So the, so Adam mentioned, you know, this seems a little bit far from the normal haunts that I inhabit when I'm buried in the library doing research.

And in fact, the problem comes up for me from a puzzle that appeared in my very first philosophy class that I ever took as a freshman.

So this has been a question that I ever took as a freshman.

So this has been a question that I've had for a long time

that I've been sort of trying to work out

and thinking if Aquinas can help us reflect on this issue.

And the problem came up basically when I was studying,

as one does in one's first philosophy class, the notion of telos, or the notion

of intrinsic good or intrinsic goal. And the telos, this comes from this Greek word, telos,

and it gets translated over into English philosophy. And the basic idea is that everything has some state or condition or activity that completes or fulfills it.

That explains what the thing is for, and if we use the metaphorical language of happiness,

extending it out beyond simply human beings and extended to other things,

we could think of the T-Loss as the

condition of the thing's happiness. So when you achieve your T-Loss, when a thing achieves

its T-Loss, it achieves fulfillment. And so we can talk a lot. People usually when they're

thinking about T-Loy, they start with artifacts. And so we can think about, for

instance, a book. What is the t-loss of a book? It's to be read, to communicate knowledge.

And so we can see that, see the idea of completion or fulfillment here that something is missing

if the book just gets put on a shelf and nobody reads it. Something that scholars worry about

all the time. It's an unfulfilled it. It's something that scholars worry about all the time.

It's an unfulfilled book.

It's an unhappy book that has not reached the completion of what it is for.

...