If murder is simply something we say is
wrong, there's nothing stopping us from
saying murder is okay. And Plato sees that right, that's why I
think Plato's so interesting, he senses that.  He goes like are you sure you want to say
that? I mean really have you thought
about that? [Student: Is that what's going on here about God creating reason, and if he says it's wrong it's wrong?] Well yeah, so in the beginning when
this is first starting, this is definitely the
main action. Everything that's
wrong is because God has decreed it to be
wrong. Now we're not really looking at
that stuff here, instead we are looking
at the different schools of determinism.
For example, fatalism versus determinism. I should pause; what is the difference between
fatalism and determinism? It's one of those kind of important things people don't think 
about enough. What does determinism
mean? I think it's self-explanatory
since it's self defining. What does determinism mean? [Student: Everything's predetermined and there's nothing you can do to change it]. Yeah
basically the sense is that everything
you do, everything that happens in the
world, is causally affected. And since
everything is causally affected, there's
really, you have no control because
you're not the first cause. The
only person controls the first cause is the
first mover, and since we're millions of
moves down the line we're caught and
determined , i.e., nothing you do
matters; it's already determined. That's
determinism. Nothing you do matters. You can do whatever you want, it doesn't matter. In fact determinism 
is really saying everything you do, you
have, you have no choice. You literally
have no choice. You thinking that I suck, you really had no choice but to think that.
So fatalism, what is fatalism? Wanna guess? It's
close to determinism but it's a little
different. So fatalism would be Oedipus.
Who was Oedipus? [Student: Uh, he was sent off and through a series of events the predictions come true]. Yeah, so that's
fatalism. Fatalism is the sense
that no matter what you do what's gonna
happen is gonna happen. And fatalism can
look like you have free will, right fatalism
is this guy, so determinism there's no
freedom at all; determinism 
everything is just set. Everything you do
is caused my something else, there's no
freedom at all you feel free, but there's
really no freedom at all, it's all fake. Fatalism is almost nastier; fatalism is, well you
have a ton of freedom to move around, but
that's as much as you get. Some like to think fatalism is
kind of stupid, when you start thinking
about it there's some times you're like mhm
did I really have a choice? Very ancient
kind of phenomenon to assume this kind
of fatalism, things are just gonna happen the way they're gonna happen. That's
why the Greeks are always interested in
this kind of stuff, the Greeks want
to know: is it just that I'm fated? Is
there a way out of this? How would you
get out of it? What would mean to get out of it? How do we need to get out of it?
These are the questions underlying
all that. Free will doesn't become an
issue, a real philosophical issue, until post 1000 CE, until the Victorian
school. Until they start making this
argument. When they start making this
argument people start to go, uh, what? So
let me get it straight; God is powerful,
he can do whatever he wants. He creates
everything, but I'm free? How does that work?
It doesn't make any sense, explain it to me.
And good luck. If you read all the literature
on free will, it's not like early
Christians are like oh yeah free will.
Most of them were like, uh, that makes no sense. How can God be all powerful and yet you can
do something to influence God? If you
can't influence God how can you claim to
have free will? Does that make sense? And if free will is an illusion of choice
within a determined world, well that's
just soft determinism. 
Christianity, i.e., Calvin, says God has already determined everything from the beginning.
He had to of, otherwise
what? [Student: He doesn't know everything?] He doesn't know everything, that's
right. And if God doesn't know everything then everything we saying about God is wrong; and
that can't be right. So it must be that God knows everything. If God knows everything and
God is all-powerful, and nothing you do can
change God's mind; got it?
Picking up what their laying down? Since nothing you can do can change God's mind, God's already
determined whether you're saved or not
from the beginning; nothing you can do
can change it. That's Calvinism. That's
schools of Lutheranism. Some of the anti-
Baptists hold views like that. It's the
strict determinism. Strict determinism, right?
And they held that view, i.e., that's where the view of semiotics comes from. So the
early Puritans accepted that you are either
saved or not, and nothing you could do to change
it. But they want to know whether or not they were saved, and how do you think they
knew if they were saved or not?
How did early Puritans living here in
the new world know if they were saved or
not? [Student: If they were developing?] Yeah, if their crops grew and they made it
through the winter, then God must have
chosen them, they must be saved. If you,
if you struggle and you die, it must
because God hadn't saved you anyway.
It's a, it's a weird view, but that's Puritanism look it up. Google that stuff, because
we're grounded, America's grounded in
that ideology, so anyway. But uh so yeah,
free will is not necessarily a Christian
doctrine. It grows out of
Christianity, but it's not a Christian
doctrine; it's not even close to a
Christian doctrine as far as Christianity per se, does that make sense? That said free will
does, I'm not gonna lie, free will does come out of the debates of the Scholastics. Because
they are the ones who realize that if this
is true, it's gonna be really hard to
understand, I mean, all you are left with is
faith. Does that make sense? I hope you can see
that kind of movement. If God
creates reason, and reasoning equals reason,
faith is more important than reason,
because faith is in God and God created reason.
See how that works? The important
point to keep here, the thing that I want
to make sure we focus on when all is
said and done, is that all we're really
talking about is this problem right here; by putting God back in. Particularly
this problem. This is the argument that
we're going to be following. Aristotle's the
first one to say, well maybe we should
figure out what
the human, i.e., who the hell we're talking
about? We're talking about the "anthropos",
it's the rational animal, and we're off
and running. Then he turns around and says this,
and this sound, so this doesn't sound
like Plato
is what I'm trying to say. This does sound
like Plato. And I said that multiple
times that when push come to shove
it's very hard to tell if Aristotle and
Plato are that different. Like I
said Plato, I mean Aristotle does focus on this, and this
is the idea the polis in general. These
few things of course are intertwined. And
Plato talks about this in the sense of
the Forms, the trickle down sense we talked about
with the Good. And so the question then becomes
what view of the polis are we holding?
Is the polis the source of all, I
mean this is that kind of weird,
all right what's going on? And that is
just again a recap, you know, of what we've
been looking at already in Greece.
So erase this. And then we get a different move.
So here you get the sense that the human is kind of a lesser form of God. God is
clearly above the human and you can't
put equal, but there's definitely a line
that connects the two, right? Which
this does lead to the ultimate
claim that that's why faith trumps
reason. I hope you can see that
connection. It's pretty obvious I think. It is
pretty blatant. If you hold this view
then reason is your guide. If
you hold this view then faith--and what do I
always say we're really talking about? [Student: Beliefs].
Bottom line simply being that in this
world view the human, because of its being
in the image of God, becomes higher
than the animals. And this we still
struggle with this language today. So it comes out of, basically when we get to Hobbes, this
has been generally accepted as just true.
And I would argue that it still holds to
this day. All we seem to do with
animals is kill them. We struggle to live
with them, and I find it to be a fascinating
phenomenon. I know actually I think I can
explain exactly why; how can you live
with something you don't respect? And how
can you respect something that's lower than you? And so this comes out as
basically what I'm gonna call a "truism", for lack of a better way of putting
it. And Hobbes is gonna hold this view
even though he doesn't hold the religious
view. And I think it's an important point
to see, is that you don't get that here
by the way. What Aristotle simply says is humans are
the animals with logos. He doesn't say
that therefore the other animals are
lower than the human. He kind of avoids
that kind of conversation. In fact if
anything Aristotle does what Heidegger will do later, and just say I'm not
talking about the animals in phusis
until they write their manifestos. Which is
just kind of saying I just don't know
what the hell they're talking about?
But this is a different move. This is to
assume there's something fundamentally 
different about the human than every
other animal. Is there something fundamentally 
different about the human? I think this is an interesting question.
I mean clearly, made in the image of
God, that's something I can say as a statement.
But how beyond faith is there anything
different about a human? Or what makes humans
special? Does anything make humans special? We can either say yes human life is
more valuable than any other animal
life, or we say no; in which case then
how, what's going on exactly? What are
we using to demarcate?
Does it make sense? This is
more important than it may at first appear.
So let's get out of here. You know
Scholasticism, we talked about them
already. You know they basically hold
the Catholic view of the human. When you
get to Hobbes; you see Hobbes's dates in the reading. Basically the late fifteen hundreds to
early sixteen hundreds. 1588-1672
So these are the dates we're looking at.
Descartes falls in here. Montaigne
falls in here. Hobbes is kind of a later,
the later date here, but he's also the
first true materialist. That's why
I'm stressing this, since as a materialist-- let's put this
as Hobbes--as a materialist Hobbes still holds that the human is above other animals. Hobbes
still holds his view. Make sense? But he is
not a Christian. In fact he's the
farthest thing from a Christian. He basically bashes Christianity. He is in a very
real sense your first; he's not the first
atheist of course. You have atheism in
the Greek world. But he's the first to
expand if you will on what it would mean
to say; well to basically open up Aristotle's doctrine, if that makes
sense? He's going back to the idea of the anthropos. He says look, what we need
to get clear on, and this is the important point, what we need to
get clear on is what is the nature of
the human. So it's an interesting
question. Hobbes is the first one to really
ask it. I think he assumes this, but he is
asking--I'll just nature, I was gonna say phusis--what is the nature of
the human? And that's what Hobbes wants
to know; what is the nature of the
human? What does it mean to be human? This is a famous piece, the
Leviathan. So this is what it looks like.
Here is the Leviathan. Of course we're not, were
just looking at bits and pieces of it. Another one of my
texts with all kinds of notes and stuff in
it. So the ocean was always the kind of thing
that was hard to control. The Leviathan,
Hobbes invokes this term to kind of show
that there's this unwieldiness in this
question of what it means to be human.
So if you look at our section that we're reading, and this is right at
the beginning. Hobbes says "nature"--and
these are translations so you have to 
deal--"nature hath made men so equal in
the faculties of body and mind as that
though there be found one sometimes
manifestly stronger in body or of quicker
mind than another, yet when all is
reckoned together, the difference between
man and man is not so considered as well
as that one man can thereupon claim to
himself any benefit to which another may
not pretend as well as he. For as to the
strength of body, the
weakest has strength enough to kill the
strongest, either by secret meditation or by the Confederacy with others that are in the
same danger with himself". So we already talked about this a bit. What is he
saying right there? We're asking what the
human is, what does he say right out the
gate? He says, "for prudence is
but experience, which with equal time equally
bestows on all men and those things they
equally apply themselves unto. That which
may perhaps make such equality
incredible, is but a vain conceit of
one's own wisdom, which almost all men
think they have in greater degree than
the vulgar. Oh man I love that. I mean my god what did Hillary call Trump
supporters? The deplorable? I mean isn't,
this sounds exactly like what he just said. 
Those people, you know, in the sense of
they judge others as vulgar,
the deplorable, because they don't see the same things they see. 
Again I find it fascinating we're
back here using the language as
identical as being used today in
politics. Those who don't understand history or
domed to what? [Student: Doomed to repeat it?] Yeah, they're just doomed to
repeat it.
Alright yeah I think we're getting a 
manifestation of that as we speak. Anyway,
so uh so this is an interesting claim Hobbes makes here. This term prudence is an
interesting term. It comes term called "phronesis".
Fascinating term phronesis. This is
what's being translated as prudence.
Heidegger calls phronesis "circumspective insight". That's a really
weird convoluted term, what he's doing there. I thought about
how to kind of explain what they're
talking about here, and prudence is really
a kind of informed insight. Informed insight.
Yeah? [Student: Can it also be seen as being wise?] Well you see, so the Greeks had a term for that, Sophia, so initially the Greek didn't.
don't think so
So the question might be do
you have to have phronesis to be wise?
That's a fair question, and I think the Greeks would have said yeah; if you don't have
phronesis, if you don't; actually I should back up. Everybody has phronesis. It's just some people
cultivate it and some don't. So everybody has insight, does that make sense? Everybody
has insight. The example I always use to
try to explain this, because it's a difficult
concept, is that of the gunfighter. When the gunfighter walks into a room
what does the gunfighter do? [Student: Takes out his gun and starts shooting?]
No, that would be the best way to get shot.
What does the gunfighter do? Maybe you guys
aren't dangerous enough? [Laughter] If you're a law breaker and you walk into a room
what do you do? You can tell you guys are not law breakers, which is a good
thing. If I'm a gunfighter; if I know
people are out to get me--
that's what gunfire is, a gunfighter everyone wants to take on
the gunfighter. Another way to look at is
if you're the best,
the badass in sports at school or
whatever, what do you want to do if
somebody's number one what does everybody want? [Student: To take them down] Take them down, why? It's an 
interesting question. Part of it is just
so they can be number one, and part of it is that it
just seems to be the nature of the human
again. It's kind of sense that the
king of the mountain, right? No one's
allowed to stay on top. Sooner or later
they're gonna pull them down. But just this idea that no one's allowed to be better than somebody
else. This kind of sense that I
don't care how good they are I'm just as good.
That's a lack of prudence, if that makes
sense.
That's what the Greeks would call a
lack of prudence. It's what Hobbes is
talking about when he says I don't care
how smart you, I don't care how strong
you are, if you start to think you are
the best somebody--the best--is right
around the corner and they're gonna take
you out. Because there's always somebody
better, always. And that's this kind of--and it doesn't come
from the angle you think it's gonna come
from. So the strong person thinks
he has to defend himself against other
strong people. Hobbes goes hell no,
it's the little wimpy you know person
that comes over and sticks you with a
poison arrow that kills you. But that's that vanity if you will
of the strong. Or of anybody really, the
intelligent. The strong. Money it all leads to
that vanity. That sense that you're somehow better than other people. And so
phronesis, for the Greeks, that sense of
things like I said the gunfighter,
it's just this being aware of your
situation.
Being aware of your, what's
going on around you. But to get back to
that nature of the being, or the nature
of phusis, the nature of the animal, seems
to be to take the easiest one. So
if I am a, to play off of this, if my job
is to rob banks, I'm going to understand--
this kind of what Hobbes is trying to get us to see--I'm
gonna understand that nature of the
human. I'm going to understand that you know by
nature, the weak are probably gonna be
the ones that are easier to take over.
But what is it, what does it mean? [Student: It gives you an advantage]. Yeah right. It gives you an advantage.
And that's, that's when push comes to
shove kind of what Hobbes is on about.
The sense that everybody seeks
their advantage. And that's fair.
That's kinda what he's talking about, so that sense when he said everybody wants their
own and blah blah blah, it's kind of the same sense. One's own wisdom, one seeks
what one desires. And phronesis
would be that sense of doing what it
takes. But phronesis will never tell you
what's right, because it's always
determined by the situation you're in.
Does that make sense? And the person who has prudence, to play off of the term
again, is the one who understands the
situation. Does that make sense? They don't,
they don't try to build a wooden bridge
in a humid area. There's all these
kind of things you guys were talking
about. Does that make sense? At least for a
general sense of prudence? And it's important because of what Hobbes wants to say about
the human. And we'll leave this up here as I think it's an
interesting question. Do you have to have
phronesis to have wisdom? I think the
answer would be yes actually. I don't see how you couldn't? I think the more
interesting question is how do these
things play off of each other, but that
would be well beyond our scope. We
can read Heidegger for that. So uh 
back into Hobbes. We'll just look at this
last little piece. I just like, well, I
love this little claim right here, so I want to read it. He says, "but this proveth rather [proveth, haha]
that men are in that
point more
equal than unequal [in that sense of choosing what we desire] for
there is not ordinarily a
greater sign of the equal distribution
of anything, then that every man is
contented with his share". That's a weird
claim. What the hell does he mean? For there is nothing,
there is not ordinarily a greater sign to equal distribution of
anything, then that every person is
contented with their share.
What do you think he's saying, yeah? [Student: Unclear/inaudible] But is that an act of prudence or
an act of selfishness? What's Hobbs trying to say there?
We can jump to the next section where he says, "for this
equality of ability ariseth equally
of hope in the attaining of our ends.
And therefore,  if any two men desire the
same thing, which nevertheless they
cannot both enjoy; they become enemies".
Now what's he talking about? [Student: Is that selfishness?] Well selfishness in terms of what? What's
he saying? [Student: like they're not happy with what they got so they gotta have
somebody else's stuff so, with them being their enemy . . .]
Well, let's kind of keep in mind what we're doing here. We're trying to talk
about what is the nature of the human?
Nature of the human, number one
thing is we're finite. The second is you know we
for like a better sense, experience
determines what we're doing; for a lack of a better
way, we can explain this more. The third is, seems to be, that we are all
inherently selfish also. That make
sense? So the human, when we talk about the
humans, well they're finite number one, that's what unites all
humans right there, everyone is finite.
Everything we do is from experience.
That's kind of what he means by this phronesis. It's more complex than that,
but for us that's good enough. And we
appear to all be selfish. So he does this,
he wants to build this, because he wants
to be able to say that; well what does he
wanna be able to say? I think a lot
of people think Hobbes was just right about
this by the way. Granted it's been a
long time, but I think you asked a lot of
psychologists and people like sociologists, they would say yeah that sounds about right.
You know we're all bound by finitude,
everything's grounded in experience, and we
are inherently selfish, right? And then
Hobbes says what? We'll jump
here and come back to this on Friday.
This is section eight;  "Hereby it is
manifest, that during the time men live
without a common power to keep them" Go ahead [Student: When we are at war].
Correct. The war of all against all.
So when this, the nature of
the human if you will, is a state of war.
That's his famous claim that he makes,
that the true nature of the human is a
state of war. That by nature we are all
basically enemies. Because we're
all inherently selfish. Now if he's wrong
about this, there's hope, but this is really the driving point.
If everybody is selfish, if everybody
desires their own ends, their own goods,
then when push come to shove everybody
is kind of an enemy. I mean right even
even a wife is somewhat of an enemy, and
this is what's kind of, yeah.
So let's come back to this on Friday.
