Well, good morning, everyone.

What I'm going to do is first give what I'm calling a pre-introduction.

I'm going to give a little introduction to the three talks of today,

and then I'll actually give the talk of today.

Does that make sense?

I mean, the first of the three talks of today.

So this talk and the next two, Okay. I mean the first of the three talks of today.

So this talk and the next two are on metaphysics, and I want to begin by explaining how they fit together with each other, and how they fit into the series of talks for this weekend, the series as a whole.

The first talk last night laid out some critical issues and pointed us toward a positive, constructive solution, trying to understand the

philosophy of Aquinas. The last three talks tomorrow and Monday morning will explore the existence

and nature and activity of God, but in between

there are today's three talks, and they are about the basic structure and nature of the created

world, and these talks are presented partly for their own sake and partly with a view towards getting us prepared to grapple with the God material later on.

What these three talks have in common is, as I mentioned, that they focus on the nature of the created world.

They focus on what created things are like,

as opposed to how we know about them or how we talk about them.

Because they focus on what created things are like,

we can call them metaphysical talks.

But in fact, they also include material that for Aquinas would belong not only to metaphysics, but also to the philosophy of nature.

Or physics, if you like to speak Greek. In some contexts, it's important to keep an eye on the distinction between

metaphysics and the philosophy of nature. But in this context, it isn't. So I'm going to

switch back and forth between metaphysical topics and philosophy of nature topics without

...