I've been asked to give an introductory survey of the basic principles of nature or the basic principles of the philosophy of nature.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, I'll be following basically a short little text that he wrote called the principles of nature.

I commend that text to anyone who's a beginner or is making first forays into this topic.

It was written by St. Thomas for his Dominican brethren who at one point seemed to have asked

him, please make Aristotle easy for us.

And he wrote this text out and in fact he does kind of make Aristotle easy. So that's the text I'll be going through.

In order to jump into it, we have to situate things in a larger context.

I know there's a lot of scientists here and there's a lot of people who already have a well-elaborated

understanding of nature at a very detailed level.

So what we're going to be doing this morning is an exercise that you are probably not accustomed to at all,

those who are practicing scientists, we're going to step back from a lot of detail.

And we're going to reconsider nature afresh in a very general way,

trying to start in a way where Aristotle himself started with our ordinary, everyday experience,

our experience of kind of large-scale, ordinary size objects around, ordinary size,

or larger ones that we pick up on with our senses, and we're going to start with a kind of

common sense experience of them. And I'm going to walk you through the problematic that Aristotle

himself walked through,

at least part of it.

Obviously, I can't elaborate the whole problematic, but I'll try to elaborate the core of that problematic for you.

And in order to articulate a set of basic principles that he, I believe, discovered, and that I think articulate the essential

structure of the world of nature.

Okay?

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