beginning not just of constitutional history but of critical constitutional history right looking to see what's good in them and what isn't good in them and what works and what doesn't what can be improved and what yeah they're after all have been tested by living them out by experiments and living they're actually carried out and that seems to be a major achievement too which is look and see don't don't get on your armchair start thinking you probably won't do a very good job if there's a big amount of empirical data out there for you to know about a lot of work by other people you should start with that I think that's good advice too so I want to try to return to two points we discussed earlier and try to put them together and see what you think of this so the first is dialectic as the only way to gain clarity about the starting sort of clearing of the the ground you could say um and then the uncertainty of whether new problems could arise so you said ideally yes you would just be over and done and then you move on and you go do something right and it becomes merely an educational process for others but in the event of uncertainty I find myself so it's one thing when you have question and answer are different right it's another thing when you're actually thinking dialectically and you're both question or answer right so the softest empathy is to get these definitions of of philosophy as a conversation the soul has with itself in silence so the softest outside is not always troublesome at least as far as science is concerned you can kind of pick out fallacies and be reasonably confident it's the softest within that's a little bit difficult where from motivated thinking or maybe being too eager to achieve the starting points you might make a mistake is this a horizon that we're just stuck with that we're not going to overcome or no I don't I don't think that's right I mean I think we're in the case of true introduction of the starting points is there some sort of moment of epistemic certainty that's insurmountable do you get do you get my question I do yes but I'm not sure that I want to try to answer that last bit about epistemic certainty I want to go back first to the earlier part of what you said so I think one of the things we know about the mind we know that maybe Aristotle didn't know it was thought our minds are themselves dependent for their structure to receive on social environments a lot that's why solitary confinement is such a horrible punishment and a way in which we correct for our known biases right of the biases that are involved in self-knowledge self-delusion etc etc these can be corrected for by the right kind of community of of thinkers and dialecticians so you know I think it's very important that both played when Aristotle founded schools and there's another great achievement we can easily forget about you know these were the first two western universities and every now it's like crucial fact about them is that you're surrounded by really smart people so you know you didn't have to rely on your own things that you're also I've got a lot of proof by Thogoruses they were not right and then you know to be said whatever happens to be in the next office runs that takes a look at the references but that doesn't follow from this look now you are and I think that happens to us regularly I think that the fact is we're part of I can't it's you know we like to think of ourselves as kind of knowers in the you know isolated knowers but actually we're knowers as part of a large environment of researchers and investigators and other things that it give us the confidence and so on to make certain kinds of plans that's having been tested I think it's remarkable if you look at how mathematics actually works you know how the number of people who will that proof it's gonna be immensely obviously it's not valid to see before they'll publish it right it's gone over by you know people who spend their lives on the little pieces and ah yeah right and that's crucial I think to the kind of security we feel it's like people who've investigated you know spent their lives investigating one bit of what we were drawing upon saying yes that's right that's very important in fact just today on this one fragment I was looking at I said I don't understand the translation of this oh it's notoriously difficult translation piece of text by Ambuchus but I consulted an expert on Ambuchus who says yes you're translating this roughly speaking right but you need to read this instead of that you know that you know how I know I'm confident I was you know pretty confident before I thought well it has to mean something like this in context but that's quite different from sort of mapping the meaning on to the actual sentence so now I think oh here's an expert one of the worlds we're experts on this one is life we can teach text and it shows me that yes this is right that's good so I think that's the way we escape the kind of self-psisic predicament that otherwise is prone to all kinds of errors that we know of is that we know we we we converse as you even I already know we're we're conversing and tracking each other's fears on bringing up points that we have overlooked and the richer that environment is so the smarter the people you're surrounded by the better you are so like playing tennis if you play against people worse than you all the time your game goes worse I have a question about um this is in the topics it's uh in chapter eight yeah I'm gonna for I'm gonna put a little bit of background on the turn to the posterior analytics this is let's see if I find the chapter in first thing this chapter 22 of alpha I think you have one I'm just I'll just I'll give the question that I'll be a little more precise and get so gives you more time I think in the posterior analytics uh the question in my mind and you've already kind of hit it this is their demonstration simply or are all demonstrations do they all proceed on the basis of some kind of supposition and so I guess my question frankly is I've been working through in my own head I mentioned we had this reading on aerosol as a writing trying to figure out what science is for aerosol and I've been I've been very tempted to the notion that they're strictly speaking is nothing scientific in aerosol that he finds his own understanding in other words that he sort of concedes that science proceeds on the basis of a supposition or um hypothesis maybe I think this is Barnes translation he's translated to the supposition yeah I'll I'll take it I'll turn to the topic changes and you know you and Barnes know another seems like great you guys yeah I thought so I'll just read the posterior analytics and I'll read the passage from the topics um thus if it is possible to know something by way of a demonstration simplicity which is hot blows I think in the Greek and not on the basis of something else i.e. on the then the predicates in between must come to a stop if they do not come to a stop and there's always something above whatever term has been taken then there will be no demonstrations of all of them hence if it is not possible to survey infinitely many items we shall not know through a demonstration items for which there is a demonstration thus if we are not more happily related to them by knowing them which is a weird really weird term phrase just being sort of well disposed toward the principles we still be able to understand that nothing through demonstrations simply simplicity but only on the basis of a supposition um and then this is in chapter eight of book two of the topics something kind of similar here uh um aerosols again if scientific knowledge is supposition the scientifically noble is also supposable so just um yeah in a way it's impressive aerosol seems to be sort of humble and understanding like all of our ways of proceeding scientifically they begin from something that we don't strictly speaking know and it's demonstrable and then if that supposition changes then things may change and maybe this accords with your account earlier as well then that is that might change and then therefore what we would know would change as well but that just throws me into a whole lot of epistemic uncertainty and maybe i'm just not i'm not happy with this but yeah i wouldn't so let's uh go to the um okay to the topics thank you please that's so the other epistemic attitudes right hougalapsis as the magnolia person i was that by which we play a double game uh with things so you say we can either suppose them to be true or suppose them to be false we don't have we don't have to take a stance i believe we've already taken a stance you know what we're going to be converse of so hougalapsis is important and when when a when our start says that epistemic is right it's a kind of supposition but of course there's more to it than that just as belief is a kind of supposition but there's more to a mere supposition so that's not i think related directly to your question about the posterior analytics okay the posterior analytics is saying look you you have to get back to starting points because demonstration is always from starting things moreover there are uh if you like things in the background like logic right the common thing so sourstral colesom by which everyone in terms of which everyone argues so uh shall we start us in the second book of the meta physics right you have to already be trained in analytics before you're ready to sit down and take business and electricity and metaphysics right you don't need logic you know you're gonna be lost right you've got to start uh all right well if there be some preliminary training you know as we would say you have to speak a language that's a good starting point you can't understand the lectures or over you better not be busy asking well but why can't things be true i'm not true at the same time right right that's this class you should it's all right this one presupposes that so you have to take that one um and i think though uh so i think that the general point on the posterior analytics is you've got to start from starting points right and these are or can be taken as hypotheses until they're as aware properly treated by dialectics so that you have understanding of them right otherwise they are played oh so it's too they're hypotheses things that you're taking for granted for the sake of proof right but which are not your themselves out of issue in the thing that they're taking for granted and what you're doing now yeah now i'm tempted to go to this passage from the metaphysics where uh the principal you just mentioned uh the principal not kind of tradition doesn't air so refer that as an opinion or belief there and he says it's just the sturdiest yeah i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i know i'm very proud i remember i just go lost uh wrote on the invention of belief and one applies right uh in the the general history of philosophy i think and uh i thought this paper was false um i thought of course i was not able to invent belief um and then i thought okay so i better write a paper myself for the factage and uh and it's about a couple of lapses if doctors and i was staying there and i was not alone about how they properly play play out um that's a very good paper by joskin bersh and says much as well of course it's a very illuminating paper um but i think that uh uh uh it's right i say in that paper that the most secure starting point of all the principal of non-com tradition is a it's a belief for uh it's not a piece of scientific knowledge but it that way um but what makes it most secure right is the fact that you can give a a demonstration a dialectical demonstration of a Aristotle says against the person who denies it that's that's the model it's not dialectical uh uh demonstration of dialectical proofs are always against somebody raises a puzzle right and you come and they tell yourself the person who raises a puzzle about those you can show that they are themselves committed uh to the principal by their by the fact that they have to signify something in order to get into the argument at all they have to mean something by their words otherwise as you said they're just stones you know they're j you thought they were speaking but they're not they're just making noise with their mouths you can tell you should be able to tell by our questions that we're both very concerned with the possibility of science or what yeah yeah i'm saying that and the you know so if dialect and we have and we have one of the world's experts right here so yeah i always tell us i do but i think i think that there's a way in which you might say science needs no defense that that's the first thought would be science defense itself by its success and capacity to explain and all kinds of other things uh so we don't you know it's one of the most exciting and important human enterprises that there is and uh it's been going on for a long time with enormous success i mean we are benefiting from it and the fact that we can talk to each other on zoom yeah i think we certainly don't want to think that you know somehow or other it stands in need of certification by philosophy not philosophy that's what ours is that's exactly what ours is saying so when he confronts it's a big question you know he about skepticism so arristodel doesn't get excited about skepticism and a lot of people are like what about the skeptics and arristodel's thought is that you know look that's an argument it's kept except it's an argument and on the other hand we have this massive amount of success okay so that's a puzzle that goes over into the part of our intellectual enterprise that's dialectic be good to solve the puzzle but we're not waiting to sell it to go on with our science that would be to give the argument way too much weight arguments or arguments they have a certain amount of weight trouble with philosophers as you know well maybe it's a problem that's a problem that's a problem that's a problem that's a problem that's a problem that's a lot of people suffer from in our philosophy department says they think arguments are the greatest things says i don't know what if you've got an argument oh that's just great and it's our philosophy that arguments are pretty good for preaching to the choir but you know where it really comes to hard work they don't do that much worry in part because right people have to agree to some of the things that you're you know depending on your argument and they may not at which point it's very hard to get an attraction with them so a lot of the time i think our thousand other part of our ourselves could something that we should take seriously is that you know arguments are good to have and sometimes they're very useful and helpful but they're not the bees knees i want to i want to push back a little bit on this notion that science doesn't need a demonstration because just as a matter of historical fact there was a log uh aristotelian tradition specifically on the medieval Arabs of meaning to defend it against theologians right and that's a different question yeah that's a different question and can absolutely defend supposed to be the defense against someone well of course if it's a theologian's uh in the Islamic world you do need to worry about them just have a lot of power you know they could stop you from doing it and maybe we're teetering towards some elements of the same kind of theocracy right here on the United States of America what you know what you're going to do research on can have no right from powerful people who will fire you or kill you if you try to do the research involved in that case arguments might be very helpful but they mightn't be helpful yeah they might not do much for you know i think even if uh one of my favorite taxes are these uh decisive treatise where he's beginning from gazale's decisive criterion and he's kind of dialectical argument on the basis of law but also on the basis of gazale's own interpretive principles in defense of reading the topics the Greek textbooks on online and using those as a way and and it strikes me that um and i find those those sorts of works very powerful as a depiction of right so you're saying maybe you don't give the arguments maybe this isn't a demonstration but something well i mean i think it depends on the faithless the people you're arguing with i mean i'm sure you've had this experience in arguing with uh book true believers so to speak which is they love to argue with you until you refute them if they ask for your argument and then what they tend to do is back away or become a professor for do something else because their commitment to argument is actually uh so let's be downstream from a deeper commitment and the deeper commitment is not subject to being questioned by argument you they won't they they're there's some i don't know you've probably seen some of this stuff and whether we ought to really call religious belief belief there's a new book religion that's make believe i don't know i'm just really with you i think this is a bit like um whether we have a leaf and be leaf right whether there are things that we we say we believe but actually they're not subject they're not sensitive to evidence they're not subject to refutation they seem to be held in place by something else rather than what we normally think of as the grounds for belief so maybe there's some truth in that but let's get back to the other point because i think maybe that's a safer one to uh say on which is um arguments are limited on their power but but they can be very effective for the not for the person developing the argument to better understand the position that argument accounts by saying for example say that it's inconsistent uh that it you know has commitments that it can't face up to even if even if to the opponent uh they don't uh they don't do much to get them to change their minds they can help you to better understand the position because we can ask you a question uh you sort of spoke about uh one of the ways that science is victorious because of success like it's what it's done like it was able to do but i couldn't help but think all the obvious examples mirror modern so i was just wondering if you saw a kind of continuity from ancient to modern science or if you see big and then for example they're modern in what way is it a continuation of Aristotle's science and what ways of rejection is are there some ways in which aerosol if they are different is there any way in which aerosols natural scientific natural scientific writings are look it's obvious like you said you didn't have a microscope but is there any other ways in which you might be superior to modern science or there's a lot of questions in there i was a very i mean i was a very difficult question to answer but yeah back to the first bit of a about bacon dick hard on us we think of it the modern rise of modern science right and the and this quote unquote rejection of Aristotle well first of all we read 25 pages of the meditation so you realize how much Aristotle hasn't been rejected at all this scholastic background that dick hard just exists obviously is what he learned from textbook ours and communism and in la flush so you know that that's there the other i think i was to think dogmatic Aristotelianism of the sort that got absorbed into Catholicism via St.
Thomas that's a very different animal from Aristotle and partly it gets things in Aristotle wrong i just give one example because i think this is a very great example is uh so when we think about what is a form you know if so form hyalomorphic analysis or matter form analysis one of Aristotle's great achievements i mean i think it's a Plato-Dessent degree but completely developed and Aristotle and utilized very intelligently by him but what's a form exactly what's an intelligible form you know this so in Catholicism and St. Thomas and later an intelligible form is something that you don't think of us being present even when uh even when you might not think so so when you know in transubstantiation when the when the bread and wine get transformed into the body and blood of Christ the real form of blood and flesh are present under as they say under the appearances of bread and wine but those appearances go all the way down right and that is very hard to understand rather than it's a mystery but nonetheless in Aristotle there could be no such question forms are formative motion movements they're there as i think of them they are it's like if you were thinking of saying DNA and how it codes for the whole animal um Aristotelian the form of the human being is something that can be transmitted in male semen to female catamenial fluid to produce an embryo that's a huge difference from Plato when you think about the platonic form of a human being as you sort of think of a model of a human being is wrong but you you sort of think i kind of statue like a perfect human Aristotle thinks no no forms can't be anything like that how could you transmit something like that in a tiny little piece of semen so what are forms such that they can be transmitted is it's huge wonderful question that he raises and then now let's see how we can answer them it comes very closely think to what we think of as information a certain kind of colloquial package that when you sell it in motion produces in order a whole complex series of of links so you can't say so just one example but there are many others in which you know Aristotelianism got calcified and in scholastic teaching and labor as we think in the 19th century and 20th century there was a return to Aristotle not to Aristotelianism and then a realization that the texts were vastly more richer and complex than that it led us to believe so that you know nowadays i think Aristotle's scholarship was at its most vibrant that's uh keep here actually alive on the present on the fourth century. It's good to hear you say Greg i know it's a question with a comment on what you said because one of the most frustrating things about reading Hobbes, Bacon, Descartes, on the ancients is that they don't they don't read the text or at least present a read. Oh that's absolutely true yeah but there are times when you see you're reading Hobbes for example you see oh he's got the ethics the specific passage in mind and you can kind of trace it or the politics but nothing like a textual engagement and refutation and one of the things that i think makes 19th and really 20th century to 21st century thought now so so vital is the fact that this is going on much more than it ever than it ever did you know.
I think that's right i mean i think that's us um we've made great steps forward on our understanding of Aristotle but i do want to capture that i think it matters you know we always want to feel um but you know we're part of a new dawn you know suddenly we've gotten rid of the past and we have last clear sight at least he thinks the way they really are and we can just as children do with their parents so we think ah they were so beat fertile but we have last living the pure light of day and that that's a very important human practice too it's not to be just wanton we cast aside the thought that you can you know that the anxiety of influence can be overwhelming you know they just can't do anything because Aristotle was so overwhelmingly great how could you possibly improve on that that's something that often we have to be dishonest to overcome we have to pretend that we're better than we are in order to go on with the under prize and that's not a trivial fact about us either. I have one comment about this and then a question on the basis of your marks my first comment is i wonder i think Alex and i've talked about this before but you know how spinoes and these guys i wonder what extent they don't sacrifice Aristotle recognizing that they can't aerosol has been so absorbed and so yoked as you mentioned that we want to get rid of the yoke the thing that's been yoked to we can't do that without also tossing aerosol out and so anyway but my question is uh along the lines of the parts of aerosol that have been absorbed by later thinkers and if this is too far field or too deep uh one's about the attorney the world and one's about god and so in in many places in aerosol's writings he speaks about the attorney the world is simply the way things are it's his official doctrine but in the topics he says it's a problem and so he's he's much he seems to be much less committed to the attorney the world of the topics we're actually discussing i just wanted to discuss that at all but then my second question is where aerosol speaks about god most famously is in land of course and i was just wondering what you make of aerosols account of god there are you persuaded and it's not what's the problem so so the first thing i think i was to to try to look out clearly see what exactly is being said and then think about it right so uh what's so thought thinking itself or what right no is no as he goes no as he's right what else that exactly and i think the closest you can come to understanding of is something like it's self-consciousness without any other object it's uh it's so to speak if you like what you have you got this is the way i put it to my students so think about think about a red pool ball but focus closure eyes think about a red pool ball and then move the red pool ball out of your uh you know just off screen so to speak you're in and you're sort of roughly you're in an illuminated kind of space right that's what it's like and the great mystics talk about this right as the kind of pinnacle of the greatest happiness the perfection of life is this out of pure thought well okay so hold that thought for a second it's thought thinking it's self-consciousness right and uh you know consciousness is a big problem for us we don't understand how to explain it so there's some people think oh well we ought to be panpsychists and there are elements of panpsychism in aerosol he says there's a little bit of soul in everything because soul is formed and form is present on everything right so there's a way in which you can kind of know Jim a little bit in that direction and uh we we don't the hard problem for us supposedly how do we not posit consciousness as a primitive in the world how do we derive how do we constitute a lot of other stuff and we don't know how to do that so in a sense you might say well Aristotle's thought is self-consciousness is the starting point of all knowledge because with our self-consciousness there's no knowledge and we say ah so what is that thing now though has to be present if there was to be knowledge in the world though leaving outside the cosmic role the divinity of this thing and I thought that all the planets were all around it and so on are moving by love as now they put such for this uh good but leaving that out because I mean can't really buy that uh but the self-consciousness part I like us uh not incredible and therefore to that sense you might say wow we've got a problem too we we want to give it a cosmic role as well maybe not that well cosmic role but another cosmic role and then we have to ask ourselves you know what what could play that role can we do better so that at least as it where makes it that's stupid yeah and I feel so I'm not sort of magical or something else or what we just could oh I don't know it was a long time ago people were stupid or whatever right or whatever right so our listeners can't won't have video but they don't see that you've been every time Greg and I speak you've been furiously translating Aristotle on the side and you've I think just completed another translation. I just finished a book like we were talking about it. What's it like translating all the other stuff I mean how do you you keep doing you must immensely enjoy the activity just tell us about what you like about translation what you hate about and uh yeah so uh so it sounds I fell into this that's one times the fall into one's life right so I wrote um as you mentioned earlier my first book Phosphorus Kings on the Republic and in the process I translated quite a few passages of the Republic for my own years never occurred to me really to be a translator I just translated it because I wanted to get it right so I speak for the purposes of my argument and as a result uh uh hula uh hula uh hula uh chai hula was done the the president of the company just died yesterday at a present old friend um but uh Jay uh had the hack that's most valuable property was really the group of translation of the republic and they had it for quite a few years and they wanted to do it a second it doesn't have a part to make money I'm in part to have a better translation and uh because of complex chain of acts I must say have me to do it and I produce group of readers not to be really a very successful translation of the republic so successful that I wish it hadn't been so successful because I think my film translates is much better but people say a lot of people you know like professors are like once they start the lectures through a tax they never want to change it so uh I've been you know as it were uh undone by my own success so that's really how the translating things started then uh John Cooper who was uh directing the project of a complete works of Plato for Hackett uh asked me if I would translate the cravelist because he couldn't find anybody uh as a part of the as it happened a hack out had sent both John and me a provisional beginning of a draft of a translation and our criticisms turned out to be essentially the same so he said well we still let you do it then and uh so then I translated the cravelist and that was a success you know so you know since you're carried along by the fact that you don't fall on the first step and uh then there was a John said you know we really should have a translation of the politics David why don't you translate the politics I translated that and that was very successful too in fact again so successful that the much better second version of the revised version and they're both still available because Hiker's oh we can't not keep selling that because it sells a lot of copies so we'll do both but you can't get rid of it so uh yeah so and then one thing led to another as they say I thought well I've always loved them I can make you an ethics so I should translate that because that's just and I've done quite a bit of translating over for book six which has been a passion of mine since I was an undergraduate uh uh right so you know and up then they I there were enough things the metaphysics again things like love uh that we thought well why shouldn't we have a new complete works of Arizona right and uh well you know it doesn't you don't want to look at the Mount Everest from the bottom because oh you won't start climbing up but you know when you're part of the way up you think oh it wouldn't be that hard to go the rest of the way let me get some people you know who work on these things to help and before you know we'll keep going well yeah so that was 12 12 years or so of essentially six hours a day oh my gosh you have seven days a week oh my gosh 50 some weeks of the year yeah I mean that was a huge you don't you think it it just can't it's very you have to be very slow and careful so each but each treat us I started by doing an annotated version because I really want to understand it because you can't translate our subtle unless you understand so then building the vocabulary and keeping it in place became a crucial uh digital route right so we had a consistent translation across all the treatises does it become easier as you add works because you have vocabulary oh that's what initially the thought is how should I translate this yeah and and once one and then of course idioms sometimes structures right other kinds of vocabulary they become second measured here after a while because you've translated so much about right so you know you're not at every step thinking what the hell right of course there are places like that so sometimes it'll a day or maybe a week will go on one little piece because you can't figure out what the hell is going on on but that's a lot's and laughs as you do more and more yeah you Greg had a similar experience he spent 12 years uh Sundays a week six hours a day just to finish the marathon hunting with dogs that's true so you just have a master glossary to do like a big yes or not where he just yes and that will be in the end you know how much that that's going to be in the so it's two if the two volumes up will be the genuine works a third volume which is somewhat up in the air oh my goodness oh I've done quite a bit of trans-right for that of the do-be-own scuria then not my hour's stuff without it's been hived off so it's not because the two volumes will have the genuine works and it's well it's not as richly annotated that couldn't be as the individual volumes what a lot of the material from the notes especially the important ones will be in a glossary so the glossary is probably going to be about 250 pages or something like that it's a amazing resource yeah I think without that uh you can't read our story now it's not something you just pick up and start reading it's cold from the get-go I was giving a talk to my department what have you been doing okay this is what happened to him and I'm working progress so I thought yeah that's that's a good topic for it so I just take the opening sentence of the micamaking ethics right and you know you're people read it as if it's kind of just common sense or whatever but every term as a technical term and I saw you know without that you're kind of just giving yourself the field of reading Arizona I think without actually really reading it so the glossary this is not like foreign so it's a user friendly it's not just a collection of tests they mean the two volume relies on translation that's just a compendium of texts right this is really something you can read if you put the effort into it I'm sorry excited but to have you back on the plug it when it comes out yeah oh great yeah we'd love to well look you already mentioned your undergraduate careers maybe this is a good time for you mentioned this is your first podcast which I'm I'm genuinely surprised to hear but when we have when we have scholars on who reached your level of achievement and fame we just our listeners like to know how did you get into flossy was it a teacher was it a text was it a text was it a by accident were you did you come out of the womb already right here and also it was it was an accident I went to to Trinity to as we said then to read physics and mathematics and then my in my very first couple of weeks I was taking modern algebra class they were I think six or seven students in the class and we were doing a huge set of problems to just spend about the semester on one star to five star the five star we're supposed to be largely unsolvable no we weren't expected to do more than one or two of those and a young woman we were all frightened young woman so a unfurled me right for sleeping through the problems more less like this and looking at the five star as they raise their hand and said number 163 of the five star problems hey there must be a mispron that's impossible and I'm on the blood brain from my family I thought well she didn't go on and research mathematics either I mean mathematics is really tough to do really hard all the geniuses are probably few and far between and I was so when I'm not good enough at mathematics to do what I really want to do which I wanted to fly pretty high and I didn't think I had the wings well around the same time I met a young woman and I had a party she was JP Don Levy's niece I don't know if that rings any bellows for you but he was a writer he wrote the ginger man and it was one of the thousand best novels of the 20s maybe a hundred I remember the number 100 language towards the bottom but I banned at Ireland when I was a student I fell in love with her and she was a first year graduate student in philosophy and so I began to hang out with the far more interesting philosophers than the rather girdy physicists and mathematicians and Trinity have this great thing which is you didn't have to do anything except take the final exams so I took the final exams in philosophy I didn't take the physics and mathematics exams we said you haven't been going to do very well in them instead I kind of read all the books that were supposed to read for first year philosophy I managed to get D plus which got me into the program and I switched so I spent a year in physics and mathematics in the next which then philosophy and I hadn't taken any of the tutorials so I got to do all that did you take exams without taking any of the classes or tutorials I just went to the test but I you know well you know if you're the reader the questions were difficult but you know not exclusively difficult I could do well enough on them I certainly did better than I would have done I think in physics and math especially since I stopped going to the class of the world but yeah so I felt into it I say I thought it was a it was a it was a it was a love affair I say when people ask me how did you start doing philosophy it was a love affair but it wasn't with philosophy to start with it was with Dea Tima led me in philosophy and of course I discovered that I loved it she gave me as a Christmas present Frigga's Foundation of arithmetic and the fact that I studied a couple of self-explanatory things were just it was a perfect gift I mean she read my mind so it's me you know you love this and I did so I switched to philosophy well the rest of this history is they say I just kept rolling along through that thing right any particular influential teachers along the way yeah I had an opportunity I now William Charlton who translated physics and wanted to and but he was there for a year he left unfortunately soon after I started and I took a day card lock no I have sorry a lock barterly here in class with him it was great then I went to Cornell right and I worked I didn't work on ancient philosophy I worked on contemporary metaphysics you know with us in a shoemaker Bob Sonicker and I think I took I think maybe the best class I took at Cornell was actually Nicholas Persians I was on the British Marlifts and it was that's where I I'd say I discovered how much I liked working on texts how much I liked reading them and trying to figure out what we send them I was probably the close reading and then I met Russ Massey who was a young ancient philosopher and we he taught me how to cook Chinese food which was one of the most important things I learned in graduate school when I was in the last thing influenced my still cook Chinese and I and introduced me to reading Zeta so we spent some time right afternoons reading Zeta and then cooking Chinese food for a lot of graduate students and young faculty members and that I got introduced to Michael Freida of via Russ and GLON could then process teaching yeah that's kind of probably the other things that we're really excited but I don't remember them off hand yeah that's that's very good very helpful um gosh we've learned so much Professor Rief thinks David we've been discussing your new book Aristotle's Dialectic are we not gonna do lightning round questions do you want to do lightning round or we do lightning round a couple lightning round questions okay let's go in right here yeah he's a quick answer all right great spot on let me start yeah he's sorry he's sorry okay all right David so this is meant to be a little silly but um who's your favorite philosopher I was gonna say I've stopped amalgam yeah Paul Greisies to talk about play title play title I like that I played on Aristotle I find I like very much both of them but it seemed to me I have slightly different styles of thinking and it's a great pleasure to move from one of the others so I'm still I suppose I would have to say we'll take that as it we'll take that least favorite philosopher I don't think I really have a least favorite philosopher I'm for every philosopher that I don't like there's another that I don't like even more so I think it's kind of you know I've to remind me I know I really I say oh it's excellent really hate acts and you say well why I say oh no I hate why more than right yeah actually the most part I don't dislike there are styles of doing I'm not very fond of and part because of the first principles issue result this is not to pick a philosopher I don't like but someone who says something that I disagree with David Lewis and I was the intellectualist philosophical paper says when it comes to first principles it's pretty much a matter of taste right yeah so you know I like this kind of cumin you know you know point quality out points in space down a picture or whatever and I think oh that's really not a move I would make I said that's an example um yeah I tend to turn it for more like Bernard Williamson Peter Spross and Dunleich Willard from Norman Klein who we mentioned earlier but that's probably a cast of mind question rather than that I just don't think they're worth anything we studied them carefully on it there so that don't learn from me I got a feeling this one will be easy for you to answer either but what's your favorite work of philosophy or book yeah that's actually not too hard for me to answer oh it's the Republic oh well I think the Republic is the greatest book ever written and for really maybe out of it as well it's so I teach it regularly and every time I teach it I got more and more out of me so they're close seconds yeah yeah yeah but that's to match it in our style you have to take the physics the metaphysics the politics the day anima the neckmaking ethics I was a kind of amalgam because it's not a lot it's just brilliant I'm staggered by the by the it's how I start my as I start my course on the Republic every term I like this is just the best I just taught it twice so I taught it in two different classes one in ours undergraduate class and undergraduate seminar and it's it's not quite new every time but there's something new in it every time full of life right now I can hear it but that was easier than you might have thought I'm going to go in close seconds yeah yeah I've got a couple of air songs favorite line by air stop yeah I do have a favorite line from how it's not gonna surprise you when I tell you why that is it's uh rakda ghar ka kas hakosta it's the particular thing that needs to be done this is from book six of the night in mechanics but it's it don't ask me why that's not tell you why but that's a favorite line I just maybe we're not recording you can tell us really like have a nuclear I like that I just think it's a yeah so it's very gnarly right a couple of words oh it's very good here's another one favorite miraculous thing heard now that's what's soon on our side here we have more time I'm very even looks at it you're gonna have a favorite very very I'm glad to say I don't have a favorite miraculous thing because ones about my seating rocks that I like I it's full of stuff but it's not by arsenal like it does they get though there are a few things by arsenal they always think what was he doing when he thought that uh so yeah what's your what's about your favorite work of literature yeah it's probably uh so there's so many I'm a good in veteran real novels so I've been reading my whole life um so the presumptuous kind of the one that I say if I want to just you know think about what a high thinking intellectually right it would probably be alibor socially don't be around such I think it's japanos uh but really I love middle march I think george elia this great and I read pride and prejudice pretty much every year I think jonos it makes me laugh every time and she's very arcedatea yes I think that's right she's more bridal pointed out her her grip on arcedatea on psychomaral psychology is really secure she's terrific yeah and the father strikes me as a almost uh enveloped in the theoretical life there right in pregnant you know well he's a fool something he's very funny I think the only time i'm a part of this is just a good uh post-war so i mentioned since we're in america that i really love henry champs oh i've had almost everything um yeah but uh but i suppose especially portrait of a lady i love golden bold but you know i'm so i'm very fond of um so it's like great american novel it's sort of a there's another that i love all right what was your first car ah yes i can answer that question um i have something called a mini minor okay it's not the austin mini that we all have come to know is the mini cooper my history sort of looked like an old beetle Volkswagen i mean it was kind of hunky or hunky or looking yeah we put it that way uh it came in only one color was i think to remember which was a kind of ghastly gray but mine was so old that no matter what color it had been uh it would have you know and that i bought for myself for their enormous sum of i think 160 dollars but you have to remember the valuation probably 10 000 by now uh but in any case yes that was my very first car um do you have any nicknames or have you ever had any nicknames no nobody knowing me would ever call me dave except except my father ah he's the only one who's ever who ever called me dave and from him i don't mind at all fair enough but i don't especially like to be called dave i don't feel like a dave i feel like a dave and so it's correct car salesman when they say hey dave uh right and i think it's fair to say that you've uh you slain your goliath the complete works that i have asked which will be out in 2025 like that yeah it's not a slayer i've kind of given a new life yeah that's right if it means not for us it's not as dialectic i i i really enjoyed it and thank you for all the work you've done and then yeah as somebody who finds it burdensome to translate and tiring and confusing it's good to have an aid in well i have to say about working on this lot it's the closest to i think it's a great thing henry james that's right if you um a secret to have you know so to get outside yourself yes he says and to stay there and for that you need a very compelling erom and i'd say the triathlon and arisondyl has spent my compelling erom so i i i think i've spent all these years on really the best intellectual company you can imagine i'm just like you get much better than that so yeah so there were difficulties involved with the joys far exceeded the difficulties all right well it's been a pleasure professor we we hope to have you back again um thanks for everything folks at home don't oh i'm really of course thank you for all the help so i'm a lively discussion i all right folks don't forget to like rate subscribe we'll see you next week on the new thingery