Ep. 335: Aristotle on Fundamental Explanations (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2024
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Aristotle's Metaphysics, book 1 (aka Alpha) (ca. 340 BCE). What constitutes a basic explanation of the universe?
We talk about how mere practical knowledge of how things in fact work is not enough; there's greater wisdom in knowing the theoretical underpinnings. Various philosophers before Aristotle had given different kinds of explanations of what the universe is at bottom, but for a complete explanation, Aristotle says we'll need to include all four types of causation: material, formal, efficient, and final.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys who at one point |
| 0:11.2 | set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better |
| 0:14.0 | of it. |
| 0:15.0 | Our question for episode 335 is something like, what are the basic building blocks for explaining |
| 0:22.1 | the world? We read the first two books of |
| 0:25.1 | Aristotle's metaphysics. More information about the book in the podcast, please see |
| 0:29.3 | partial examine life.com. This is Mark Glinton, dancing around and landing some good philosophical points like |
| 0:35.7 | non-athletes do in fights in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:39.1 | This is Seth Paskin for my own sake, more honorable if less useful than others in Austin Texas. |
| 0:47.0 | This is Westallown being at work, being myself. |
| 0:51.0 | This is Dylan Casey searching for a place of leisure to obtain knowledge and first causes in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:57.0 | So I didn't put a year on this. Do we have any idea when this was written? |
| 1:01.0 | A long time ago. 340, it's going to be my guess. Yeah, |
| 1:07.1 | Aristotle was born in 384. He wrote it in his late 30s I think. I guess the question is did he actually write it or was this someone's notes? |
| 1:16.5 | Certainly if he wrote it was probably not for publication. It's been said that it's someone's notes and I |
| 1:21.2 | It seems pretty clear to me the more I delve into it yes that's |
| 1:25.8 | definitely the case it's either someone's notes or that's like a manual for |
| 1:29.4 | people in the know right for friends who are familiar with what he's talking about it's not an exposition for like people in the school |
| 1:37.1 | Yeah, people in the school so we gave a lot of introductory remarks in the nightcap that if you didn't listen to at least the |
| 1:44.0 | preview of that that was publicly available so we can just not talk about what |
| 1:48.4 | translations we used and things like that since we already covered that. |
| 1:51.4 | Mike you're you and your efficiency. |
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