Pints With Aquinas - 107: How do we know stuff (Thomas' epistemology), with Fr. Damian Ference

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

Today I'm joined by Fr Damian Ference to discuss epistemology (how we know stuff). Show notes: http://pintswithaquinas.com/podcast/how-do-we-know-stuff-thomas-epistemology-with-fr-damian-ference/ SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Today, we are joined around the bar table by my good friend, Father Damien Ference, to discuss Thomas's epistemology. How do we know stuff? And how do we know that we know stuff? And the like. Enjoy the show. All right, man, good to have you back at Pints with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. I hope you enjoyed last week's episode on the Summa Theologiae and how to read it. It's been really cool to see many of you reach out to me and tell me how you're reading Aquinas for yourself. I hope you also enjoyed my sister's talk. If you didn't listen

to that, it's the one beneath this one in your podcast feed, so be sure to go listen to that. Today, we're going to dive into deep philosophical waters with Father Damien Ference to discuss, as I already said, epistemology. This is a fascinating discussion, and I know you're going to love it. After you've listened to the show, do me a favor. Let me know what you thought about it on Twitter. I always love hearing your feedback. We have a Pints with Aquinas Twitter account. And if you don't know, we also have a Pints with Aquinas Instagram page. I think it's under at Matt Fradd. Okay, that's the handle. And I have somebody who posts around four or so memes every week. I send him the quotes from Thomas Aquinas.

He puts beautiful images behind them and puts them up. And they look really cool. So it would be a cool thing to do. Maybe follow me on Instagram. You could get those inspirational memes a few times a week. Hope you enjoy the show. Here we go. Father Damien Ference, what is up?

Well, the temperature is up a little bit here in Cleveland, Ohio, and it's Lent. So hopefully my soul, my spirit, my virtue, but I don't know. What's up with you? I just started renting an office in town. I live in a rural part of Georgia. $200 a month for this nice office. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, you know, I love Georgia. Flannery O'Connor Isn't that crazy? Yeah. You know,

I love Georgia. Flannery O'Connor was born there and died there. I love Flannery O'Connor. I have to admit, I started reading her because of you. I don't know if you know this or not. I don't think I've told you, but I,

I see that she's great, but I don't see why people think she's great. Oh, I see. Well, but to be fair, all I've, all I've read is the first two short stories all right well that's from what's that called from a good man's hard to find yeah good man's

hard to find it's funny because when her stories um started to gain some popularity one of the critiques that was made someone started to call her a hillbilly nihilist right and she said i am not a hillbilly nihilist as a matter of fact i'm a hillbilly tomist yeah she says that she read aquinas for 20 minutes every night before she went to bed and i've worked through her library down at georgia college her private collection that's in you can get access to it you gotta wear white gloves and things but cool she's got a copy of the suma and de veritate and a bunch of uh uh you know tomistic commentaries by folks like um etienne jolson and and some of the the popularizers there too so yeah are you familiar with that dominican band now called the hillbilly tomists as a matter of fact i am aren't they awesome they got the name

yeah yeah no, definitely. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, because her stories are rather dark, but unlike modern Netflix episodes, they're redemptive. That's right. They don't just plunge you into the pit and leave you there. Yeah, it's never violence for the sake of violence. the violence will be where the grace comes. Because one of her big famous lines was that, for the hard of hearing, you have to shout, and for the almost blind, you have to draw large, startling figures. So, she was trying to wake up a culture that she thought was inside and outside the church, buying into nihilism and meaninglessness. I think she was right.

I just want to bring up that second story in a good man is hard to find. You'll remember it. It's like this boy who grows up in this awful home. His parents neglect him. There's always like empty beer bottles laying around everywhere. He's got an awful childhood. One of his, I guess, mother's friends takes him to visit this preacher in Georgia and invites him to be baptized, to be baptized into the kingdom of God, so to speak. Right. And I think it was like the next day or something, he wakes up, his parents are all hung over, and he catches a ride to where this river was.

He wants to find the kingdom of God. And so, he gets in the water and he starts swimming to find it. He eventually dies looking for the kingdom of God, which is just, I want to cry, that's so sad. But at the same time, he actually found it, you know? Yeah, it's beautiful. I've taught that story to some of my seminarians, and you can play up the worst of modernity. Actually, the kid's name, if you remember, is Harry Ashfield. Yeah, what does that mean?

None of her names are accidental. So, it's a field of ash. It's what nihilism does. It brings us down. And even if you take a look at it, so it's the apartment, it's the city, it's beyond God, it exemplifies modernity. There's a piece of abstract art in there that is completely ugly. He goes out to the country with Mrs. Conan, and what does he find there? Nature and this river, but also in her house, if you remember, there's an image of Jesus, and he'd never heard of Jesus before, and he has a picture book of the Bible that he falls in love with. you count now you didn't count before so she wants to show that baptism has power it's efficacious it's not just some empty right and so when the kid after he's baptized goes back to his home he can't stand it there he's putting out cigarettes on the carpet and then wants to go where things matter and if you remember the devil it seems that some commentators say, I agree, in that story is Mr. Paradise. He's the

guy who looks like a pig who's got the peppermint stick, which can be kind of phallic-like, and he's chasing the kid, probably want to mess with him. And the kid, rather than being taken up by the devil, goes under the water, and although it's sad and violent, he actually experiences salvation. The point of the story is that that's the power of baptism. And O'Connor would hate that I just summed up a story in about a minute and a half. Oh my God, I think you're making me a believer here. Just all that you're saying, I had no idea it was that profound. Who was the bloke who chased him at the end and tried to save him from drowning?

That's it. That's Mr. Paradise. But it doesn't seem like he actually wanted to save him. He wanted to probably molest him. And he was, so he's like a devil figure. If you remember when he was getting baptized, that guy just laughed and mocked. That's right. Well,

I'm going to go read that again and I hope everyone goes and reads it again. By the way, everybody, it's on audible. That's how I'm consuming it. It's red with a cool Southern accent. So there you go. That's cool.

I'm really glad we went off on that tangent. Yeah. Why not? Hillbilly Thomas. It all fits in with pints with aquinas yeah well today we want to talk about epistemology um before we do that why don't you tell us what that even means so epistemology episteme the greek word for knowledge so the question and again philosophy asks questions that normally we just presume we know the answers to and may not think about. So questions like, what is knowledge? What does it mean to know something? Is it possible to know something? Or should we just settle for skepticism that nothing can be known? Most, actually every seminary and every good Catholic college would offer a course in epistemology, and it's a branch of philosophy that deals with

the nature of knowledge. What can be known? How can it be known? Can anything be known? What role do the senses have in knowledge? What role does reason have in knowledge? All those sorts of questions are tied up in epistemology. Yeah, it's crazy. It's one of those things that you don't usually think about. You just assume that you know things, and when people start explaining to you what epistemology is, you think, are you crazy? But then as they explain it, you're like, well, actually, that's not a bad point. I've been reading the Pre-Socratics recently. Oh, that's my phone going off. Let me turn it off. Who was it? Frederick Copleston's history. Sure. And I was surprised, you know, that almost every belief that modern philosophers

have come up with is in germ form in the pre-Socratics. I think it was, I might be wrong on this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I think it was Gorgias who tended to be a skeptic that we can't know things. Or even like pre-Socratics who were like, I don't think anything exists because if something did exist, it would have to be here, blah, blah, blah. There's a guy who came up with an argument for why nothing exists. I'm just going off on a tangent, but that's why I love philosophy because you get to think about thinking and think about all those deep things you used to think about when you were eight years old and laying in bed at night and no one else cared about. It's right. It's also true that like heresy in the life of the church, nothing's really new under the sun.

These ideas have been there. And you see those pre-Socratic ideas. My first two weeks of my intro course, we spend with the pre-Socratics. And then we find that it's Plato and Aristotle, their ideas were not born in a vacuum, but they were dealing with what came before. And I think philosophy keeps you humble in that regard. I know that a lot of the moderns want to say, I'm starting from scratch here, but no one starts from scratch. You're part of a history, you're part of a narrative, you inherit something even if you reject it. And as you reject it, you're acknowledging that it's there, right?

Yeah, yeah. All right, well, hey, before we talk about epistemology, we could probably talk a little bit about anthropology, since how we understand the human person is going to understand how the human person knows. So how are the two tied together? Yeah, so we've got to figure, we've got to come up with a solid anthropology. If we get who we are as human beings wrong, then we can get an awful lot of things. Hold on, someone's calling me now. We can get an awful lot of things wrong. So for Thomas and for Aristotle and for the Catholic Church, and the truth of the matter is, may I be so bold to say, The truth of the matter is, may I be so bold to say, that the human person is a unity, a composite of both body and soul.

So what does that mean? It means that we're not just a body, and it means that we're not just a soul. So if we can do like Thomas's hierarchy of being just to show this distinction or clarify this position, I think it's helpful. So before there was anything, we know that there was God, always was, always is, always will be. So he is totally other, but in the fullness of time, he decided to create. So when we look at creation, at the top of creation, we have angels. What are angels? Angels are pure spirit. So if we, as human beings, are body and soul, they're just soul. They're pure, intelligible species. There's no matter contained within an angel.

And actually, when an angel comes to know things, it's not the way that human beings do, because we have bodies and they don't. So they kind of have immediate knowledge of things. It's not the way that human beings do because we have bodies and they don't. So they kind of have immediate knowledge of things. Not exactly the way God does, but more like that than the way we do. So after angels coming down this hierarchy of being, we have man or human beings. What are we? We have both body and soul. So that's what it means to be a human being. We're not just body. We're not just soul. One of the ways that I would like to explain this or show this to people, I actually just did this a couple nights ago at a parish mission. I brought up one of the newly ordained priests who was assigned to this parish, Father Anthony Simone. I said, Father Anthony, come on up here. And there's like 300 people in the church, and they're like, oh, our priest is coming up.

And I have him stand next to me. I say, everybody, I want you to look at Father Anthony's body. And the whole church laughed. Ha, ha, ha. They thought it was the funniest thing in the world. He's an in-shape guy. And then I said, all right, everybody, now look at Father Anthony. And no one laughed. And I asked them, why did you laugh when I said, all right, everybody, now look at Father Anthony. And no one laughed. And I asked them, why did you laugh when I said, look at Father Anthony's body? And why didn't you laugh when I said, look at Father Anthony? And it was my phenomenological way of showing them that Father Anthony is more than just a body.

And we know that. When we simply limit people to their bodies, we know that we are reducing them to something and not seeing them as a person. And all your work in porn and your research and your anti-porn movement, you know that, that what pornography does is it reduces people simply to matter and their bodies when we human beings are much more than that. We are body and soul. So if we drop down one more level, we have animals. And human beings are animals, but we are rational animals in level we have animals and human beings are animals but we are rational animals and that we have both body and soul and animals don't have a soul at least the kind of

soul we have so what makes us unique as human beings well our soul one of the ways we could speak about it is that it allows us to know things and it allows us to choose things. So in our Thomistic terms, we would say we have something called intellect, which allows us to know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, true or false. And we have will, which allows us to choose between right and wrong, good or bad, true or false. Angels, which are pure spirit, are like us in that they can know and they can choose. Animals are like us in that they have a body, but they don't have a soul. So what is a human being? It's the composite of both spirit and matter, body and soul, and we have this ability to know and the ability to choose. Let me say one more thing about this that I think might be, actually, yeah,

let me say this, and I think this will help your listener out a bit. Maybe, Matt, you can help me. So, I know you go to Byzantine liturgy, but I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the Nicene Creed. I hope so, yeah. Yeah, when we begin the Nicene Creed, we say, I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and I believe in what? Jesus Christ, His only Son of God. You went to the Apostles' Creed. So all things...

Visible and invisible. Invisible, visible and invisible. That's it. So what does that mean? And we say that at least in Sunday Mass every week. What does it mean we believe in things visible and invisible? Mass every week, what does it mean we believe in things visible and invisible? Well, when we look to the human person, the visible part is the body, the invisible part is the spirit. So I wanted to say one more thing about that. Oh, yes. So in the second story of creation, if you remember, when

God creates man, how does he do it? We hear that he takes clay and then he forms the man out of clay. And people like Bill Maher will say, oh, that's so stupid. You Christians are idiots. How could you possibly believe that that's how God created man? And I say, well, hold up, mister. This is theological language. It's also philosophical language. Who is the human person? Well, part of us is body. That's part of what it means to be a human being. But the other part is God's breath. He breathes life into us. What might that be? Well, that's our soul. That's just a poetic way of saying that the human person is both body and soul. And both of those matter. And if I could even push this a little farther,

why is this so important for Christians? Because when Jesus died, death is a separation of body and soul. But when he rose again from the dead, he didn't just rise as a spirit. He wasn't like an angel or a ghost walking around. If you remember, he ate fish. So he had a body. He rose in his body. Now that body was glorified, but it wasn't just a spirit. And on the last day, what we Christians believe, when we say we believe in the resurrection of the dead, it means that we get our bodies back, glorified bodies that are like his, because the way that we come to know things and the way that we are is both body and spirit not just spirit and one of the big heresies of our day is that when human

beings die and if they make it to heaven they become angels that's not true right never become angels and i'm thinking of the transgender movement and this idea that well you're not your body so you can identify with whatever you want to, whether that be a different animal or a different sex. Right. So I would say you're not just your body. Your body is a very important part of who you are. It's not all you are. You're not just matter, but you're also not just soul.

Your body, soul composite, both of those things at the same time. Right. also not just soul, your body, soul composite, both of those things at the same time. That's what it means to be human. And we've lost that, which is a great reason to do this podcast is to revisit the truth of these matters. And they're important and foundational ones. So in the, this leads us really nicely into this next part. In the first part of the Summa, Aquinas discusses three opinions, he says, that have typically been held in regards to how we know stuff, which is just like an unfancy way of saying epistemology, right? How we know stuff. And he gives us three. One is a sort of materialist view.

He uses democracy as an example. The next is more the sort of overemphasis perhaps on the soul, and that's the Platonic view. And then he gives the sort of middle between two extremes, which is going to be his view, Aristotle's view. So, let me just read through these one at a time, and then I'd love to get your thoughts on it. So, he says, on this point, the philosophers, on this point being epistemology, held three opinions. For Democritus held that all knowledge is caused by images issuing from the bodies we think of and entering into our souls. As Augustine says in his letter to Dioscorus, and Aristotle says that Democritus held that knowledge is caused by discharge of images. And the reason for this opinion was that both

Democritus and the other early philosophers did not distinguish between intellect and sense as aristotle relates consequently since the sense is affected by the sensible they thought that all our knowledge is affected by the mere impression brought about by sensible things which impression democritus held to be caused by discharge of images so let me see if i can sum this up and you tell me if I'm on the right track or not. It seems to me that if you're a materialist, then one way of trying to explain how we know things is by saying, like, if you can see that we can know things, is that you say, well, part of this thing that I'm smelling or looking at or hearing is physically entering into me. Is that right?

Yeah, that sounds right. And two, let's unpack the word materialist, just so we're on the right page, that the knowledge that we can have is contained in matter itself. So, as we made that distinction between the body being of things that we can see and the soul being things that we can't see, body being of things that we can see and the soul being things that we can't see. This position is focusing simply on those things that are sensible, not the invisible, as we would profess in our creed, but simply things that are visible and somehow that's making its way into us. Does that sound right? Yeah, that sounds right.

So this is sort of the mind really doesn't play much of a role here. If I'm not mistaken, I believe the word abstract comes, I might be wrong on this, comes from like etymologically to drag out. So, like when you abstract something, when you come to know its essence, that's the, like a concept is the intellectual abstraction of the essence of a thing. But for the materialist, at least the way that it was explained prior to Plato and Aristotle, that seemed to be like a purely material way of understanding it. So, the second way he says is Plato. Plato, on the other hand, held that the intellect is distinct from the senses, and that it is an immaterial power not making use of a corporeal organ for its action. And since the incorporeal cannot be

affected by the corporeal, he held that intellectual knowledge is not brought about by sensible things affecting the intellect, but by separate intelligible forms being participated by the intellect, as we have said above. Moreover, he held that sense is a power operating of itself. Consequently, neither is sense, since it is a spiritual power affected by the sensible, but the sensible organs are affected by the sensible, the result being that the soul is in a way roused to form within itself the species of the sensible. Augustine seems to touch upon this opinion where he says that the body feels not, but the soul through the body, which it makes use of as a kind of messenger for reproducing within itself what is announced from without. Thus, according to Plato,

neither does intellectual knowledge proceed from sensible knowledge, nor sensible knowledge exclusively from sensible things, but these rouse the sensible soul to the sentient act, while the senses rouse the intellect to the act of understanding. So, it sounds like you're saying's i mean it's so whenever we come to know something plato is saying is it's because we are we're we have some kind of knowledge of it in that we are participating in the form of it so my understanding is that like plato sort of tried to bring together the balance of like um heraclitus and Parmenides, right? So, for Heraclitus, everything's always changing, though there is a unity beneath it all.

For Parmenides, literally nothing changes. And even though it appears that it does, we shouldn't trust our senses, but just our intellect. With Plato, it sounds like he's saying there are some, you're kind of both right. So, it sounds like there's some things that don't change, and those are in the world of the forms, and there's this earthly stuff that does change. And the only way we can know any of this stuff, the only way we can know the essences of things, is that our soul participates in the form of that thing that we had some knowledge of prior to our earthly life. So that knowledge is more a matter of remembering than it is discovering something new. Am I on the right track? Yeah, you're totally on the right track. So one of the ways to think about this, and you

just mentioned it in your second or third to last sentence, that before we ever had our bodies, we did have our souls, and we were privy to this, what you talk about as the world of forms, or the intelligible world, which is without matter, and it's simply the forms themselves. But once we take on our human form, it's not, as we'll see with Aristotle, that our bodies help us and assist us in knowing. Sometimes they can be a hindrance to us for full knowledge, and our lives here on earth, participating in this material world, consists of trying to remember what it was that we knew and moving beyond what our senses tell us to what is actually true. So from belief to real knowledge, and that knowledge is in the formal, or as you talked about this, the unchanging world of Parmenides. And what we're living with down here is the change in the flux and the flow of the Heraclitian world.

Yeah, but it doesn't sound like, I mean, so it sounds like Aquinas is going to say that Plato put too much emphasis on the soul, because he says here that it doesn't even need to make use of the corporeal organ for its action. So that would be the senses. And yet... Yeah, totally. And yet... Yeah, totally. But yet, when we look at the world, surely from Plato's view, these things pluck up within us the remembrance of those things, don't they? Yeah, there's a connection.

The way that I teach this to my seminarians is, and this is somewhat funny, I think, I bring in Play-Doh. So little cans of Play-Doh that I buy at Walmart. And each guy gets a little plastic can of Play-Doh. So little cans of Play-Doh that I buy at Walmart. And each guy gets a little plastic can of Play-Doh. And then I ask him to make a table. So a Play-Doh table. And then he does it. And everybody's looks a little different, but they all know what a table is. And so they make one. And then I ask, could you sit and use that table as a table? And they say, no. They make one. And then I ask, could you sit and use that table as a table? And they say no. And our classroom desks pretty much are tables. And I say, so how did you know? And they actually go to the Aristotelian route. Well, we encountered one before. But we pass over that for a little

while. And I'll say, okay, so the Play-Doh table you made isn't a real table. And the table that you're on now, or the desk that you're at now, is that, is that the real, uh, table? And then they ponder for a while and I'll say, well, what is this business that we call table? What is this form? What is this universal thing that we're referencing as, and talking about as table? And they'll say, I don't know. And I'll say, well, what is it that's in your mind's eye? What is it that you, you actually know? And then they'll say i don't know and i'll say well what is it that's in your mind's eye what is it that you you actually know and then they'll say that i guess that's table ness or however they want to say it and i will say yes and for plato he believes that that is not found in the in

corporeal substances it's not found in stuff or things but the reality of this thing we call table is found in the world of the forms that's the the intelligible which is not found within the sensible but apart from it so aristotle makes another synthesis after that but that's what he that's what his his teacher taught him and so it's still pretty genius of Plato to come up with that. But I think Aristotle... Yeah. And I see Plato's point, I think, because like, let's just take a natural thing like a tree. If I say to you, do you know what a tree is? You'd say yes. But what you mean, I think, is that you have intellectually abstracted the essence of a tree. In other words, tree-ness. But if I said, imagine a tree, like what is a tree, think of it, then you're thinking

all of a sudden of a particular tree. You know what I mean? You can't think of tree-ness. You can only think of a particular tree, and yet you know what a tree is. You know the essence of it. And so, I think, yeah, I think that's why Plato was trying to grapple with that in that, well, I know what a tree is, and yet these are only particular trees. So, maybe this is a tree in as much as it, you know, participates in the form of the real tree, I guess. That's true, but what you just said is also true. What is real is what is not changing the form itself. So he would even say the tree here in the intelligible world isn't really real.

Why? Because it corrupts, because it's not always going to be a tree. Eventually, it's going to die and turn into soil again, so that can't be real. Interesting. So, here's what Aristotle, Aristotle chooses the middle course, okay? So, if Democritus places too much emphasis on the senses, and Plato puts too much emphasis on, say, the intellect, Aristotle's going to bring these together. So, Aquinas says this about Aristotle's epistemology. Aristotle chose a middle course, for which Plato, sorry, for with Plato, he agreed that intellect and sense are different. This is something apparently Democritus didn't agree with, but he held that sense has not its proper

operation without cooperation of the body, so that to feel is not an act of the soul alone, but of the composite, which is what you talked about earlier. And he held the same in regard to all the operations of the sensitive part, since therefore it is not unreasonable that the sensible objects which are outside the soul should produce some effect in the composite, Aristotle agreed with Democritus in this that the operations of the sensitive part are caused by the impression of the sensible on the sense, not by a discharge, as Democritus said, but by some kind of operation. For Democritus maintained that every operation is by way of a discharge of atoms, as we talked about earlier. But Aristotle held that the intellect has an operation which is independent of the body's cooperation. Now, nothing corporeal can

make an impression on the incorporeal. And therefore, in order to cause the intellectual operation, according to Aristotle, the impression caused by the sensible does not suffice, but something more noble is required. For the agent is more noble than the patient, as he says. Not indeed in the sense that the intellectual operation is effected in us by the mere impression of some superior beings, as Plato held, but that the higher and more noble agent which he calls the active intellect, of which we have spoken elsewhere, causes the phantasms received from the senses to be actually intelligible by a process of abstraction. There's your word again, abstraction.

Yeah, and then he says, according to this opinion then, and then I'm going to get you to define what is meant by phantasms and then the passive and active intellect they talk about. On the part of phantasms, intellectual knowledge is caused by the senses, but since the phantasms cannot of themselves affect the passive intellect and require to be made actually intelligible by the active intellect. It cannot be said that sensible knowledge is the total and perfect cause of intellectual knowledge, but rather that it is in a way the material cause.

Go. What does that mean? Okay. Well, we started this podcast by talking about our friend Flannery O'Connor and over and over she uses this great line, which she got from Thomas, but Thomas gets it from Aristotle. And that is that knowledge begins with the senses. So what the heck does that mean? Again, it goes back to this composite. The way we understand the human person is that we are both body and soul. And the way that knowledge begins is first,

and think of it this way. Can you give me one of the names of, let's just, I don't know, you want to give me one of your kids? Yeah, sure. Let's get my youngest one is Peter. He's three years old. Peter. Okay, great. So let's say that I were to come over your house and right in my hand, I have, you could hear him, my set of keys. If I were to hand my set of keys to Peter, what would Peter likely do with my keys? He would not sit back and reflect on the essence of keenness. He would grab them, jingle them, throw them at you. Yeah. Maybe even taste them. Yeah. He would definitely taste them. Kind of squeeze them. Now, why is that?

Because that's how human beings begin to know the world. So, I know that as parents, you have to tell your kids, don't touch that. Don't touch this. Don't touch those things. But it actually is natural for children to touch things and to put things in their mouth. I don't mean to cut you off, but I got to say my kids, my three younger kids right now where we are up in the mountains of North Georgia, all go to a Montessori school, which, as you know, is all about the tactile experience, right? And that's a human experience. That's how human beings come to know things and you need to touch because that's not, again, it's not where knowledge ends, but it's where knowledge begins. Our senses, because we have bodies, our bodies help us in coming to know the world.

So you want to know how things touch and taste and smell and all those sorts of things. But that's not all that there is. But it is where things begin. In other words, maybe if we have time, we can get into our friend or perhaps our enemy, Rene Descartes, who does not start with the senses yeah um but starts simply with the mind alone but as human beings that's actually not how we come to know the world so we come to know things first by sensing them and yeah and we receive the the world is given to us not so much in atoms but through our senses but eventually we're going

to take on this process um and i don't know if you, do you want to go through the whole thing, how we take things in and the phantasm and the- Yeah, I think that's cool. My understanding is that when he's talking about a phantasm, that is to say, you know, let's just talk about sight. You open up your eyes and there is something before you. And you correct me if I'm wrong here. This is how I'm understanding him. That puts a sort of mental picture in your passive intellect. That's the bit of your intellect that receives what it is your senses take in. And then the active intellect is that which operates on the passive intellect and abstracts the essence of that thing that you're experiencing

as a phantasm, which leads you to have some understanding of the essence of whatever that thing is. Correct. So let's use the key example. So I have these keys in my hand. The phantasm is the image of this particular set of keys. And then what's going to happen is as you say and that's presented through the this the sensible part of our soul and then this thing called the active intellect doesn't deal with the senses but will abstract the essence the nature the quiddity the whatness of the thing, so that what it is that we're able to say is, these are keys. So we know, I have this particular, but I'm able to abstract the universal, this is a set of keys, or these are keys that are in my hand. And that's what we call knowledge, that we know the whatness of the thing that's in my hand. So we abstract the

universal from the particular. And notice, this is a nice distinction between what Aristotle does and what Plato does. So if I went back to my example of the Plato, the Plato table, and then the real table, and then the form. For Plato, he wants to say that we know the universal, so the form or the universal table or set of keys, apart from the particular table in the classroom where all the tables we've seen are keys, where Aristotle says, no, we actually know the universal through the particular. And it's in coming into contact with particular things that we come to know the universal right i believe that's good is that good moderate realism so it's it's kind of like in between right so it's like you know the universal through the thing

yeah yeah moderate realism metaphysical realism however you want to talk about it now you know it's funny i'm sure some people heard what you said earlier and said there's there's we know nothing except that which comes through the senses. And I bet there's some people here and they're listening and they think that sounds really materialistic. That sounds almost atheistic. It sounds like an argument against faith. I mean, don't we know things just through faith and not through knowledge of the senses? Have you heard that sort of objection? How do you respond to that? I have. And then I always push and ask how it is that you knew whatever it is that you think you knew simply as a brain in a vat or as

a floating spirit. And as human beings, we come to, unless it's some sort of the highest form of contemplation and some infused knowledge, everything else comes to us as human beings. And as a matter of fact, I know that you have believers and non-believers both that listen to this podcast. But I would suggest to those who are believers and want to push that somehow faith gives us information that's somehow foreign to our humanity. I would ask you to consider what we do as Catholics, especially in terms of our sacramental system and the way that the Lord comes to us. So notice, even in the incarnation, God doesn't remain as pure spirit, but takes on human nature in a way that he was able to be seen and touched, and he could touch others, and they could hear his voice and see him with their own eyes, right?

And so as he continues to come to us today in the sacraments, how does he do so? When someone comes into the church, we don't say, okay, welcome in. No, you get in the baptismal font, and you get water poured on your head, and words are spoken that you can hear over you. I baptize you. The same is true with confirmation. You're sealed with the Spirit. Oil is put on your head. You can feel the bishop's thumb or the priest's thumb on your head, and you can hear his words. In the sacrament of the Eucharist, we don't just say, hey, we're all one. We're all in communion. No, we take bread and wine. The priest speaks these

words over this matter. What it is, the quiddity of the thing changes, and we don't just sit back, but we come up and receive. We eat, we taste, and see the body and blood of Jesus. And so the Catholic faith is a sensual faith, and I don't mean that in some weird, erotic, sexy way. I mean it in a sensual way where it's bodily. And the Lord continues to communicate himself to us through stuff. One of the things I like to say to my seminarians is matter matters because of the way that we're formed. This is how we come to know things. You go into a beautiful church, the architecture strikes you, the beautiful stained glass windows strike you, incense, you smell it. You also see it, you know, wafting up to heaven.

And you say, oh, those are my prayers going up to heaven. And the candles and the vestments, all that stuff's supposed to hit your senses because that's part of what it means to be a human being. Sorry I went off. I got really excited. No, that's awesome. That's awesome. I appreciate it.

You know, I think another thing I would say to the person who says that, you know, how do you say everything, all that we know first comes with the senses, what about faith? But I think that's maybe misunderstanding what we mean by faith, right? Like, for the Christian, faith isn't an epistemology. Like, it's not actually a separate way of knowing things. Rather, it's, faith just means, like, when you place your trust in something you believe, you have good reasons to believe. I mean, that's so, when you, even when you place your trust in something you believe you have good reasons to believe. I mean, that's so when you, even when you're talking about things that you don't have firsthand experience of, like Christ performing miracles, you're still receiving these stories through the senses. You obviously think you have got some good reason to think it's true and that you then put your faith in it.

think it's true, and you then put your faith in it. Right. And it's, again, faith is not contrary to reason, but we come to believe as human beings believe, which means that not apart from our senses. Actually, I'm thinking Pope Francis's first encyclical, which I think was mostly written by Pope Benedict before he left, and I know Pope Francis added some things that Lumen Fide, the light of faith, the Holy Father says that where does faith begin? It actually begins in hearing, which is a sense. We hear God calling out, and then we respond to what we've been called to. And then we start to be able to see things because of our response of faith. So this is how human beings have an active faith.

It's always with their bodies. It's not apart from your body. When did you last do a retreat or last pray without your body? Your body's always with you. When do we stand and genuflect and kneel and prostrate ourselves? That's bodily action. Yeah, there's no point trying to be more spiritual than Christ. As you say, the church gives us all these physical things because we're human and that's how we learn. That's how we know. That's how we understand. Yeah. And when you look upon those things, you kind of, some people might look upon those things as rather trivial or sort of, I don't know, like mean or something as if, well, they're not spiritual enough, but that's gets back to anthropology, right? Like we're not a ghost

in a machine. It's not like Star Wars where you say, we're not made of this crude matter. That's not who you are, you know? Right. Yeah, I think, too, some of the criticisms of the Catholic Church will be, well, you have, you know, these big gold monstrance, and you have the nice vestments and vessels, and God doesn't need any of that. And I would say, you're absolutely right. God does not need any of that. God doesn't need anything, that. And I would say you're absolutely right. God does not need any of that. God doesn't need anything because God's self-sufficient, but we need that stuff because it helps us focus and it helps us pray. And it's right. God doesn't need a beautiful church, but we human beings do because it can help us. It helps us understand who God is and

how great God is. And that when we worship Him, we actually find ourselves to being great, and then wanting to go out and share that greatness in the corporal works of mercy and spiritual works of mercy and being salt, light, and loving. So, yeah, these things aren't, they're not everything, but they're definitely something. Yeah. When we talk about Rene Descartes, so the father of modern philosophy, after the sort of scholastic period, after the medieval period in philosophy is Rene Descartes. So the father of modern philosophy, after the sort of scholastic period, after the medieval period in philosophy is Rene Descartes. And why don't you tell us about him? Okay. Well, I love to read, by the way, I just got to say he is so interesting and fun to read.

I would love to hang out with him and drink. Seriously. He's just, he seems cool, like sitting in his dressing gown by the fire, wondering if he exists. That's awesome. He seems cool, like sitting in his dressing gown by the fire, wondering if he exists. That's awesome. Yeah, he is great. And he's got great long hair and a good mustache. He's not a saint, but I do enjoy teaching him. And he's easy to read.

But he was pretty, yeah, obviously one of the brightest lights of Western civilization. But he knew what he was up to, I think. I've often thought, you know, in his meditations or in his discourse on method, you notice they're both six books long or six chapters long. You wonder if he was trying to recreate, you know, as God created in six days. I often ask my seminarians if they think he was trying to recreate the world somehow. But my professors told me that he was a faithful Catholic, at least in terms of going to church. that he was a faithful Catholic, at least in terms of going to church. And what he tried to do was, in his meditations, let's see, meditation three and five, he tries to prove God's existence.

No, it's three and five. He proves God's existence, and he wants to prove that the soul exists, too. But the problem is, it seems to me there's a lot of problems. But one of the biggest problems is his starting point. And as we said, did you say your son was Peter? I forgot. Yeah, Peter's my youngest. Yeah. So we use the example, if you were to put a set of keys in Peter's hands, he would start to shake them like I'm shaking them and smell them, maybe put them in his mouth and

squeeze them, all those kind of things, maybe throw them, who knows. But that's how human beings come to knowledge, right? It begins with the senses. Well, Descartes coming along in a period where science is really taking off and he's not satisfied with the common sense approach to things. Now, granted, Thomas wasn't, he started with a common sense approach, but he got pretty technical as he went on. But what Descartes wants to do is he wants to start with this scientific precision. He wants to make sure things are clear and distinct from the get-go. That's the starting point. So anything that can be doubted, he wants to doubt, including

the senses, even if they only trick us once. And this is part of his method. Now, at the end of his meditations, he grants, listen, I know that the senses, for the most part, tell us what's true, but I want to start in a place where we start not from belief, belief in the natural world, belief that things exist, belief that our senses, for the natural world, belief that things exist, belief that our senses for the most part tell us the truth, but I want to start with doubt. And then I want to come to know what it is that we can know absolutely, certainly, clearly, and distinctly. And the first thing that he can know, as most of your listeners are probably familiar with, is that he's thinking, and therefore,

he exists. I think, therefore, I am. The problem with that starting point is that he doesn't know what the heck he is other than a thinking thing, which means he starts apart from his body, not with his body, which is a pretty unnatural way of coming to know the world, and it gets us in all sorts of problems. In short, where we used to be able to know formal cause, material efficient cause, final cause, the only things at the end of the day that our friend Descartes can know are things that science can tell us. So out with formal cause, what things are, out with final cause, what things are made for, what they're directed towards, the eidos and the telos.

And what we're left with is pretty much a materialistic view of the world um our efficient cause where things come from a material cause what what is the matter that makes up the world so we've lost a robust understanding of the world and even ourselves as human beings i'm running out of breath man man. I'm getting fired up. No, I love it. I can tell you're a great teacher. This is what people want, man. It's like this stuff's got to mean stuff to us or else what's the point of talking about it? So I want to just say a bit before we begin wrapping up on transcendental idealism, which is Emmanuel Kant's idea, which kind of follows from Hume and Descartes. And his idea was like, we just project categories in the world, right? So like Hume denied induction and causation,

said we can't really know that, which would have done away with science. And then Kant comes along and says, well, there's these different categories. And that's why we can say that, you know, we can all trust our senses to some degree because we're projecting it on the world. It's not that we're coming to know the world as it is, but we know the world as we see it in our

mind. So, this distinction between the noumena, that which actually is, and then the phenomena that as it appears to us, because there has to be some noumena or else what is it that we're encountering, but we can't know it. We can only know our ideas of it. Here's a question, an honest question for you, which is super simple. How does things like science work, if that's true? Like, how is it, like, if you actually can't know the external world, but just your idea of it, and I can't know the external world, but just my idea of it, how is it that science is so efficient? You know, how is it that you and i can both talk sensibly about what trees are and

what lakes are and what fire is is that it would he would can't say it's because well we all have the same categories we're projecting outward and that's where we can talk about these things i'm not i'm not really sure are you asking is when you say what a lake is or what a yeah the essence of these things like so well yeah so when it comes to science science can't give us the essence of a thing what it can tell us about is how well at least according to how the thing shows up in the world the phenomena of the thing but do we have access to what it is like how can we talk intelligibly of like a dog if you can't know what a dog is well maybe maybe he would maybe he would just say that we all have the same categories that we're projecting outward and that's why they all appear the same to us

which seems yeah which seems to be like that's way too complicated but anyway especially if you've got no argument for it that's the other thing yeah but but i what i would say is a little later on i mean so phenomenology builds off his numina phenomena distinction my director at catholic u uh monsignor sokolowski if you want a good book on phenomenology i teach his intro to phenomenology it's pretty wonderful okay and he gets to the point where he thinks, if you do phenomenology right, you do get back to what things are. You do get back to the eidos, and you do get back to the telos. And one of the ways that you can go about doing that is, he calls it eidetic intuition. So you talk about what makes up a thing, and then you try to pull everything away that seems to make the thing what it is, and once you get to the point where it no longer is what it is, you've realized what the thing is.

So, as philosophy moves throughout its history, that's one of the ways to get back to the real world and talking about what things are and what they're for. He's got an excellent, and maybe you can throw this into your podcast. Yeah, it should be a link to it. I'll throw it up in the show notes. An excellent essay called The Threat of Same-Sex Marriage. He wrote it in 2004, anticipating where we were heading in terms of our public policy. And he uses phenomenology to show what the nature of marriage is so philosophically speaking not as science but what we can know as rational agents about what this is and if we pull up we take certain things out of it um namely the act the pro-creative piece it's no longer what it is yeah i would if you've not read that article i highly recommend it it's piece, it's no longer what it is. So, I would, if you've not read that article,

I highly recommend it. It's wonderful, and it's rational, and it's pretty convincing. I feel like sometimes we as Christians in this modern era try to argue on these sort of, you know, Cartesian, on the Cartesian terms. Like, we go, okay, okay, let me see if I can make a case, but I'm going to leave aside'm going to, I'm going to leave aside the formal cause and I'm going to leave aside the final cause and see if I can do this. And I don't think we should do that because I tried to write a paper on why I thought pornography, you remember this, we've talked about this a bunch, about why pornography is intrinsically evil. And I tried to make an argument based just on the idea that human beings are good and you shouldn't exploit them i actually don't i couldn't figure out a way to do

it without bringing in the telos of sex you know which is what nobody wants to hear like no one wants to talk about the teleology of sex as soon as you do then and and if thwarting that telos is is not good uh then you start calling into question homosexual acts and contraception and obviously there's not a lot of people that want to do that but everyone knows what the end of sex is for because we wouldn't have contraception if we didn't we wouldn't have abortion if we didn't so and even you know the the kind, the kind of language that, you know, people would use in high school, I got to first base, I got to second base, I got to third base. Yeah, that's a really good point.

What's that home run? Yeah, yeah. How do you know what that is? And why are you nervous? Because maybe you're going to get pregnant. I mean, the whole reason that the contraceptives exist is because we know that sex leads to life. Yeah. That makes sense. There's a reason that, um, same sex couples don't need contraception because it's, it doesn't, it doesn't have the possibility of bringing about life.

Right. And by the way, I should say, I'm don't, I'm not bashing people. There's, I, I hate no one. I'm making a philosophical distinction between an act of, um, sex between a man and a woman and a man and a man and a woman and a woman. Yeah. If you, if you're, if you're out there, if you, if you, if someone's out there in a homosexual lifestyle and you think we hate you, you think too highly of yourself. Like we don't actually think about you a great deal. I know that's such a harsh thing to say. I know. I'm just tired of having to like backtrack everything I say so as not to offend anyone. So now I've taken the other approach.

I'm going to try being a, I'm going to try and be harsh, see how that works. I'm kind of joking, but I'm kind of serious as well. Like when someone's like, you're judging me and you hate me. I'm like, you think way too highly of yourself. Like I actually don't think a great deal about you. So calm down. You're not that important hate me. I'm like, you think way too highly of yourself. Like, I actually don't think a great deal about you. So calm down. You're not that important to me. But if I were to think about you, I would think that you're a child of God deserving of love like me. You know what I mean? No, I'm too harsh. I do know what you mean. But I also think that the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality is different than other Christian denominations. We don't think because someone has

an attraction to the opposite sex that they are intrinsically evil. That's not the kind of theology that we have. But I think if you were brought up in another faith, or if all you listen to is what you see on the news or on your Twitter feed, that you may think that Christians are, that hate gay people or hate lesbians. That's not it at all. What we're talking about here is the nature of the sexual act, and that a man and a woman can do something physically that only a man and a woman can do. That's what we're getting at here. Are you saying that men cannot have uteruses? Sorry, did you see that? Did you see that tweet? Did you see it? By Planned Parenthood? I can't wait until they are just abolished

and people look upon them. You know, and let's talk philosophically here. So, what kind of acts would go against Planned Parenthood's philosophy? I can think of three. What kind of acts would go against Planned Parenthood's philosophy? I can think of three. What kind of acts? That are out. Yeah. All right, let me try and think of one.

Okay. Well, I think they would place personal autonomy above almost everything else. And so telling another person what they can. I'm thinking giving someone a disease oh okay you shouldn't do that yeah non-consensual or um i had one more in mind um uh oh yeah so um probably probably something like like a pedophilia for the moment they seem to be against that yeah but but if you look and this goes back to our initial conversation Probably something like pedophilia. For the moment, they seem to be against that. Yeah, but if you look, and this goes back to our initial conversation, those all deal with matter and body only. There's no concern there. There's no contraceptive for the human heart.

Right. You've worked with enough people, and so have I, that have had safe sex, that have had consensual sex and done all sorts of things, but are not happy. They're not satisfied with life and say, but wait, I'm doing everything that I've been told to do. Well, the reason you're not happy is because there's a lot more to sex than simply orgasm and not getting a disease or not getting pregnant. There's actually a language to the body itself and to the sexual act that you're not tapping into. And that gets back to the formal cause and the final cause of things, what sex is and what it's for. If you have a materialistic outlook on sex and the human body, then you're going to reduce sex to simply not getting pregnant and not getting a disease. Yeah, I remember as a kid hearing a relative of mine tell a younger person who was probably around 19, they said, do whatever makes you happy. And it was in regard to like moving in with their significant other. And yeah, this idea, do whatever, do what

makes you happy. Well, you should do what makes you happy and what will make you happy is virtue, right? But that's not what they mean. Well, again, because you're talking, there's another telos. We are made for happiness and we know what happiness looks like. So it's not just whatever you want to be. It is happiness and it's living according to your nature. But if you have a materialist mindset, then there is no nature because that's something intelligible. That's something invisible. That's something that you can't see or touch or measure. So it's just going to be not getting a disease or not getting pregnant.

This brings us back full circle to the beginning of our conversation of anthropology. Like what will make you happy? We don't even need to do this and it happy? We are brilliant. We are brilliant. Yeah. If you want to know what makes you happy, you have to understand what you is and what you is for, you know. All right. Now we're just kind of telling each other what we agree with. But hey, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Hey, you sometimes write on the Word on Fire website. Where else do you write, blog, speak? Where can people find more about you? I do. So, as a matter of fact, Bishop Barron has invited me. I'm going out to Los Angeles

Easter week to do seven videos for a new project. So, I'm pretty excited. I'm going to get a haircut and everything. It's going to be cool. But I'm on Twitter at F-R-F-E-R-E-N-C-E. So, Father Ferenc. I'm on Instagram at Father Ferenc. IE-R-E-N-C-E. So Father Ferenc. I'm on Instagram at Father Ferenc. I write for Word on Fire. If you Google my name, you'd probably find a bunch of articles. I'll throw up your – I have not signed the contract yet, but this is new news, and I probably will within a week or a week and a half.

I wrote my first book over the summers when I'm not teaching, so that should be coming out soon. I can't give too many details yet, but when I know, I'll let you know. Tell me and I'll share it. And I might need a little blurb from you in the front. You'd be like, Father Ferenc is a good writer. I'm sorry, what was that accent you were just trying to do? I don't know. It sounded like, yeah, that's funny. Yeah, no, that's awesome. And for all of our listeners, I'll throw up the links so you can follow Father Ference on Instagram and Twitter. And as soon as your book comes out, let me know and we'll push that as well. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. Really appreciate it.

All right. Thanks, Matt. God bless. Thanks, everybody. Wasn't that fun? Father Damien's, Father Damien's, that is definitely not his name. Father Damien is the man. You got to go check out his other two episodes that I've done with him if you haven't already. The first one we did was episode 39, Aquinas' Five Remedies for Sorrow. That's a super fun one, so go check that out.

Go to pintswithaquinas.com and just type in, like, I don't know, 39, episode 39 or whatever. And the second one I did with him had to do with God's essence being existence, and that was episode 57. So go check out those episodes if you enjoyed today's episode. All right. Thanks so much. Chat with you next week.

Bye. I would give my whole life to carry you, to carry you. And I would give my whole life to carry you.