Within Reason - #159 Aristotle: The World's Greatest Philosopher?

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

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Thanks so much for having me. Aristotle is perhaps the most celebrated and influential philosopher of all time. Do you think he's overrated? No, absolutely not. I mean, he's an incredibly difficult thinker to get to grips with, but I think once you do and you kind of really get a sense of how his mind works, I mean, I think it's absolutely incredible. And I don't think that that involves thinking that he's right about everything. I don't think you have to agree with Aristotle to think he's an incredible thinker. I think it's just the way that he analyzes things, the way he makes divisions. He's very, very good at saying, look, it's just not as simple as that. We need to complicate this issue further.

I think that that's like a really valuable skill or trait for a philosopher. And the other thing that he'll do that's really impressive is we'll see him kind of make a first stab as an answer to a question, and then he'll give a second, slightly more refined answer to the same question, and then another. So there's a sense in which you can see him thinking through the problem. And so if you read him in a way where you think, okay, this is a big systematic thinker and you see these kind of seeming contradictory statements you think. God, what's going on here, all these logical inconsistencies and what he's saying. But if you get the sense that you've got to kind of get into the rhythm of his thought process and you see him, okay, here's the general statement, now let's refine it, now let's refine it. Once you get into the rhythm of how he thinks, then it's really impressive.

Sure. So people will have heard of Aristotle, but maybe especially if they're watching an introduction like this, they might not really know what he's all about. So in the fewest possible words to start with, like what's the hype? What's so great about Aristotle? So, I mean, perhaps start with a very small bit of biography. So Aristotle is a student of Plato. He's as a teenager.

He goes to Plato's Academy in Athens. He studies with Plato for 20 years. He's effectively Plato's greatest and brightest student. So he's coming in that legacy, right? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. And so he's drawing on all of those platonic ideas, but then he's challenging them and questioning them and moving them on to kind of the next stage. So that's kind of one part of what he's doing.

But he's also a natural scientist. In fact, I think the best way to think about Aristotle as a thinker is first and foremost, he's a biologist. He's interested in understanding the natural world. He's interesting understanding organisms, including us, and how they operate. And so you've got this combination of kind of very refined, complex metaphysics that he's inheriting from. Plato, and you've got this really down-to-earth, nitty-gritty, let's understand the physical world. He's bringing both of those things together. At the same time, he's also interested in politics. He's interested in literature. He invents formal logic. I mean, there's no one in

history that has invented more academic disciplines than Aristotle, right? That's quite an achievement for anyone to do. Yeah, yeah, that's fair enough. Okay, so I think, and the thing is, each of these areas like formal logic and his sort of so-called metaphysics and his ethics and they're sort of whirled unto themselves. So I think the best thing to do is to kind of take them one by one and start getting a feel for the kind of stuff that Aristotle was thinking about. So I suppose like one of the most foundational questions, I mean people often start with Aristotle with the ethics stuff, but I always like to lead that till last. We spoke before about stoicism and we did the same thing. Everyone knows that Stoics are people who, you know, hold fast in the face of suffering.

But let's do the metaphysics first and then see why that's what comes out of it. So for Aristotle, I suppose the sort of fundamental question for a philosopher might be something like, you know, what is being? What is substance? What is the universe made out of? What is like the foundational nature of reality? When it comes to Aristotle, how can we start getting a feel for his picture of that? So I think to come back to something I was saying earlier, his first move is to say it's more complicated than anyone else's thought. So kind of the famous sort of early metaphysian in Greek philosophy is a guy called Permanides.

Yes. He's a big influence on Plato in many ways. And Permanides says, well, things either exist or they don't exist. There's no middle ground, right? It's either one or the other. and things can't suddenly come to be out of nothing, right? So you can't have existing things suddenly appearing. And equally, you can't have things that exist vanishing into thin air, right?

That doesn't happen either. So things either are or they are not. And ultimately, Parmenides says, well, everything just is, everything just exists, right? You can't have a non-existent thing. And so if you just have existence and nothing can fall out of existence, you kind of of just have permanent eternal existence. Everything just is all the time, right? And this is all very kind of armchair philosophy, right? And so Plato inherits these ideas. Clearly Aristotle and Plato are talking about these things in the academy when Aristotle was young. And he comes

along and says, well, look, we need to complicate this. This is a far too simplistic way to think about existence, right? So, for instance, this chair exists. It's a thing. The brown of the chair also exists. But the brownness doesn't exist on its own. You can't have brownness just like that. You can have a brown chair. So the brownness exists as an attribute of the chair. So it exists in a different way to the way the chair exists, right?

So suddenly we've got two ways of thinking about what is or what is real. And then given that he's interested in organisms, biology and the natural world, the one defining characteristic of the natural world is change, right? Everything's constantly in motion. This is something, again, that Permanities kind of is denying. Things just are, and they don't change. So, Aristotle, no, no, everything's changing. Everything's moving all the time.

And if we look at physical processes and organisms, then these give us really clear examples of this. So a classic example would be, say, the acorn, right? So an acorn is an acorn, but it also is going to become an oak tree or has the potential to become an oak tree, right? And so there's a sense in which the acorn is two things at the same time. It is an acorn and it is potentially an oak tree in the way in which nothing else is potentially an oak tree. Yeah, and that potentiality is like part of what the acorn is. You wouldn't fully understand the nature of an acorn unless you understood its potentialities.

And I mean, you mentioned Parmenides who it's quite hard to sort of interpret him, but he seems to deny the existence of change because he sort of says, as you say, like stuff that is, is, stuff that is not, is not. For something to change would mean that something which is not would need to sort of come into being. You know, for there to be a tree that grows or something, there would need to be something like a tree that wasn't there before. that's something coming from nothing. That doesn't make sense. So Parmenides sort of brings up this paradox of change. And Aristotle, in attempting to sort of answer this concern, starts with this

distinction. He says, well, you know, there are different ways in which something can be. And for an acorn, it is an acorn, but it's also potentially a tree. And you might think, oh, potentiality isn't like, it's not really a thing. It doesn't exist. But the acorn isn't potentially a chicken. It doesn't have the potential to become a chicken, but it does have the potential to become a tree. So whatever that is, it's like it's real and it means something, right? Yeah, absolutely. As you said, it's the defining characteristic of an acorn. You don't know what an acorn is unless you know it can, it has the potential to do that.

So that is really, really important. And so this kind of really challenges the sorts of things that say Palmone is saying, because the acorn is defined by what it is not at the moment. Yeah, interesting. But what it can become. So that's quite nice. And the other thing that's also going on here, if you think back to sort of Plato, I mean, lots of people will have their kind of.

kind of sort of caricature of platonic metaphysics, right? There are ideal forms that are unchanging, and then the physical world is constantly changing, and it's just some kind of sort of shadow of these really existing unchanging things. So again, Plato's committed to this idea that the things that really exist are eternal and don't alter, and the things that change are somehow secondary and less important. And so again, Arisota wants to challenge that and say, no, it's all this changing stuff that isn't fixed in its being. That's the interesting stuff. That's the world we live in.

That's the world we want to understand. Yeah. Okay. So that's interesting. Aristotle comes along and says, Hey, like, you know,

when we're talking about stuff that exists, there's sort of potential and there's actual. You know, there's acorns are potentially a tree. And when it becomes a tree, it's actually a tree. And it has the potential to decay or whatever. Okay.

So what? You know, who cares? What does that mean? Why would someone bother sort of thinking about that? Okay, an acorn potentially becomes a tree. Like, who cares? So, I mean, it's just part of trying to understand the natural world, right? If you're trying to do science, I mean, then you're going to want to understand how these processes work.

But I think, so, I mean, I think one really interesting to do in thinking about a philosopher is who their enemies are, right? Who's the bad guy? Yeah, right. And for Aristotle, I think the bad guy is Democritus, the atomist. Uh-huh. Right? Yes. So,

So, Democritus is kind of presenting what we would now call a kind of reductive materialism, right? Everything can be just reduced down to matter in motion. Democritus is one of our earliest, perhaps the earliest thinkers

who believe that the universe is made out of sort of small, indivisible, I mean, the word atom just means indivisible, right? It's unfortunate that we have since split the atom,

but by atom, literally, we mean whatever the most indivisible small sort of unit of stuff is. That's what an atom is. And Democritus says the universe is made up of atoms, whatever the nature of those atoms are. And everything that exists can be explained in terms of those atoms, which sounds a lot like, you know, a modern materialist. And this is the kind of thing that Democritus is talking about. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you're all too aware of all of the sorts of problems that that might raise. If you're just talking about

dead matter in motion, how it is, is it that some things are alive? And how does consciousness grow out of just the interactions of these bits of dead matter, right? So this is Aristotle's sort of big concern, that just describing the physical world in terms of that kind of inert matter, just that model just isn't rich enough to explain the kind of the complexity and the variety that we see in the natural world, and particularly in biological organisms where, so, I mean, think back to the acorn, right? if you're a if you're a reductive materialist you you break it up you look at all the components you see what it's made out of in theory that's your complete explanation of what it is but that doesn't

tell you anything about oak trees yeah so it's not really enough yeah right right it's it's only a partial explanation we might say sure i mean a modern thinker might be quick to kind of criticize aristotle they might sort of say well if you actually knew everything about the molecular makeup of the acorn and the molecular makeup of the chemical surrounding it or like of the sunlight and all this kind of you actually knew all of those facts and put them together, you would kind of predict a tree, that a tree would sort of come about. But a few things to consider. Firstly, maybe it's not as simple as that.

But also, like, Aristotle is very early on here. You know, he's one of our earliest people to be thinking about this kind of stuff. And so, yeah, sometimes he misses things we now know to be true. but, like, it is still undisputedly a genius for his time. I mean, there's one interesting moment where Aristotle seems to kind of prefigure evolutionary natural selection. Like, he considers the possibility of, like, essentially natural selection. He describes it, and then he dismisses it for reasons which now we understand the evolution

seem a bit too sort of forthright. But the fact that that was even sort of something that was considered, by him is pretty astonishing. So, I don't know, I kind of want to just sort of protect Aristotle's reputation against what might be called presentism and realize that we're dealing with a, we're dealing with a mind here, okay? I kind of also want to, you said talking about like who his enemies are, okay, so you've got Democritus, the Atomist. You've also talked about how Aristotle was a student of Plato, and there are some really important ways in which Aristotle differs from Plato, right? So you just alluded to this concept of the forms and in the context of change, but could you tell me a bit more about what, like, Plato's idea of forms were and how Aristotle thinks about things differently?

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Because you think you know it and then you go back to it a week later and it's different. So you don't really know it after all. There's a sense in which for Plato, real knowledge looks like mathematics, right? Eternal and unchanging two plus two always equals four. And so he thinks that if all of our knowledge has to look like that, then it's going to have to be knowledge of unchanging ideas. And so he thinks that as we look at, at objects in the physical world, as we look at chairs, for instance, we ought not to be so concerned

about the particular chair in front of us, which is going to change and decay and not be there forever. But instead, we want to kind of, I was going to say sort of abstract, but that's not the right word. We're going to want to try and get to the idea of chair in itself. We want to move from the particular chairs we see to the idea of chairness, if we like. And he thinks that that idea of chairness, if it's unchanging, must have always existed. And then there's all the kind of very weird and wonderful stuff about, was there a past life when we encountered these ideas directly before we then, you know. Yeah, Plato entertains the idea that, okay, so, I mean, the question is, right,

you've got a chair over there, I've got a chair over here. and there's a table in between them, right? There's something that these two chairs have in common, that they both don't have in common with the table, which is why we call these chairs and that table. And the question is like, what is it? They're not the same object. Yours is over there, mine's over here,

but they've got something which connects them and makes them both fall into this category of chair. So for Plato, there is this thing called chairness, which both of them must, like, sort of participate in, right? And our knowledge of what a chair is now must be because we had some kind of prior understanding before our birth. He entertains this idea that we were sort of existing in the realm of forms, which is a little bit wacky and a little bit weird.

But look, it's a real problem, right? Because otherwise, we've just got a bunch of matter. And it's like arranged in various ways. Yeah, you know, I could cool it a chair, but I could also use it like a table or something. To say that there's this real thing that these have in common that the lampshade doesn't means there must be this sort of form of chairness that they all participate in. Aristotle is aware of this problem. But he doesn't agree with Plato's solution.

No. I mean, let me give a kind of a more sensible and sympathetic account of what Plato's doing here as well. And he, as I say, he says different things in different places. So he's actually quite difficult to pin down on this. Another way to describe what Plato's saying is, look, for you to be able to go into the world and recognize a chair, you must already have the idea of chair in your head in some sense. So he's effectively saying that there's certain ideas and things. concept that we must know a priori, we must know them before we go out and experience the

world. They're not things that we kind of concoct off the back of experience. They must be there already, right? So for your viewers who know, who are kind of deep into their philosophy ready, right, he's canned, he's not hume. Yeah. It would be a way of describing where Plato is on this, right? So a priori concepts must be there in place already. And then there's the kind of the weird and wonderful stories about, and did we encounter those A-Pri-R-I concepts in a past life? Yeah. Which obviously Kant doesn't go that far. But what Aristotle will want to do is want to bring that idea of form down to earth.

So, for instance, again, I mean, it's a mundane example, but the chair again, right? Arisov's going to say, yeah, the chair has a form, right? And the form is simply the structure and organization of the matter that makes it up, right? So these chairs do share something in common, and it's the way in which the matter is structured and organized. But as soon as you destroy all the chairs in the world, there is no form left. So the form is dependent on the particular things that exist, rather than being some kind of eternal idea that exists independent. So for Plato, the form exists and the objects sort of exist as reflections of the form. which for Aristotle, the individual objects exist,

and the form sort of comes out of those individual objects. So it sort of like flips it on its head and reverses it and says that the metaphysical starting point is the objects in the world from which we get forms rather than the other way around. I suppose this is like one way of thinking about it. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, episodes like this take a lot of planning. And last night I was up fairly late reading everything I could about Aristotle.

And I soon realized that I just kind of had had enough to eat. But I'd been so wrapped up in my prep that I also hadn't gotten any food in and I didn't really feel like waiting for a delivery or something. So I might have felt a bit stuck. I would have been a bit stuck. Were it not for today's sponsor, Huell. That's H-U-E-L. I reached for one of these. This is the Ready to Drink Black Edition, which is a high-protein variety. It's got 35 grams of vegan protein, 26 vitamins and minerals. There's no added sugar, it's gluten-free, it's got fiber, it's got omega-3s, and it costs less than $5. This is a complete meal of 400 calories. This one is the chocolate peanut butter flavor,

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there's a deal on for you. If you go to Hule.com forward slash Alex O'Connor and use the code Alex O'Connor, then you'll get 15% off. So thanks to Huell for quite literally actualizing today's episode's potential both by fueling my prep last night and sponsoring the show. And with that said, Back to John Sellers. Okay. So for Aristotle, form is like some kind of structure or arrangement of a sort of set of matter. So he's got matter and he's got form.

And these two being put together gives us this concept of hylomorphism, right? I think hylowe must mean something like matter and form, meaning, well, like, and morphae meaning form. So you get like hylomorphism, the idea that what an object is, is a mixture of matter and form. And if you're familiar with, like, 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. is just that significant. But okay, so we've got an idea 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 Democritus. I think there's one more sort of missing picture before we can talk about some of the implications of this metaphysical worldview, which is Aristotle has some pretty specific views on the 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. In the modern 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 in that way, would he?

No. So, I mean, famously, Aristotle is credited with a theory often referred to as the four causes. and although in this context, I think cause is perhaps a slightly misleading translation. So a better way to put it would be four explanations, or a better way still to put it, would be to say, an explanation must have four different components, right? Okay. And so one of those components would be what we mean about causation, right? You know, who made this come about? Yeah.

So, 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. So, again, you want to understand the chair. You've got to know what it's made out of. It's 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 that, he thinks, is equally vital to really understand anything. Yeah. And people, like, it's a sort of common question in philosophy to be like, well, you know, if I sat on that table, would it just, like, become a chair?

And I think a sensible way to answer that is to say, well, what's its actual purpose? It's like, what was it made for? And that's like the only real way that we can meaningfully distinguish between the table and the chair in that context. Because, yeah, maybe they're made out of, maybe they're both made out of wood, they've 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, like, teleology in terms of what they're for, people are like a little bit allergic to it. And I think Aristotle is like aware that people think about this differently.

We understand that a table is made with a purpose. But when we look at things that aren't manmade, we've talked about chairs and tables, and it's easy to see how this applies. But what about like a tree? You know, like 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. enact the change, but what's a tree for? People would say that's kind of a meaningless question. What would Aristotle say? I mean, in the case of the tree, the kind of organism as a whole, I guess it's trying to stay alive. It's trying to reproduce in a sense. This is what living things do. So there's a sense in which that's their function, we might say. I mean, what he's particularly interested in when thinking about these kind of purposes or functions for things, is thinking about parts of organisms in particular. So if we think about a human being, right, 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 heart. So those look like quite simple examples of things in the natural world, not man-made, where we can point to these kind of functions and purposes. Yeah. So I think it's interesting how, like, I've read, if you read like a biology textbook, like a high school biology textbook or something, you'll find Aristotelian language like sneaking in. Or if you look up on Google, like, you know, what is a heart? 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 get. It'll say to pump blood around the body. That's why you have a heart, which is an extremely teleological answer, you know? Like, why do, why does this exist? Why do birds make nests? And it's all like, oh, to do this for this purpose?

Why do trees have leaves? Oh, in order to photosynthesize. When, like, in the modern day, we don't like the idea that teleology is like built into nature so much. We sort of 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 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 like a modern understanding of evolutionary biology undermines the teleological causation of Aristotle?

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? We're not, again, back to the acorn, you're not going to understand what a heart is. Yeah. 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? blood? Can we reconcile what Aristotle was saying with, say, Darwinism? Right. I think we can. I mean,

if you think about what Darwin was trying to do, and this isn't my area of expertise at all, but what Darwin is trying to do is offer an explanation for how these purposes and functions come about. Darwin can see that the heart looks as if it was designed and has a very clear purpose. And So his question is, how on earth could that have happened without reference to some kind of brand designer who constructed all 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 the sense, Darwin would acknowledge that, I think. 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 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'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 our sort of modern metaphysics, but is often sort of understated. But it depends on the context, right? Like I've sometimes said if you go into a science lab and ask somebody like, you know, why is that rocket on its way to the International Space Station? And they'll say, well, because the thrust 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. And both of those can be true at once. And the whole point of Aristotle's distinction here is to say that these are different aspects, different ways of answering the question, like, how do you explain the existence of this thing? Right. So, okay, that all having been said, we've got a basic grasp of like how Aristotle is thinking about the world. One of the most sort of profound metaphysical questions that somebody can ask is about, like, the nature and course. of the universe itself. Did Aristotle believe in God?

So I think the short answer is yes, he did. Precisely what he means by that term is sort of slightly harder to pin down. I mean, he thinks the world is eternal. He thinks he's always existed. So he doesn't think it was created at any point. And in the kind of early Christian reception of Aristotle, this is a sticking point, right? then they don't have to fudge, you know. 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? So not a first cause in the sense of Big Bang, chronological. point in time. Yeah, exactly. So not a first cause in that sense, but something that is kind of the origin of, the ultimate origin of movement and activity in the world. So we don't have an infinite

regress in our explanations, 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 he said, okay, we want some eternal movement, right? Movement that doesn't stop. Well, movement in a straight line is no good because that has a start point and end point. So what movement can go on and on forever and ever, movement going round 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 kind of divine bodies in some sense that are underpinning everything else. It gets very murky beyond there. You see quite different from like a modern conception of God. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because like Aristotle, his views on like the nature of whatever God might be are extremely different from something like modern Christianity.

And yeah, 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. That's how Aquinas would use this term to prove God. 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 regress here. is particularly sort of focused on by Aquinas later, which is that, like, in order to actualise something, there needs to be something already actual. You know, like if I want to cool down a can of Coca-Cola and I put it in a fridge, if my fridge is only potentially cold but not actually cold, it's not going to be able to, you know, actualise the potential of the can

to become cold. The fridge has to be actually cold in order to actualise that change in the can to make it cold. But then if the fridge is actually cold, something must have actualised that potential. And whatever actualised that potential must have been actualised by something else. And so something has to be actual in order to actualise, but there has to have been something to actualise that. And you end up with this kind of regress. And crucially, this isn't the kind of regress that sort of goes backwards in time, like domino's falling over, but like what is actualising potential right now, you know, the potential of the cup to be in its position right now as opposed to being on the floor. It's being actualized by the table, which is being actualized by the table

legs and so on and so forth. 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. The 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 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 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 principles. So insofar as this unactualized actualizer interacts with the world, with us, or cares about human affairs, Aristotle has some quite different views to the modern Christian, doesn't he? I am one of Motenui. On July 10th. Maui, you will board my boat and restore the heart of Tefeiti.

And here we go. The journey begins. See her light up to 90. The ocean chose you. Let's go save the world. I got you back, chosen one. Disney's Moana. Boat's Nick.

His name is Hay Hey Hey. His name is Yum when he goes in my tum-tum in theater's July 10th. 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 kind of 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. 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. I think so, because of course Aristotle sort of has an interesting history post his death, right? because his works are kind of like kind of neglected for some time and then kind of rediscovered. Can you tell me about that story and particularly like the church's reception of Aristotle's work when it's sort of rediscovered?

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-Andus,

where you have 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 Greece. from Byzantium, say, and translate those into Latin. 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. 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. Yeah. You get a group of Aristotelian philosophers who, were almost, who are very radical, almost atheists in Paris. And they're condemned, right? The

Bishop of Paris says, no, don't teach this stuff. This is dangerous. And it's then the next generation of philosophers in Paris, which includes Thomas Aquinas, who then want to kind of rescue Aristotle. They can see that he's just a genius thinker and they don't want him condemned as a heretic. So they find a way to kind of create this marriage where they can bring the two together. So, yeah, it's not an easy marriage to start off with. It takes some time. It takes some work. It takes someone of the stature of Thomas Aquinas to pull it off. Yes, quite, quite, quite. And people can probably begin to see how, like, well, there's lots of resonance. Aristotle, as far as pertains later Christian tradition, is laying some seeds that have to then be, you know, actualised by Thomas Aquinas.

But there is also a lot to like in Aristotle when it comes to modern, theistic ways of thinking. And one of those is 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. So if you take the right matter and you put it in the right form, it gives you, you know, 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 body,

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 like Aristotle's taxonomy and how he accounts for what a human is and what makes them so special? So, I mean, earlier we were saying that when we were talking about hyalomorphism, we were saying, okay, form is the kind of structural 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. Yeah, yeah, 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? So, I mean, he uses the word potential in two different senses, right? So one sense is the acorn has a 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. That doesn't involve any change on our part. We're still the same person. But one of them, we're actualising the potential to speak.

And the other we're not, right? So then he'll want to define, say, human beings in particular, particular, but also other living beings as the sorts of things that have certain abilities and capacities. And that then becomes part of his definition of what the form is. So form of a human being isn't just two arms, two legs. 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, I think like the earlier fourfold causation becomes relevant and you

begin to see, okay, interesting Aristotle thought that to 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 becomes quite difficult. Yeah, you can just say one of them's alive, one of them's, and when you start reaching for words, you'll want to say something like, well, one of them, you know, it's doing stuff. Its heart is pumping blood, its brain is firing neural. You're talking about what it's doing. You're talking about like functions.

You're talking about what everything is sort of for, what sort of end it's serving. And that's what sort of produces life. So matter and form, but form includes what a thing does, like what it's for. Now Aristotle uses in trying to distinguish between, say, what a human does and what an animal can do and what plants can do.

And like you say, it's about capacities. It's not about actually doing them. Right now, you're not speaking, and neither is your chair. 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 word, 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, 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?

And soul is the thing. For Aristotle, like that's how he uses the term. 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 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 capacities and abilities that we have. Yeah.

So if you have a tower that you knock over, right, like, it's capacities as a tower, the form that makes it a tower is now gone. but it's and you could call that the soul the soul of the tower is whatever sort of makes it into a tower. It's its form, its capacities and whatnot. If I knock over the tower, the soul has gone, but it's not like it's like floated off somewhere into an afterlife or something. It's just no longer functionally there. And Aristotle is going to say that plants and animals have souls too because they're living things, right? So a plant can be alive or dead. So a plant has soul, it has some kind of animating 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. 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 metabolizing and whatnot. But also they can think. And that's all our subtle means by the soul. Because people, 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, again, not very supernatural here. We're just talking about matter and form. And so the thing that makes humans so special is their ability 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 opposed to every other animal? So when Aristotle is describing human beings as rational, he uses the word logicae, right, rational, which comes from the Greek word, logos, meaning word, or explanation, right? So humans are distinct inso far as they speak. They don't just think, they also speak, right? You might think your dog can think and is actually very clever. but your cat's probably cleverer. But humans speak, right? And then you might say, okay, well, other animals like dolphins and things, they communicate. Communication isn't unique to human beings.

But the sense of Logos that we've got a play here is not simply communicate. It's also explain, right? 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 was talking about rationality, he's not just talking about kind of basic thought processes we could attribute to lower animals. He's talking about the Logos. He's talking about we can think and reflect about the world that we live in and we can try and explain it.

That's distinctive. And 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. in that the Logos is translated as the word. So 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 overlaps beginning to kind of form, perhaps.

But okay, so we've got a metaphysical view and hylomorphism, four causes. And we've got Aristotle's view on the soul, which is actually pretty like empirical and materialistic, essentially. That gives us a kind of like metaphysical picture of what Aristotle is talking about, I think. One thing that we haven't mentioned yet, which people often start with, because it seems a bit more like meta, is something you alluded to earlier, which is that Aristotle invents formal logic. Now, Aristotle is this great scientist and biologists and now apparently a metaphysician and, you know, 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? 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. What Aracel 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?

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 a famous example, this kind of sort of syllogistic arguments, that he codifies for the first time. you know, all A's are B, all Bs 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. 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 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 sort of, presented by Plato is trying to pull the wool over people's eyes.

And, you know, we're all familiar with Sophistry today. Aristotle really wants to say, okay, I'm going to give you the tools so that you can really, you can really uncover that when you encounter it. And you can see whether someone is giving you a good argument or not. Yeah. And so to be clear here, like if you 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, but for the argumentation. It's like it, there's no content we're just talking about the overall structure. And Aristotle comes up with a bunch of different, essentially like forms of argument. He sort of in the form of like A's and B's and ifs and all this kind of stuff, and nuns 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, right? But I mean, it's incomplete, right? Our sort of conception of formal logic today is not purely Aristotelian, but it's a starting point. 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. Yeah. 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, you know, just unbelievably impressive. I'm beginning to see as well, I'm hoping people can begin to see that when you introduce Aristotle and you want to sort of start talking about him, you kind of want to say, 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, he's invented logic, which is totally separate from being probably the preeminent biologist of his era, like his his study of of animals. And he like sort of live near a lake or something and he'd go down and spend his time like dissecting the fish and stuff like that. Yeah. But no one else was doing at the time. Yeah. I mean, after he left Plato's Academy, he spent some time on the island of Lesbos.

Yeah. And I've never been, but apparently in the center of the island of Lesbos, there's a huge lagoon, kind of sort of 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. And again, we're back to, 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? I need to know what function they have in order to understand how this organism works. And so I think that's where, I think it's the hands-on,

science of dissecting fish, which is where many of these ideas were first kind of crystallized. Yeah, I find it so interesting the thought of like how 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'd almost trick people. Like in the context of philosophy, if you speak to like a modern atheistic materialist and say like, you know, does the eye have a purpose? They'll want to say, oh, well, you know, no, no, no, not really. It just sort of exists. And it has the effect. peer and stuff, but if without priming them, you sort of went up and you said, hey, like, can you tell me what an eye is? It's, you know, it's the organ you used to see. And what I want to say is,

like people might think Aristotle is a bit, well, antiquated because he's sort of holding on to this teleological nature that has been gone since evolution. But I want to say that, like, I agree with you from earlier that evolution doesn't do 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 it being meaningful to say that the function of a biological part is really part of what makes it what it is. I think we really can retain that if we just use quite like plain language about it. You know, the table has a function to hold things up and that was invented by humans. The eye has the function of seeing and that was developed by natural selection.

One is designed, one's not, but they both have a function in a meaningful sense. So, having said that, I want to ask you what the function of a human being is. And what I mean by that is I want to sort of, I want to say wrap up, but it's probably the biggest subject of Aristotle's 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 Nicomacian ethics about what makes a good life.

And in many ways, his idea 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? What is their function? Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think it's, 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 not comician 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. 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

Traditionally they're called moral virtues We might call them character virtues Something like that 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 We don't lose our animality Just because we're rational beings So we have all those desires and appetite that any other animal would have. 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. And that's one way in which we can live a rational life, right? Another example would be, say, courage, right? Again, good evolutionary reasons for us to run away from dangerous situations, right? Very sensible. But there are some situations where it might be important for us to face danger

and to step in for a variety of reasons. So we want to develop the virtue of courage so that we can use our region to manage that kind of very sensible, inbuilt cowardice that we will have. 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're saying earlier about kind of explanation and doing science, is what Aristotle calls intellectual virtues. And so this would be the trying to understand the world that we're in, trying to contemplate

the universe, to do biology, to think about God, to do philosophy, do metaphysics, the things that we've been talking about right now, right? So that's another way in which we can be rational. So a good human being, and this is, I think, the key most complex question in Aristotle's ethics, which I don't think is resolved at all, which is which of these, if at all, is the most important? do we have to choose between the two? The obvious thing to me, it seems, is to say, well, obviously the ideal human being is going to be rational in both of those senses, right? You're going to have those virtues of moderation and courage.

And also you're going to engage in that kind of reflective activity. But the way that Aristotle phrases it right at the end of his book on ethics is to describe this in terms of two different ways of life, right? So he talks about a political life, someone engaged in their key, 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. 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, I think, I mean, philosophy often has an autobiographical element, and I think in this instance,

it's clear to me the life that Aristotle wanted to live, which is just to be engaged in that kind of contemplation, reflection, the life that he did live, right? Yeah. Doing science and thinking about these big questions. So, firstly, just as a point of interest, because people might wonder,

Why is it called the Nicomacian Ethics? That's a good question and shrouded in mystery. There's another book called the Udemean Ethics. It may be that those books were originally addressed to those people. It may be that they were edited by people with those names. So in both cases, we've got a kind of a pile of lecternotes. In fact, some of the books that make up these two works overlap. So it almost looks like one is a kind of.

an expanded version of the other. Yeah. So it may have been that these were the names of different editors. Aristotle had a son called Nicomachus. So it's conceivable that maybe his son put all these lecture notes together after his death. But yeah, we don't know for sure. Interesting. Okay.

So we're talking about like the function of a human being and it's like the employment of rationality. People might be confused because they're thinking, well, no, I studied Aristotle in school or a 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. 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? Another term that people sometimes refer to use to translate eudaimonia is flourishing, as opposed to happiness. Yeah. Which might better capture the kind of thing we're driving at.

Yeah, that's right. And in a very famous English translation, sometimes it's just translated as a good life. Yeah. Right. So that's what we're after. So how do you live a good life? Be a good human being, right? engage in rational activity.

So happiness isn't about kind of feeling good inside as only. It's about actualising 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 as a rational animal. 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 you get that specific? 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. But he also gets really into the nissy gritty of everyday human life, we might say. So, I mean, one example, he has quite a lot to say about friendship. He thinks friendship and our social relationships are really, really important. Not just friendship in the way that we use the word, he's also thinking about romantic partners, he's also thinking about family relationships. He thinks these are absolutely fundamental. And 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, a sort of very sort of interesting and broad views about friendship and whatnot. 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. But you want that to be a good friendly interaction. But it's just a transaction.

There's nothing deeper to it than that. And then there are real friendships, right, where you can really rely on the other person and it's grounded on care and concern. You're not trying to get anything out of that person. And so, again, this is Aristotle, the scientist, if you like. I'm going to analyze human behavior and human relationships. I'm going to see how they differ.

And I'm going to classify them. And this is a useful thing to know because you might think that someone is a true friend and you can rely on them. And they might think you're just a friend of utility and it's just about exchange back and forth. And you need to have a sense of, you know, you need to know what relationships you're in

and where you stand. And you can only do that if you've made these classifications. Okay. So friendship, fair enough. I'm also thinking about, I'm trying to think what people might have heard about Aristotle that they might want some elucidation on. And another thing that Aristotle is known for in the context of ethics is what's come to be known as like virtue ethics.

Typically, if you're like a student of philosophy, particularly high school or undergraduate, you kind of learn 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, 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? So virtue ethics is focused on developing these character traits like courage, moderation, justice, and a range of others that he discussed is generosity would be another example. And so the thought is, if you want to live a good life, don't think of it as there's a set of rules you have to follow, right? Or 10 commandments or 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 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 there or not? And if you think that it's all about rules, don't lie, never lie, right? Then you get in these cuts of problems. Whereas if you're developing the right character traits and you find yourself in that situation, then it's like, well, on the basis of being, you know, being just and fair to my friends, and given the specifics of this situation right here right now, I can, you know, 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. There are no straightforward rules in life because every situation is unique. So we need to judge each one as we find it. And so virtue ethics is about developing the skills so that you can cope with those very different random situations. And what about this idea that these virtues sit in the midst of two extremes. You sometimes hear Aristotle described as believing in what's come to be known as the golden mean. What's all that about? Yeah. So, I mean, he thinks a lot of, he thinks that vices are often extremes, right? If you go to the, 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. Yeah. But maybe it's true. Right. Right. People often think that you know, you want to push things to the limit, but actually maybe not. So he thinks that a lot of virtues can be understood as existing in between two, two vices. So moderation is an obvious example that it's somewhere in the middle. Courage, he thinks, is in the middle between cowardice at one end and kind of recklessness at the other end. And for a number of other virtues, he thinks this is a really good way to think about them. 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 away at all. So there's going to be a sensible middle ground. Yeah, I mean,

we all know 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 things, 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 whatever. And you're kind of like, you know, it kind of makes you a bit uncomfortable or someone who's like so, so kind that like it's almost like uncomfortable. Like you sort of, you know, I don't know, you'd be a little bit uncomfortable in your chair and

they're like, oh my gosh, oh, 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 like well established in many ethical systems that temperance, mediation, being in the middle is key. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, another example, for instance, if someone is incredibly selfish, that's clearly a vice. If someone pays no attention to their own personal needs to the point that they neglect themselves, that's clearly a vice as well. There's a sensible middle ground where people are looking after themselves, but not to the point of selfishness. So again, that would be another middle ground example. But, I mean, Aristotle isn't kind of dogmatic about this.

He says, well, there are some things that are clearly just wrong and there's no kind of moderate version. I mean, a nice example he gives 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 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 doesn't care and will like, you know, talk to other women and meet up with them and do all sorts of stuff. But then on the other side, there's the person who might be like, terrified to talk to anybody of the opposite sex for fear that, you know, they're somehow doing something wrong because they got a wife and they won't even talk to their, to their best friend's wife or 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, with them without, you know, committing adultery. Like, even that itself seems like it sort of sits on a, on a continuum and that mediation is is perhaps kind of key. But what I'm interested in is that these specific virtues, which to us sound perfectly reasonable, like, yeah, bravery sounds good, courage sounds good, you know, generosity sounds good. The way that we got here, like, 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, why generosity, why bravery, why these particular virtues? Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question, isn't it? I think... I mean, there are two different places where Aristotle comes close to giving kind of a definition of human being, right?

So one of them is to say rational animal. Yeah. Another one is to say social animal. Yeah. Right? Some animals live in in packs and herds. Others are more solitary. Human beings live in packs and herds, right?

We live in tribes. We live in villages. You know, when we're born, we're this long. We're utterly useless. And if we're left on our own, we'd be dead within a week, right? So necessarily we're brought up in families, right? Yeah. So our very survival depends on other people.

So in order to survive, you have to get along with other people. So kind of socially positive virtues like generosity and justice, right, and not running around killing everybody. It's actually really, really important for our survival, absolutely fundamental. So, you know, we live in a culture where we've been encouraged to. 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. 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 kind of the biological origin of those sociable virtues, we might say. So do you think that Aristotle's ethics is ultimately descriptive? I mean, like, when we think about ethics, it usually sounds

in this sort of mystical way that we don't quite understand, well, you just should do this. there's this should component of the universe that you just have to abide by. Whereas with 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. Yes, I mean, you can certainly present it in a very kind of descriptive way. This is Aristotle, the biologist, just describing this strange species that he's encountered. He just happens to be one of them. Yeah.

Right. But there's also, I think, a kind of a normative element that comes through as well. So an adult human being who doesn't control their appetites and desires and who never really thinks through their decisions, Aristotle is going to say that's a bad human being. They've gone wrong, right? They failed to be a human being in the full sense of the world because they're not actualizing their, distinctive defining capacities. And that feels like really judgmental, right? And in a sense, you could say, okay, it's no different from him saying, this eyeball's 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. 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 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 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 Alastair 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, whereas maybe for Aristotle, it's just a case of defining our terms differently and realizing that it's not that profound. Yeah, and given the kind of close interconnection between Aristotle,

Aristotle and Christianity in the Middle Ages and after, and we talked a bit about Aquinas earlier, we've used words like virtue and soul, which are both very loaded terms, again, coming out of that Christian tradition. And so I think one thing that might put some people off Aristotle is thinking that he's kind of stuck within that model, right? Yeah. But if we can kind of ditch those terms and ditch those associations and think, hey, this guy is a natural scientist, He's a biologist. He's trying to understand organisms. And off the back of that, he's producing what's ultimately a naturalistic ethics. Yeah. We then end up with a completely different image of who this guy is and why we might want to think about him and take him seriously. Yeah, that's interesting the comparison with the soul in that, like, at first it sounds like something wishy-washy. But when you realize, no, no, no, like it, 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 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 like use reason. They have the sort of animating principle. But I think it's just naturalistic. I think it's just sort of a function of their biology. You know, 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, that. There isn't really one. It's just, you know, humans are social creatures. They live in a society and they act in particular ways that have, you know, rationally served 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 atheist as by the Christian, which is perhaps one of the reasons he's so influential that he just seems to slot him wherever you need him to fit. Yeah, absolutely. But I think, you know, Aristotle is also. one of the most important thinkers. And I don't know if you'd agree with me because you said that the order we went in was quite good. And 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 Nicomachian 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 like the primary texts, where do you think people should go? Actually, I think the easiest of all of his text 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 how 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,

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? 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. You're absolutely right,

and the comic in ethics is 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 maybe that second. I think the metaphysics is obviously really, really challenging. His book metaphysics is really challenging, so that probably saved for a later day. 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, 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 grass of what Aristotle is talking about. And that's going to come through secondary literature. So another book I recommend here briefly. So obviously, by my book first. Yeah. But there's a really nice book which I, which I reference in my book. called the lagoon by a biologist called Amman Marie LaRoy. So he's a practicing biologist, so he knows his science.

And at a certain point in his career, he kind of discovered Aristotle and thought, oh my goodness, this guy was a genius. He was a genius biologist, right? 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. Awesome. 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.

Well, we'll link that in the description as well. But John Sellers, it's always fun. Thank you for your time today. My pleasure.