#159 Aristotle: The World's Greatest Philosopher?

22:20Alex O'Connor:And if you're familiar with scholastic philosophy, you will begin to see the influence of this kind of thinking on people like Thomas Aquinas, who also sort of felt the same thing. I mean, Aristotle is a 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' work, because he was just that significant. But okay, so we've got an idea of of aristotle'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 of democritus um 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 some pretty specific views on the nature of causation so we've talked about objects which exist and the form in which they exist but there's also like reasons why things exist right an acorn doesn't just exist for no reason um in the modern like age if i ask you to explain something's cause like 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 aristotle wouldn't answer it quite

23:22John Sellars:in that way would he no um so i mean famously um aristotle is is um credited with a theory often refer 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? and so in Aristotle we call that kind of the efficient cause or explanation then we've got the form and the matter that we've just mentioned right so if again you want to understand the chair you've got to know what it's made out of its 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 yeah right what's its purpose what's its goal the kind of the teleology the telos 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 and that he thinks is equally vital to to really understand anything

24:41Alex O'Connor: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 become a chair? And I think a sensible way to answer that is to say, well, what's its actual purpose? What was it made for? And that's the only real way that we can meaningfully distinguish between the table and the chair in that context. Because yeah, maybe they're both made out of wood. They both got legs and they 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. And yet today, if you were to say that things need explaining in terms of teleology, in terms of what they're for, people are a little bit allergic to it.

25:25Alex O'Connor:And I think Aristotle is 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, I mean, we've talked about chairs and tables, and it's easy to see how this applies. But what about a tree? When you look at a tree, you might say, okay, it's got a material cause or explanation. It's made out of bark or 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 rain and the soil and everything enacts the change. But what's a tree for?

25:58Alex O'Connor:People would say that's kind of a meaningless question. What would Aristotle say?

26:02John Sellars: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 um this is what living things do so um 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 he's thinking about parts of organisms in particular so if we think about a human being right um what's your 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 whole 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

26:53Alex O'Connor:purposes yeah so i think it's interesting how like i've read um 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 like look up on google like you know what what is a heart like why 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 to pump blood around the body that's why you have a heart which is an extremely teleological answer. Why does this exist? Why do birds make nests? And it's all like, oh, to do this, for this purpose.

27:34Alex O'Connor:Why do trees have leaves? Oh, in order to photosynthesize. When in the modern day, we don't like the idea that teleology is built into nature so much. We are typically suspicious of it. But the language remains. And I think it's because people will want to say something like, it's kind of true that the heart exists to pump blood around the body but really what that is is a shorthand for saying that like an organism which pumps blood around the body is like more likely to survive if it has a heart and therefore hearts evolve in in that creature it's not really that like the heart ontologically really is for pumping blood and so i don't know do you think that a modern understanding of evolutionary biology undermines the teleological causation of Aristotle?

28:25John Sellars:I mean, that's a really good question. I mean, I think I would say, yeah, the heart is for pumping blood. That's literally what it's for, right? 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? I think we can. I mean, if you think about what Darwin was trying to do, and this isn't my area of expertise at all, but what Darwin's trying to do is offer an explanation for how these purposes and functions come about.

29:09John Sellars: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. So in a sense, Darwin would acknowledge that, I think.

29:44Alex O'Connor:I think it's helpful maybe to think about, like when you ask a question like, what is it for? Instantly, you're conjuring up ideas of like a creator and a god who like 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 this thing called a heart that has this purpose. it's just as a matter of fact what is in fact its function what does it do not 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 that's not a sort of super theological or supernatural kind of question it's just what does it do it pumps blood around the body and that's what we're talking about with this fourth level of explanation which i think still has a place you know in in our in our sort of modern metaphysics but is 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 you know why why is why is that rocket on its way to the international space station and they'll say well because the thrust it outweighs 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 go to space man It's because we want to get up there and we want to do some science.

31:07Alex O'Connor: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? So, okay, that all having been said, we've got a basic grasp of how Aristotle is thinking about the world.

31:32Alex O'Connor:one of the most sort of profound metaphysical questions that somebody can ask is about like the nature and causes of the universe itself did aristotle believe in god

31:45John Sellars:um so um i think the short answer is yes he did precisely what he means by that term is slightly harder to pin down. I mean, he thinks the world is eternal. He thinks it's always existed. So he doesn't think it was created at any point. And in the early Christian reception of Aristotle, this is a sticking point, right? They don't have to fudge. So he thinks the world has always existed. It 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, right?

32:33John Sellars:So not a first cause in the sense of big bang, chronological first cause. Yeah, exactly. So not a first cause in that sense, but something that is kind of the ultimate origin of movement and activity in the world. so we don't have an infinite regress in our explanations right because he wants to avoid that so he thinks there must be some kind of eternally 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 So he said, okay, we want some eternal movement, right?

33:16John Sellars:Movement that doesn't stop. Well, movement in a straight line is no good because that has a start point and an 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 around 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 are all these things up there going round and round and round and they don't seem ever to stop and they seem to have been there forever. So perhaps these are divine bodies in some sense that are underpinning everything else.

33:48John Sellars:It gets very murky beyond there.

33:50Alex O'Connor:You see quite different from a modern conception of God. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because Aristotle, his views on the nature of whatever God might be are extremely different from something like modern Christianity. And yet, thanks especially to Thomas 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. And my understanding is that by motion in this context, we're kind of talking about change, right? Not 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.

34:35Alex O'Connor: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, would 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 there's like a regress here and this is particularly sort of focused on by by aquinas later which is that like in order to actualize something there needs to be something already actual you know like if i want to cool down a 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 you know actualize the potential of the can to become cold the fridge has to be actually cold in order to actualize that change in the can to make it cold.

35:34Alex O'Connor:But 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 so something has to be actual in order to actualize, but it has to have been something to actualize 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 like what is actualizing 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 and 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 unactualized actualizer or unmoved mover problem is when you try to talk about this you're using the word actuality and actualizing 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 you've 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 so we kind of end up with this unactualized actualizer the the unmoved mover which is great and aquinas leans on that very heavily later on say that that first unmoved mover is god but for aristotle it doesn't like 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 principle so insofar as this unactualized actualizer like interacts with the with the world with us or cares about human affairs.

37:22Alex O'Connor:Aristotle has some quite different views to the modern Christian, doesn't he?

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38:44John Sellars:We'll see you next time.

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38:56John Sellars:Yes, I mean, this is 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 platonic influence still. I mean, Aristotle's God is going to be thinking about universal ideas and forms, we might say, rather than thinking about particulars. 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.

39:38John Sellars: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 quite an achievement.

39:50Alex O'Connor:I think so, because of course, Aristotle sort of has an interesting history post his death, right? Because his works are kind of neglected for some time and then kind of rediscovered. Can you tell me about that story and particularly the church's reception of Aristotle's work when it's sort of rediscovered?

40:09John Sellars:So, I mean, in late antiquity, his works were translated into Syriac and then Arabic. Their first wave of influences is in the East, in places like Baghdad. And we see Islamic philosophers really interested in Aristotelian ideas and going with them. a little later 12th century we see some of Aristotle's works get translated into Latin some of them from those Arabic versions Spain is particularly important Al-Andalus where a lot of Arabic scholars and people from Western Europe going to Northern Europe going to Spain and learning Arabic and translating texts and people also access some texts from from Greek, right, from Byzantium, say, and translate those into Latin.

41:01John Sellars:And when that all happens and people first encounter the kind of full range of Aristotle's ideas, I mean, the church is deeply worried about this. I mean, here's this guy who says that the soul dies with the body, right, amongst many other things, who denies miracles. He says the universe is eternal. He says the universe is eternal and wasn't created, right? So he's saying, on the face of it, Aristotle was saying a number of really quite heretical things. You get a group of Aristotelian philosophers who were very radical, almost atheists in Paris. And they're condemned, right? The Bishop of Paris says, no, don't teach this stuff.

41:36John Sellars:This is dangerous. And it's then the next generation of philosophers in Paris, which includes Thomas Aquinas, 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 bring the two together so yeah it's it's um it's not an easy marriage to start off with it it takes some time it takes some work it takes someone of the stature of thomas

42:04Alex O'Connor:aquinas to pull it off yes quite quite quite um and people can probably begin to see how like well there's lots of resonance aristotle as far as pertains like later christian tradition is laying some seeds that have to then be you know actualized by by thomas aquinas um but there is also a lot to like in in aristotle when it comes to modern theistic ways of thinking and and one of those is trying to account in a world full of all kinds of organisms full of plants and animals for the sort of uniqueness and specialness of humans like aristotle as you say is fascinated by biology and he also knows that you know what a thing is hylomorphism from earlier is its matter and its form.

42:50Alex O'Connor:So if you take the right matter and you put it in the right form, it gives you a thing. But Aristotle writes quite plainly about a corpse. 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... But it's 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 Aristotle's taxonomy and how he accounts for what a human is and what makes him so special?

43:30John Sellars:So, I mean, earlier we were saying that when we were talking about hylomorphism, 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's 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 caches this out is he says, well, we also need to think about what things can do. We need to think about their capacities, their potentialities, right?

44:07John Sellars:So, I mean, he uses the word potential in two different senses, right? So one sense is the acorn has the potential to become the oak tree. The warm can of Coke 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. um that doesn't involve any any change on our part we're still the same person but one of them we're actualizing the potential to speak yeah and the other we're not right so then he'll want to define say human beings in particular but also other other living beings as um the sorts of things that have certain abilities capacities and that then becomes part of his definition of what the form is.

45:02John Sellars:So form of a human being isn't just two arms, two legs. It's the 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.

45:21Alex O'Connor:I think like the earlier fourfold causation becomes relevant and you begin to see, okay, interesting. Aristotle thought that understand something you have to know what it's for so what when you look at like real cases like this if you don't have that element and trying to account for the difference between a corpse and a living human being kind of becomes quite difficult yeah you can just say one of them's alive one of them's um and when you start reaching for words you'll want to say something like well one of them you know it's doing stuff its heart is pumping blood its brain is firing neurons 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 it's what what sort of end it's serving and that's what sort of produces life so matter and form but form includes what a thing does like what it's what it's for um now aristotle uses in trying to distinguish between say what a human does and what an animal can do and what plants can do um and like you say it's about capacities it's not about actually doing them.

46:25Alex O'Connor:Right now, you're not speaking, and neither is your chair. But you have an actual capacity to speak, and the chair does not. But in terms of the sort of type of form or the arrangement of form that something has, a human versus an animal versus a plant, Aristotle uses this 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 to Aristotle? So of course,

46:57John Sellars: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, right? What distinguishes the living, breathing human being from the corpse, right? And soul is the thing, right? For Aristotle, that's how he uses the term.

47:34John Sellars:Yeah, yeah. So, and that's not to say that some kind of soul has departed from the corpse, right? It's not as if it's lost a component. it's just that it's the the corpse has lost its capacities so in the cases of a human being soul the thing that describes how we're alive is really a case of just describing those

48:01Alex O'Connor:capacities and abilities that we have yeah it's like if you have a tower that that you like knock over right like 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. It's form, it's 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.

48:29John Sellars:And Aristotle was 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 power. which is simply to be alive. Plants can reproduce in their own way. 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.

49:11Alex O'Connor:And this is what Aristotle means by soul. He's not talking about a ghost in the machine. He's not talking about something which continues to exist after you die. He's just talking about the form of a living thing. That is, it's organization and also its functions and its capacities. What can it do? and so a 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 and metabolizing and whatnot but also they can think and that's all aristotle means by the soul because people might be put off they might think oh aristotle believes in the soul i often find people are surprised to learn that that's what he means by soul and it's also worth pointing out that of course he didn't use the english word soul it meant something more specific so and not very supernatural here just 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 like i've seen you know i've seen chimpanzees that can like you know tap on the screen and follow the numbers and stuff aren't they kind of using reason as well like is aristotle sort of justified in saying that humans are a particular form as

50:19John Sellars:opposed to every other animal so when aristotle is describing human beings as rational he uses the word logike, rational, which comes from the Greek word logos, meaning word or explanation. So humans are distinct insofar as they speak. They don't just think, they also speak. You might think your dog can think and he's 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, right?

51:02John Sellars: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's 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.

51:29Alex O'Connor:And so 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 uh in that the logos is translated as the word so in in the prologue 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 some overlaps beginning to beginning to kind of form perhaps um but okay so we've got a metaphysical view and hylomorphism four causes and we've got aristology on the soul which is actually pretty like empirical and materialistic, essentially.

52:13Alex O'Connor:That gives us a kind of 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. Now, Aristotle is this great scientist and biologist and now apparently a metaphysician and pre-Christian thinker and whatnot. But at the same time, he doesn't just want to think about propositions he doesn't just 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 we use 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?

53:10John Sellars:That's true. I 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 yeah what our our sotter 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 of famous example the sort of syllogistic arguments that he codifies for the first time you know all a's are b all b's are c therefore all a's are c right the first 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 yeah and then 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 of knowledge so it's a way of I mean, again, famously in Plato's dialogue, Socrates is arguing with all these guys that we usually call sophists who are presented by Plato as trying to pull the wool over people's eyes.

54:40John Sellars:And, you know, we're all familiar with sophistry today. Aristotle really wants to say, OK, I'm going to give you the tools so that you can really uncover that when you encounter it and you can see whether someone is giving you a good argument or not. Yeah.

54:57Alex O'Connor:And so to be clear here, like if you have an argument of that form, like all A's are B, all B's are C, therefore all A's are C, you could say that argument is valid. Like it's true. Yeah, that follows from the premises, but there's no content there. It's like algebra, right? It's like algebra for the argumentation. it's like it there's no content we're just talking about the 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 a's and b's and ifs and all this kind of stuff and nones and whatnot and lists out basically a bunch of different valid syllogisms where if you plug in the facts you'll know what the conclusion is and that's like a pretty significant contribution to philosophy But I mean, it's incomplete, right?

55:46Alex O'Connor:Our sort of conception of formal logic today is not purely Aristotelian, but it's a starting point.

55:53John Sellars:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a huge achievement. If he had just done that and absolutely nothing else, he would be a really, really important philosopher. But to have done that and done 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 just unbelievably impressive.

56:15Alex O'Connor: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 asked you at first, like, you know, what's all the hype? And it's like, gosh, well, it depends what you're talking about because he's invented logic, which is totally separate from being probably the preeminent biologist of his era, like his study of animals. Didn't he live near a lake or something and he'd go down and spend his time dissecting the fish and stuff like that? Yeah. Like no one else was doing at the time.

56:46John Sellars: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, a huge body of water in the center. And Aristotle spent a couple of years there dissecting fish on the shore of this lagoon. you know um and again we're back to we're we're back to our kind of four causes you you open up a fish you pick out all the different bits 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's 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

57:42Alex O'Connor:interesting the thought of like how the different ways of interpreting what it means to say what is something for like what is an eye for to see and it feels like you could almost trick people like in the context of philosophy if you speak to like a modern atheistic materialist and say like you does the eye have a purpose? They'll want to say, oh, well, no, no, not really. It just sort of exists and it has the appearance. But if without priming them, you sort of went up and you said, hey, can you tell me what an eye is? It'd be like, oh, it's the organ you used to see. And what I want to say is people might think Aristotle is a bit antiquated because he's sort of holding onto this teleological nature that has been gone since evolution.

58:24Alex O'Connor:But I want say that like i agree with you from earlier that evolution doesn't do away with this concept of function it might do away with the idea of there being some like built-in teleology by design but i don't think it necessarily does away with the idea of of of it being meaningful to say that like the function of a biological part is really like part of what makes it what it is i think we can 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 um so having said that i want to ask you what the function of a human being is and what i mean by that is i want to i want to sort of i want to say wrap up but it's probably the biggest subject of aristotle's that that is most popularly discussed his ethics you know we've got an idea of what he thought about the world but he's also famous for his nicomachean ethics about what makes a good life and in many ways his idea of about like what makes a good life and what humans should do it's 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?

59:45Alex O'Connor:What is their function?

1:00:37Alex O'Connor:We'll see you next time.

1:00:42John Sellars:Yeah, absolutely. And 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 Nacomachean 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, you want to understand what a human being in general is, right? What's it for? And then what's its function? And once you understand that, a good human being will be one that fulfills that function, right?

1:01:23John Sellars: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. 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 that he describes in the book. so the first set of these we might call i mean 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.

1:02:16John Sellars: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. You 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.

1:02:50John Sellars: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 reason to manage that kind of very sensible inbuilt cowardice that we all have. So there are those ways in which we can be rational by managing those non-rational elements of ourselves. 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.

1:03:39John Sellars: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 right now. So that's another way in which we can be rational. all so um 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.

1:04:24John Sellars: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 is to describe this in terms of two different ways of life, right? 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. 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 pursuits.

1:05:06John Sellars: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? 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? Doing science and thinking about these big questions.

1:05:39Alex O'Connor:So firstly, just as a point of interest because people might wonder why is it called the Nicomachean Ethics?

1:05:44John Sellars:Um, that's a good question and shrouded in mystery. There's another book called the Eudemian Ethics. 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. Um, so in both cases, we've got a kind of a pile of lecture notes. Um, in fact, some of the books, um, 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 Nicomachus. So it's conceivable that maybe his son put all these lecture notes together after his death.

1:06:28John Sellars:But yeah, we don't know for sure. Interesting. Okay.

1:06:31Alex O'Connor: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 eudaimonia 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 this happiness that people talk about.

1:06:56John Sellars:Yeah. So happiness, not in the sense of a subjective feeling of being happy in the way that we use the 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? something that other people can say about you, right?

1:07:15Alex O'Connor:Another term that people sometimes prefer to use to translate eudaimonia is flourishing, as opposed to happiness, which might better capture the kind of thing we're driving at.

1:07:23John Sellars:Yeah, that's right. And in a very famous English translation, sometimes it's just translated as a good life, 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 only. It's about actualizing your potential for being a good, rational being. And that's what happiness looks like. And as it happens, he thinks that if you do that, you will feel happy, right? The feeling of happiness, the feeling of pleasure, these will be the consequences, the byproducts of fulfilling your potential.

1:08:10John Sellars:as a rational animal.

1:08:13Alex O'Connor:And how does that come out in practice? Like what, I mean, different ethical theories about sort of 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 like practical, here are things to do with your life. Here are things to believe, here are ways to behave. Does he get that specific?

1:08:35John Sellars:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned the idea of a choice between two different lives, 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 um but he also gets really into the nitty-gritty of um of um of um uh 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 um not just friendship in the way that we use the word. He's also thinking about romantic partners.

1:09:11John Sellars:He's also thinking about family relationships. He thinks these are absolutely fundamental. And so he goes into a lot of detail analyzing this in a really quite kind of sort of psychologically perceptive and astute way. So in that sense, he's interested very much in the nitty gritty. What does he think about friendship? I mean, I've heard he's got, you know, sort of very sort of interesting and

1:09:32Alex O'Connor:broad views about friendship and whatnot.

1:09:34John Sellars:Like what does he actually say? So, I mean, for instance, he draws a distinction between a kind of 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 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 um but you want that to be a good friendly interaction but it's just it's just a transaction yeah there's nothing deeper to it than that um 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 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 you know you need to know what relationships you're in and where you stand

1:10:51Alex O'Connor: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 that 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, or you're a deontologist who thinks there are like rules to follow.

1:11:28Alex O'Connor:like 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 would do. 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?

1:11:46John Sellars:So virtue ethics is focused on developing these character traits like courage, moderation, justification justice um and a range of others that he discusses generosity would be another another example and so the 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 10 commandments or you know kantian 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 the kantian you know the yeah do you lie to the person at the door yeah that's right the lunatic comes to the door trying to kill your friend do you lie about whether your friend is is is there or not uh and if you if you think that it's all about rules don't lie never lie right then 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 um being you know just and fair to my friends and given the the specifics of this situation right here right now um 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 aristotle was quite clear about this.

1:13:11John Sellars: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.

1:13:26Alex O'Connor:And what about this idea that these virtues sit in the midst of two extremes? You sometimes hear Aristotle described as believing in what's come to be known as the golden mean. What's all that about? Yeah.

1:13:38John Sellars:So, I mean, he thinks he thinks that vices are often extremes, right? 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? People often think that 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 vices. So moderation is an obvious example that it's somewhere in the middle. Courage, he thinks, is in the middle between cowardice at one end and kind of recklessness at the other end.

1:14:20John Sellars:And for a number of other virtues, he thinks this is a really good way to think about them. Generosity 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 at all so there's going to be a sensible middle ground yeah i mean we know we all know

1:14:38Alex O'Connor:people who are like virtuous to a fault i think we're like we're 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 thing you should just do as much of it as you can but then you come across the person who like is 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 what. 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.

1:15:13Alex O'Connor: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 gosh, I'm so sorry. Let me, let me fix that. Let me fix that. I can, let me get you a pillow. Do you need it? And you're like, it's a bit uncomfortable. It's like 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 the middle. And this is not a sort of unique insight to Aristotle. The Buddha's sort of central path and the Confucius sort of has the same idea. It's sort of quite well-established in many ethical systems that temperance, mediation, being in the middle is key.

1:15:47John Sellars:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, 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 is there's no moderate way to do adultery right 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

1:16:34Alex O'Connor: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 you know 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 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 they won't even talk to their to their best friend's wife or be because they're 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 somewhere in the middle like yeah i can i can have a wife and i can talk with women and have friendships and relationship with them without committing adultery.

1:17:20Alex O'Connor:Even that itself seems like it sits on a continuum and that mediation is perhaps key. But what I'm interested in is that these specific virtues, which to us sound perfectly reasonable, like bravery sounds good, courage sounds good, 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 like thinking as philosophers we have to get rid of our assumptions that we know what's good and what's bad why is generosity like 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.

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1:18:54Alex O'Connor: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 quesadilla, not a rolled quesadilla anymore. now it's a sauce shovel taco bell's jalapeno citrus salsa get it with any item on the cantina chicken menu while it's here the participating u.s taco bell locations for a limited time only while supplies last contact store for availability yeah i mean that's a really interesting question

1:19:19John Sellars: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 yeah another one is to say social animal, right? Some animals live in packs and herds. Others are more solitary. Human beings live in packs and herds, right? We live in tribes. We live in villages. When we're born, we're this long, we're utterly useless. And if we're left on our own, we'd be dead within a week, right? So necessarily we're brought up in families, right? So our very survival depends on other people. So in order to survive, you have to get along with other people.

1:20:03John Sellars:So kind of socially positive virtues like generosity and justice, and not running around killing everybody, is actually really, really important for our survival. Absolutely fundamental. all. 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. But 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. People filter the water that I drink. I've never met these people, but I couldn't survive without them.

1:20:43John Sellars: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 Aristotle could ever have imagined. So getting along with other people is essential for our survival. So that's, if you like, the biological origin of those sociable virtues, we might say.

1:21:01Alex O'Connor: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 Aristotle, it sounds more like he's just saying this is the case. It is in fact the case that you're a human, which 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?

1:21:35John Sellars: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. But there's also, I think, a kind of a normative element that comes through as well. So an adult human being who doesn't control their appetites and desires, and who never really thinks through their decisions, Aristotle's going to say, that's a bad human being. They've gone wrong, right? They failed to be a human being in the full sense of the word because they're not actualizing their distinctive defining capacities.

1:22:16John Sellars:And that feels like really judgmental, right? And in a sense, you could say, okay, it's no different from him saying this eyeball was broken in a very descriptive way. Well, it's a bad table. Yeah, exactly. But it feels as if there's a bit more normative force to it than that also.

1:22:33Alex O'Connor:Yeah, it certainly feels like that. But then I think it can also be quite attractive to people who are a bit suspicious of like morality and maybe they're not realists about ethics and they think it's all a bit sort of wishy-washy. That 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 it'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, it's not like super like it's not divine it's not supernatural it's nothing like that it's just look there's a there is in fact a way that like that there is a function that you're supposed to serve and you're not serving it and and that's all that ethics really means which seems like a sort of easier pill to swallow than 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 and it's quite attractive i know that um alistair mcintyre has that book after 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 that when he says words like good and bad he just means them in a totally different way to the way that we do which is why we kind of think ethics is a bit weird and different and out there.

1:24:01Whereas maybe for

1:24:02Alex O'Connor:Aristotle, it's just a case of defining our terms differently and realizing that it's not that profound. Yeah.

1:24:10John Sellars: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? 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 yeah we then end up with a completely different image of who this guy is and why we might want to to think about him and take him seriously yeah that's interesting the comparison

1:24:59Alex O'Connor:with the soul in that like at first it sounds like something wishy-washy but when you realize no no like it kind of sounds like it's as you say like if you didn't know you were talking about aristotle if you had like a a new atheist or someone in a debate and they were challenged and so well how do you account for the soul how do you account for what a human being is if there's no God. And the atheist kind of goes, well, I think really what you're describing is just the fact that humans use reason. They have this sort of animating principle, but I think it's just naturalistic. I think it's just sort of a function of their biology.

1:25:30Alex O'Connor:That would sound like a pretty sort of robust atheistic response to a Christian, but that's kind of what Aristotle said. And the same thing with ethics. It's like, oh, well, if there's no God, then how do you ground good and bad? Who's the moral lawgiver? It's like, well, there isn't really one. It's just humans are social creatures. They live in a society and they act in particular ways that have, you know, rationally serve their interests. Again, that sounds very much like the kind of thing you hear in debates about ethics between atheists and Christians. And yet Aristotle could just as easily be employed by the atheists as by the Christian, which is perhaps one of the reasons he's so influential that he just seems to slot in wherever you need him to fit.

1:26:09Alex O'Connor:Yeah, absolutely. But I think, you know, Aristotle is one of the most important thinkers. And I don't know if you'd agree with me because um you said that the order we went in was was quite good and i i agree but if people were going to go to the primary sources and be like i want to read what this guy has to say i think most people sort of recommend that they actually begin with like the nicomachean ethics i don't know if you agree with that or maybe they should listen to this and then read it or maybe read a secondary source on his metaphysics like where should people turn to there's your book of course which i'll link in the description and introduction to aristotle But when it comes to the primary texts, where do you think people should go?

1:26:47John Sellars:Actually, I think the easiest of all of his texts to read, one that we've not talked about, is his Poetics, in which he discusses Greek tragedy. Right. I mean, that's just kind of the most accessible. Anyone can just pick that up and read it. and even if you think i've no interest in greek tragedy or or how to to structure the plots in stories i mean it does give you a window into his method and approach because what he's doing is he's doing um what he's doing is what he does with every single subject which is okay let's analyze this let's break this down let's look at the components let's see what all the bits are right um how does a good plot work what's the role of the characters and so on so you kind of get a taste of his way of thinking in a way that is i think really accessible um you're absolutely right and the comic in ethics is um also quite good i mean i think it's kind of it looks accessible because it's talking about topics that people can connect with but it is actually quite challenging so um maybe that second um i think um the the metaphysics is obviously really really challenging His book, Metaphysics, is really challenging.

1:27:58John Sellars:So that probably saved for a later day.

1:28:01Alex O'Connor:Yeah, I think oftentimes secondary literature is better, especially when you're dealing with ancient authors and you're dealing with translations of ancient authors who even at the time in their original language were quite difficult to fully understand. There's no shame in just reading a commentary and having that as your way in. Like, I think that's the way I do it. You know, I'm not going to sit down and read through the metaphysics. I just feel like that would be a waste of my time, at least until I feel like I have a firm grasp of what Aristotle is talking about. And that's going to come through secondary literature.

1:28:32John Sellars:So another book I recommend to hear briefly. So obviously, buy my book first. But there's a really nice book, which I reference in my book, called The Lagoon by a biologist called Armand-Marie Leroy. So he's a practicing biologist. So he knows his science. and at a certain point in his career he kind of um discovered aristotle and thought oh my goodness this guy was a genius he was a genius biologist right um and he tells the story of aristotle the natural scientist and all of the kind of work that he was doing and so for people that are interested in the naturalistic aristotle that's a kind of a great story by someone who really knows the biology, which I don't.

1:29:19John Sellars:So that's, I think, an interesting take, completely different from the kind of Aquinas version of Aristotle that people might think is the obvious way to go. Yeah.

1:29:28Alex O'Connor:Well, we'll link that in the description as well. But John Sellers, it's always fun. Thank you for your time today.

1:29:34John Sellars:Every act of change begins with a neighbor, with someone saying,

1:29:38Alex O'Connor:we take care of each other here.

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