I have this idea of doing the Joseph Pieper book on the four carnal virtues, and looking at all the in-depth definitions of all these virtues, and now it's like, I'm trying to remember all the courage stuff, but I can't. Yeah. So I'll have to do another stuff. Well, I mean, doesn't Aristotle

talk about all this stuff too? Yeah. I keep these definitions of them. Peeper's basically just like

Aristotle footnotes. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. I feel like Aristotle would be easier to read. Maybe. Is that fair? I feel like Peeper's hard to read.

It's more condensed than this Aristotle book you

have, right? But Aristotle's pretty great. I love me some Aristotle.

Yeah. I mean, there's a reason why everyone all the way up into the Middle Ages called him the philosopher.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Okay. So he says this thing and he's like, right, I've been living towards death. Only we can have real virtues. It'd be silly of me to run from it. And then his followers ask the next logical question. Can you guess? No.

Are you looking forward to death?

No. It's what if the soul doesn't live on? Oh, yeah. Right? So like what if your soul just scatters, right? What if you're wrong and the soul doesn't live forever and it's just gone in the wind, right? Yeah. So the same fear a lot of people have now, right? That if I die, what if my soul just disappears?

It's just black. It's just emptiness.

Oh, what's the... So have you guys ever seen the Mike Tyson interview where he's talking to a 13 year old girl and she's like, I'm wondering about like, what your legacy is going to be? And he's like, we don't have any legacy. There's nothing after death. I'm just going to be dirt. Like there's nothing. It's all just hubris. So like, I just like nothing after it. It's just darkness. There's no such thing as legacy. That's what people talk about. I don't believe in that. So this poor 13 year old girl is getting a lesson in like nihilism from from Mike Tyson. So he's got that fear, obviously. Did you watch the fight? I didn't the day of I kind of tried, but Netflix wasn't loading. And so I watched like just the last bit of it. Do you think

he pulled his punches? Do you think he threw the fight? Man,

I don't know. It looked... I feel like Mike Tyson should have just trounced.

There was a moment where I was watching this. I was watching the fight. I know that we should move on. But there was a moment where I was watching the fight. And I was like, what are we doing? He looked like an old man at some point. He was like crying. He was crying but he was like he was clearly pained in the what was the eighth round going into the last round the ninth round and i just saw him i was like we're just watching like a 26 year old beating on a 50 almost 60 year old man this is kind of it's like and then i went and toured the coliseum in rome so Terrible.

Okay, so Socrates responds and says, the soul must be immortal. There are two reasons he gives for this. We can play quiz show on this, but I feel like these are tougher to get. I feel like Graham knows them offhand. I bet you could name both of them right

now. Why the soul must be immortal? Yeah. Because it learns? I can't remember. That's

close. Yeah. That's close to one. I'll give you half a point. All

right. Cool. Is

there something about like motion or we're not doing the weird element stuff where like fire in the body is the soul? Whatever your weird episodes from before. Oh, those were,

I think those were Aristotle.

Were they? Aristotle's De Anima.

De Anima. Yeah. Like what the, soul is. And it's just like moving numbers. Yeah, I remember those. Yeah, that was a whole lot of, you know, not all of Aristotle is pure gold. Top tier, yeah, yeah, sure. So he says there's two reasons. One, and this is one we discussed in a previous episode of mine, is the doctrine of recollection, right? We don't learn things we simply remember them i think it was maybe the last episode i did where he sort of nudge nudge taught this kid geometry and the kid gave wrong answers and he just sort of blew past it and he's like but wouldn't it be better if it was eight and not four and the kid's like okay and he's like ah see he knew it already so that's

mino right uh

yeah i think it's me And so he goes back into that doctrine of recollection. And the quick, quick argument to review is he's like, we have this notion of, say, something eternal, like equality, right? What perfect equality is. But we've never actually seen that. We've seen two blocks of wood that look a lot alike, but the grain structure isn't the same. And if we cut them open, they'd look a little bit different. They have knots in different places. The same with stone, right? We're going to see veins in different places. And so we've never actually seen really quality, but we can imagine it. And because we can imagine it, we must be getting this knowledge from somewhere. So either it came to us at the point of our birth, right? When we were born, all this knowledge just popped into our heads, or we're simply remembering it because we've forgotten it because we've been reincarnated, right? So, so he has that little piece. Okay. The other piece is that he has a doctrine of opposites. So there's something like warmth and cold. So something, they're opposite. They can't be there together, but warmth comes out of cold, right? So if you have a warm, sunny day, you know it's warm because at one point you had a cold day. The same is true of fast and slow things, right? We wouldn't know fast except that we've seen slow things. And we wouldn't know slow except that we've seen fast. And they come from each other and generate each other. I can see someone going fast because a minute ago, they were going slow. And I can see someone going slow because they were going fast. Okay. He says the same is true of life and death. So we can see life move into death, but we can't really see what death moves into. But life must come from somewhere. Otherwise, literally everything would die. And we would have no more life coming into the world okay i'm not sure i get it but okay like yeah do you buy this oh not at all i think like this is this is a horrible idea okay um so i think what's happening is he is misunderstanding how biology works that that the way life comes from death is by taking inanimate material, food, and then eating that and then digesting that and making it into the building blocks of life. But that happens when something is already alive. There was a germ of life and that life has continued in an unbroken chain until now, right? So is it possible that eventually that dies out and everything dies? Yes. He might be looking on too short of a timeline and he doesn't really understand how like we pass on life. He thinks, you know, something must spring into the child's, child's, like an inanimate child's body and a woman's belly from somewhere. And so I think it's partially a misunderstanding of biology and also just a weird equality of things. Like, I don't know. So saying that, say, things that rotate and things that don't rotate are opposites, and one comes from the other. Well, that doesn't necessarily mean there was a time when the Earth wasn't rotating or wasn't orbiting the sun, right? He leaves no room for something that is always moving fast, right? Or something that is always doing something. Does that kind of make sense? Makes sense. So I don't think it's a good doctrine. But for these two things, right? Cut

him some slack. He's about to die. Poor guy.

Sure. Give him the comfort of an immortal soul. I just think he's got better arguments maybe coming later. Will he make another argument for why the soul is immortal?

Yes, kind of. At least there's more talk of it because not everybody really buys this. Yeah, great. Okay. So they're on the same page. Yeah, well, there are objections. They say, okay, you've proved that the soul will, like, that the soul came from somewhere. Yep. You haven't proved it will continue after death. Yeah, great. Right? So we're remembering stuff that we learned before. Doesn't mean we're going to keep on going after. He says, well, if we combine this with my previous argument, we've proved that the soul should pass into life again after death. Because we have that whole, like opposites generate out of each other. So from warmth comes cold, but from cold has to come warmth again. So life to death, eventually there has to be some life or else everything would just be, um, die. This is where it gets more complicated for him. He says, okay, there are things that pass away and those things are like composite, soluble, things that are like put together or conglomerates, for example. And then he says, pure things don't. So like pure justice, pure beauty, the essence of things, these things don't change, but visible beauty does, right? So I can see a woman who is beautiful. She will eventually decay, right? I can see a coat that is beautiful. I can see a tree that is beautiful. I can see a landscape that's beautiful. It will all eventually change and be not as beautiful as before, but beauty itself does not. The things that don't change tend to be invisible. So like the essence of things, true beauty, true justice. We can't see any of those. The soul is invisible like those. It also rules the body. It commands the body and the body obeys. Therefore, it's more like divine things than earthly things. And when released, it won't be soluble and likely to pass away, right? A body, even just a body, will last for a long time after death. So the bones last for a long time. If you're embalmed, you'll last for a really long time. He even talks about like, if you've had good habits, it'll last for a really long time. But the soul isn't like that. Like it'll, it'll last for a really, really long time. And this is where he gets into like weird metaphysics. He says souls that are tainted by earthly pleasures and desires will want to stay. So a philosopher, he's like, body sucks. I'm out. I don't want this anymore. But anybody who's like, man, I really love Chinese food is tainted by the body and they're going to want to stick around. And so this is where ghosts come from.

He says that? Wow. Okay,

cool. They stick around. They're like, and they become visible, which is like a changeable thing. That's not great. We don't like visible things. We like invisible things. Or they go into animals that are like their own natures. So if I'm a tyrant, my soul, which wants to stick around, is not going to desire the things after death, is going to go in something like a wolf, right? If I am, say, a nice, happy, sociable person, I'll go and be an ant or a bee. And then if I'm, say, really energetic, I'll be a hummingbird. And then you are reincarnated as that and then maybe learn and eventually get freed. What

if you really like Chinese food? What was that one?

Oh, like what would you, I mean, a panda probably.

Okay, good. Can't express.

Yep. Good. So the real soul untainted by the world is released. And this is why true philosophers avoid pleasures. They fool the mind into thinking that the pleasurable or painful thing is real when it's not. They want to know the truth, so they avoid these things.