Aristotle vs. Kant on Epistemology and Ethics

foreign [Music] is on Aristotle versus Kant on epistemology and ethics Socrates Plato and Aristotle were to my mind the three most original and important philosophers who ever lived there are no new Socrates there's no new Plato's no new aristotles in our world today in fact there is not a single living philosopher who I think will be called one of the great ones let's say one of the hundred greatest philosophers who ever lived 100 years from now and certainly not a thousand years from now irate Augustine and Aquinas as even greater than Plato and Aristotle but

that is not because they were more original but because they were more complete mainly because they were theologians as well as philosophers their faith enriched their reason I see Augustine as a Plato who met Christ and Aquinas as Aristotle who met Christ Plato was Socrates student and Aristotle was Plato student there seems to be something that brings great minds together in time and place perhaps it's a kind of inherent spiritual gravity or perhaps its Divine Providence or most likely both Paradox about Aristotle an apparent contradiction between two points two pieces of data Point number one

is that Aristotle had something reasonable to say about nearly everything sayable the medievals called him simply the philosopher he is the West's version of Confucius the philosopher of Common Sense on almost every issue most other philosophers say things that contradict Common Sense usually in opposite ways while Aristotle almost always stands firmly in the middle in the golden mean between two opposite extremes it's almost a fault he is moderate to excess fanatically anti-fanatical unreasonably reasonable he made some significant mistakes but they were mainly in what today we call the physical and biological sciences rather than in

philosophy Point number two of our Paradox is that the common sense of this philosopher is very uncommon when I teach the history of velocity to freshmen in college I always find that they score worse on my tests and quizzes about Aristotle than on those from any other philosopher I'm amazed that they understand complex and muddled and questionable philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger and dareda better than they understand Aristotle I also find that many great modern philosophers and either neglect Aristotle or trash him or misunderstand him more than they do any other philosopher many of those

who do know him like bacon and Hobbes are positively allergic to him and hate him with a passion I was puzzled over this apparent contradiction the contradiction between Aristotle's rationality and Common Sense on the one hand and his unpopularity to the modern mind on the other hand until I realized that maybe that's not a contradiction at all maybe it's precisely his common sense that appears so Unthinkable to the typically modern mind both in its simple uneducated form in college freshmen and in its sophisticated educated form in modern philosophers our modern students have the greatest difficulty

in understanding or believing common sense because our modern philosophies have percolated down to them through our modern culture this uncommon common sense is found both in Aristotle's theoretical and practical philosophies both in his worldview and in his life view both in his metaphysics and cosmology and epistemology on the one hand and in his ethics and politics on the other hand I want to look at his world view first and then his life View first is metaphysics and then his ethics since metaphysics is the foundation for ethics for metaphysics is about what is and ethics is

about what ought to be the primary metaphysical Concept in Aristotle about moderns find so hard to understand or accept is the concept of form which means not external visible shape but internal essence or essential nature and more specifically the idea that one of the dimensions of every form or nature is its natural end or purpose which philosophers call its teleology after the Greek word Telos the word for end or purpose this is the concept of a cosmic order a cosmic design that we find in the thought of every great culture and every great language in

past history it's called the Rita in Hindu philosophy the Dao in Chinese philosophy the logos in Greek philosophy so why is our modern Western culture the first and only culture in history to ignore or deny this great idea there are probably a number of reasons but one is surely that are one spectacularly successful achievement is modern science and it's child technology and the idea of an objectively real purpose a natural end did everything is a concept science has dropped because it is inexact and unmeasurable scientific definition is by measurement and quantity not by quality or

Essence or nature and that's when Aristotle called the form this idea of design is also not empirically verifiable what size and shape and color is it that's empirically verifiable but design is a philosophical idea not a scientific idea it cannot be dealt with by the scientific method which relies only on exact quantitative measurement and empirical observation of course the assumption that modern science is the only reliable knowledge is not a scientific assumption it's not science it's scientism there is no way to prove by the scientific method that all proof must be by the scientific method

so that scientism is really self-contradictory it's self-eliminating it's like Sola scriptura the Protestant principle that scripture alone has religious Authority which is also self-contradictory because that's not in Scripture you can't prove by scripture alone that all proof must be thy scripture alone and the same is true about science you can't prove by science alone that all proof must be by science alone turning to Aristotle's practical or ethical or moral philosophy I think that the primary Aristotelian principle here is that modern philosophers do not understand or accept what's traditionally called the natural moral law the law

that moral precepts are objective and absolute and unchangeable that morality is not about values but about laws and not man-made laws it's called the natural law to distinguish it from the laws that come from God Alone by divine revelation and from the laws that come from man alone by human creation the natural law comes from the very nature of things especially the nature of man it's called the natural law for two reasons because it's based on human nature and its natural end and because everyone knows it by Nature not just by cultural conditioning and education

but by a kind of natural innate Universal conscience it's innate in mankind and Universal in all men like language itself as distinct from a particular language we're all born with the capacity to speak but we're not born knowing how to speak any particular man-made language that capacity is not man-made it's made for man but not made by man it's innate this most basic and commonsensical ethical idea that Aristotle teaches more clearly and consistently and commonsensically than any other pre-christian philosopher is the idea that is today most uncommon most denied or ignored or misunderstood by our

Educators both formal and informal it is the most controversial moral principle in our culture but it was the least controversial and most obvious and common foundation and starting point for nearly all pre-modern cultures and philosophies in ancient Greece and Rome it was only a few sophists and Skeptics that denied it it's the foundation of an Ethics that is neither just a set of abstract rules on the one hand nor a set of so-called values that are really only subjective feelings or desires or preferences on the other hand but a real law the word values is

a modern word it has a comfortable subjective squishy sort of sound like the Pillsbury Doughboy on the other hand law sounds hard and sharp and clear and non-negotiable and uncomfortable especially to law Breakers and most especially to law Breakers who deny that they are law Breakers there is no such thing as a subjective law but there can be such a thing as subjective values I think that central idea is the main reason why typically modern philosophers and their students dislike Aristotle for instance like all cultures before 1930 Aristotle judged contraception to be unnatural and therefore

immoral we've done a general overview of Aristotle's worldview and life view or theoretical and practical philosophy now let's turn to some of the specific more distinctive details let's begin with this logic Aristotle wrote the world's first logic textbook it was the first theoretical analysis of the structure of deductive and inductive reasoning which had first been practiced by Socrates who wrote nothing and then exemplified in print in Plato's Socratic dialogues Aristotle discovered the common patterns of valid and invalid argument in these dialogues and here's a big picture summary of Aristotle's logic there are three logical questions

that we need to ask of any idea in order to evaluate it logically because there are three acts of the human mind that produce three different kinds of ideas the three acts of a mind are first conception or simple apprehension or understanding the meaning of a term then second judgment judging the truth or falsity of a proposition which combines two terms a subject term and a predicate term and then third evaluating the validity of an argument which is a claim to prove the truth of one proposition a conclusion by the argument from premises other propositions

Aristotle discovered and formulated the rules for doing that for the first time so the three questions are first what your terms mean what are you talking about second whether the propositions are true that you use as your premises or reasons and third why they prove your conclusion whether it logically follows from your premises or your assumptions Aristotle first formulated the criteria the rules for answering those three questions the questions of what and whether and why are your terms clear are your premises true and is your reasoning valid Aristotelian logic which until the 20th century was

the only logic has almost disappeared today in the face of symbolic logic or mathematical logic which is a quantitative logic partly because it makes the philosophical assumption that there is quality as well as quantity that there is meaning in terms especially Universal terms which according to nominalism can only be invented names or nomina not realities nominalism asserts that all Universal terms like man or red or Mortal or Justice or triangle or goodness or truth or beauty are only names or nomina that what Aristotle inherited from Plato and brought down from a heaven of platonic ideas

to the Earth of concrete things what he called Universal forms our only man-made words not objective realities we make them they do not make us in other words what Socrates sought in all his dialogues which was always the real nature of things especially goodness and what Plato taught was the absolute reality goodness itself and what Aristotle said were the essential forms of concrete things oh this is a myth phenomenalism there are no such universals or forms and if there were we could not know them and if we could we could not rightly use language to

communicate them those are the three Theses of gorgeous denying the three meanings of the Greek word logos nominalism and its current child deconstructionism invades against logocentrism it is logophobic and if Christ is the logos it is christophobic Aristotle's theory of knowing or epistemology follows from his metaphysics because it also centers on this notion of forms or universals which we come to know by abstracting them from particular instances of them for instance we abstract a common human nature from our experience of many diverse individual human beings or we abstract the essence of Justice from examples of

just people just habits just actions just laws and just societies this is induction or inductive abstraction moving from particulars to universals once we have the universal we can deduce particular instances from it for instance if all Justice is profitable by its essential nature for both individual souls and States as Plato tried to prove in the Republic then it must be profitable for me too and for America too this act of detecting the universal in the particular the form in the matter is a kind of mental x-ray of the appearances to find the central skeletal structure

that holds all of the visible flesh together Aristotle's epistemology joins the body with the mind the senses with the reason the upstairs so to speak with the downstairs or at the top of the mountain where you see its Oneness with the many things spread out to make its many different parts and sides Aristotle says that human knowing Works in four steps beginning at the bottom with sense observation of many different concrete particulars we learn by experience Aristotle is a soft empiricist he says that all our knowledge begins with sense experience but it is not confined

to it as is claimed by the heart empiricists like David Hume the second step is climbing the mountain to its single top by abstracting the common form or essential nature from its many different instances for instance After experiencing many human beings we know something about human nature which they all have in common third step is distinguishing the essential and necessary from The Accidental among those common features that we have abstracted from experience for instance a rational mind an animal body are essential to humanity but a particular race or a particular language or gender or ideology

is not finally the fourth step is on the basis of that understanding of the universal Essence and reasoning from it to particular applications of it we go back down the mountain to reduce particular conclusions from our Universal premises the Second Step abstractive induction is the way up to the essential form and the fourth step deductive reasoning is the way down from it seeing the concrete instances of it is the first step and seeing the abstract Universal form of it is the third step for example first we observed many men die then we formulate the universal

proposition all men die by inductive reasoning then we understand that this is essential not accidental and thus finally we can deduce that we too must die thus Aristotle gives us a complete circle top and bottom combining senses and mind body and soul and this is not done either by an epistemology of mere empiricism which trusts only sensation or by any epistemology of mere rationalism which trusts only pure reason because neither of those two epistemologies has the bridge between them that is the abstraction of the universal form from the particular material instances of it this pattern

of both and instead of either or is found in all of Aristotle's thinking that's why he's so commonsensical for instance he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist about human nature we are not vicious selfish animals which the state needs to tame by fear and force as Machiavellian Hobbes say nor are we innately saintly Innocents who are victimized and corrupted by oppressive systems and institutions as both Rousseau and Marx say but we are all full of impulses to both Vice and virtue to both selfishness and unselfishness both Folly and wisdom both Injustice and justice and

these impulses need to be trained and directed by reason to create virtues or good habits and to root out vices or bad habits Aristotle gives us a wealth of practical detail about the various virtues and vices other Aristotelian both and is his theory of hylomorphism which means both matter and form that is the heart of his metaphysics forms for Aristotle are not separate beings as in Plato nor are they only subjective Concepts and names as in nominalism but they are the forms of material things forms like humanness and redness and Justice are objectively real Aristotle

gave Plato's forms a new Earthly address the same tenant moved to another house a more Earthly house if all humans died human nature would still exist for Plato but not for Aristotle if all triangular things in the universe disappeared the laws of trigonometry would still be true for Plato but not for Aristotle because of no triangular things existed there would be nothing for the rules about triangles to be true of now that's an important difference between Plato and Aristotle but their agreement is much more important than their difference nominalism which denies the objective reality of

universal forms entirely departs from both Plato and Aristotle far more than they depart from each other the relation between Plato and Aristotle is like the relation between protestantism and Catholicism they disagree about some very important things such as the authority of the church and Christ's real presence in the Eucharist but they agree about even more important things about the reality of God and the Divinity of Christ the difference between them is relatively small compared to the difference between either of them and Atheism similarly the difference between Plato and Aristotle is small compared to the difference

between either of them and the typically modern mind Aristotle is Plato tweaked for Aristotle matter and form are not beings but principles of a being aspects of a being Aristotle's name for concrete individual beings or entities is substances as that which stands under substance accidents or qualities to unify them the same person is happy one moment inside the next the same Leaf is green in September and yellow in October this distinction between the substance or Essence and the accidents or the changeable Properties or characteristics is one of the most important and essential philosophical distinctions in

common sense sanity which is increasingly uncommon today I think it is significant that the only two essential Catholic dogmas that depend on secular philosophical categories and are framed by them in fact the two most essential ones of all concerning the very center of the Catholic religion Christ himself are the two that depend on this Aristotelian category of substance first that Christ is consubstantial with God the Father homo usian in Greek the same in being Essence essential nature or substance and second that in the Eucharist it is the very substance that changes from Bread and Wine

to Christ's body and blood transubstantiation another example of one of the most practical and useful theoretical ideas in the history of human thought is Aristotle's theory of the four causes which is at the heart of his cosmology or philosophy of nature it's a classification of the four and only four possible questions or rather kinds of questions that anyone can ever ask about anything and therefore a classification before and only four possible answers or kinds of answers or explanations the Greek word translated causes here itia means something much broader than our current use of that word

in Aristotle's metaphysics a cause is any real factor that makes a thing or event to be what it is thus in Aristotle's epistemology it is a rational explanation of something or an event two of the four causes are intrinsic or within the thing to be explained they are as matter in its form or its material cause and its formal cause and the other two are extrinsic or outside it they are its origin and its natural end or good or fulfillment Aristotle called these two Clauses respectively the efficient cause and the final cause this classification is

extremely useful when writing essays if you can give all four causes of your subject you have a complete explanation of it the formal cause is simply the essential form what makes a rose to be a rose rather than a tulip or a triangle rather than a square or a man rather than a god the material cause is what it is made from or made out of what potentiality is it the actualization of for instance you can make a desk out of wood or out of metal or out of plastic and you can make the plastic

into a desk or a statue or a pipe if the formal cause is what it is made into and the material cause is what it is made out of the efficient cause is what it is made by the immediate efficient cause of you is your parents and their sexual intercourse the efficient cause of sunlight is the sun the efficient cause of a book is its author the efficient cause is what we almost always mean by cause nowadays the final cause is what it is made for its natural end or goal that which by its nature

it moves towards puppies become dogs and kittens become cats Aristotle called that the final cause not because it is always Final in time but because it is Final in purpose Aristotle believed that purposes or goals or ends are not merely subjective and psychological goals and purposes in our minds but also that there are natural ends in everything's movement and behavior Fire by Nature Heats and Rises and heavy objects by Nature fall and seeds by Nature grow into plants the metaphysics of final ends or teleology grounds Aristotle's ethics man's Supreme good or end or Perfection is

the most important ethical question man fits into this pattern of Ends by also having a natural end or Perfection that fulfills his nature both physically and spiritually Aristotle called this eudaimonia which means beatitude or blessedness it means Perfection physical and spiritual objectively and subjectively eudaimonia is usually mistranslated happiness which to the typically shallow modern mind is purely subjective and purely emotional no one today ever says to another person you think you're happy but you're really not but that's what Aristotle would say to a tyrant who enjoyed torturing his victims and no one ever says you

think you're not happy what you really are but that's what Aristotle or any other wise Pagan would say to job who is suffering but by his suffering learning wisdom and the virtue of humility which makes him more perfectly and more completely human and fulfills his real needs even though not his conscious wants so Aristotle would not have regarded the question why do the righteous suffer as an unanswerable mystery or as a threat to Faith in a just and wise order in the universe even though he did not believe in the personal God behind it who

providentially designed and supervised that order for us in his ethics Aristotle inherited the notion of the four cardinal virtues from Plato Prudence or practical wisdom for the reason and fortitude or courage for the will which Plato called the spirit in part and moderation or self-control for the appetites and justice for the right order of all three the right relations among the three powers of the Soul internally and also among different individuals in society externally and among the natural classes in the state which performed the natural functions in the state the wise lawmakers and the courageous

law enforcers and the self-controlled and moderate law obeyers although Aristotle did not confine and distinguish these classes as rigidly as Plato did in the Republic and Aristotle added also about a dozen more virtues to Plato's four this was not a disagreement but an addition onto Plato's Foundation he did however disagree with Plato's idea that to know the true good is necessarily to do it to choose it because Plato believed that he believed that learning moral wisdom having true education is sufficient to produce all the other virtues Aristotle said more commonsensically that knowledge is necessary but

not sufficient for moral virtue intellectual virtues come from education alone but moral virtues come by practice by repetition which constructs good moral habits and thus good moral character we must not only know the good with the mind but also choose it with the will and implement it in training and ordering our passions and our actions here too on the Practical level just as on the theoretical level with the forms Aristotle brought Plato down to earth a bit it was a modification not a rejection it was an addition not a subtraction similarly St Thomas Aquinas later

used and modified Aristotle by addition not subtraction in many ways most obviously by adding God and the theological virtues as our final end many modern philosophers disagree with Aristotle by simply subtracting from him and moving more in the direction of skepticism and this office in various degrees that's negative but the modern philosopher who most seriously challenged Aristotle with a new positive philosophy both in epistemology and ethics is Kant Aristotle and con are probably the two most serious options in ethics and also in epistemology because both try to avoid both skepticism and dogmatism and both try

to avoid both empiricism and rationalism let's look at the central disagreement between these two first in epistemology and then in ethics but to understand the disagreements between Aristotle and Kant we should first begin with their more basic agreements in epistemology can't like Aristotle repudiated both simple rationalism and simple empiricism he called rationalism dogmatic or uncritical and he called empiricism skeptical and he saw Humes profound and pervasive skepticism as The Logical result of a mere empiricism and terribly destructive so he tried to formulate a new epistemology to answer that but he did not return to Aristotle

mainly because he was a nominalist and did not believe in that Central notion of essential forms or universals and our ability to know them can't call his epistemology the copernican revolution in philosophy Copernicus gave us a new absolute not the Earth but the Sun and he reversed the relationship between the two the Earth's position is relative to the Sun not the sun's position relative to the Earth Kant did the same reversal for the relationship between the subject and the object man and Truth nowhere and known instead of receiving and discovering the truth Kant said that

we created we make it we form it we structure it so truth is the Conformity of things to thought not thought to things for Khan what we think is science or Discovery is really art or creation of course we don't create the matter of the world but we do create all its form according to Kant and we do this in three ways first in the world of the senses we do not discover the two forms of all sense perception the two sensory universals namely space and time we do not abstract these forms from matter rather

we impose these two forms onto matter like imposing cookie cutters onto cookie batter thus we create physical order of course this is unconscious rather than conscious second we do the same thing in our logical thinking where we impose our logical categories or Universal forms such as cause and effect substance and accident necessity and contingency onto everything that we can think these categories or forms of all logical thinking are not in nature but only in our thinking about nature remember Kant is a nominalist he denies that we can know real Universal forms we do the same

projecting and creating an active unconscious structuring in our metaphysical thinking with what cotton calls our three ideas of pure reason namely the concepts of a single world or Universe to know the concept of a single self to know it and the concept of a single God to unify both the world and the self can't insist that we do not know that these things are objectively real because we simply cannot know things in themselves or objective reality all we can know are appearances or how reality must appear to us when it is filtered through these three

sets of categories like light filtered through stained glass all the color comes from the glass and the glass is in us like contact lenses that we can't take off the Emerald City and The Wizard of Oz isn't really green at all Dorothy is wearing Green contact lenses thus in constant epistemology truth is subjective in the sense that its order its structure is man-made it is not subjective in the sense that it is arbitrary or individual or freely chosen there is no alternative it is all necessary and Universal common to all persons but there are no

objective universals there are only subjective universals we cannot think in any other way it's as if we live in a shared dream and we can never know what is outside of that dream we not God created the world not that we created its matter but that we created its form so this is nominalism with a vengeance it is also far more skeptical than even the skepticism of this office or Hume Khan tried to answer him and his heart empiricism which limited our knowledge to sensation which doesn't give us universality or necessity or certainty but at

least Hume granted us some merely probable knowledge of objective reality through our senses whereas for Khan all the information on all the messages in all the bottles that we read are what we have written ourselves const copernican revolution in philosophy is thus a radically new epistemology in a sense even farther from Aristotle's common sense that either rationalism or skepticism but it seems to be not only false but self-contradictory because it asserts that this is the way it really is that we really cannot know the way it really is that it is an objective truth that

we cannot know objective truth that all messages in the bottle are only what we ourselves have written rather than truth coming to us from something or somebody else but that is also only a message in the model a message that we ourselves are written and it is only a truth that comes from us rather than to us put more simply the self-contradiction in kant's copernican Revolution is this if we can't know anything about things in themselves or objective reality how can we know that it even exists Kant tries to limit thought to the subjective but

in order to draw a limit or border to anything we have to think both sides of the Border so in order to limit the thinkable we have to think the unthinkable I think all forms of skepticism are self-contractory is it true that there is no truth is it certain that there is no certainty is it an objective truth that truth is not objective it is it an absolute truth that there are no absolutes is it universally true that there are no universals is it infallible that there is no infallibility is it merely probable that there

is only probability is it reliable knowledge that all our knowledge is unreliable is it proved by the scientific method that there is no truth except the scientific method etc etc I'd infinite him I think if you don't break the grips of the Python of skepticism right from the beginning you never will the snake will just squeeze you Tighter and Tighter into itself every time you move now let's turn to cons ethics and its fundamental difference from Aristotle's traditional and common sensical ethics is a virtue ethics moral good and evil consists primarily in habits that are

good moral virtues and evil moral vices the collection of habits constitutes one's moral character for Aristotle the most important moral good is to be a good person not just to obey the moral laws constant epistemology the epistemology of the copernican revolution in philosophy prevents him from claiming to know things in themselves or objective reality and his nominalism prevents him from believing that universals like human nature even exist in objective reality and so Khan's ethics is an ethics of rules or laws rather than virtues and character Khan's ethics is traditional insofar as it asserts a moral

absolute essentially the Golden Rule as our absolute Duty and our Universal obligation that is his first formulation of the single most basic principle of Ethics what he calls the categorical imperative he formulates it this way Act only according to that Maxim or practical principle whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law for all to obey in other words do unto others what you will them to do unto you his second formulation of that same principle is more distinctively modern because it focuses on the intrinsic worth and dignity of

each individual person it is that every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will therefore act in such a way that you treat Humanity whether in your own person or in the person of another always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means now these are indeed excellent moral principles the first exalts each individual to equality with the rest of the human race and the second exalts the human race that is persons above everything else in

the temporal universe they are necessary but not sufficient for a complete morality because they do not Define every moral good for instance celibacy or military service may be a moral good for some but not for all but they do Define every moral evil every morally evil act violates one or both of these two rules they're not complete because they regulate only how to treat each other not our individual character or the question of some more greatest good in the sense of the final end or purpose or goal of human life kind of skeptical about that

they're like sailing orders that tell a fleet of ships how to cooperate but not how to stay healthy and Ship Shape individually and above all they don't tell the ships what is the mission of the fleet why it's sailing at all but then Kant goes on to a third formulation of what he calls the categorical imperative that exalts man even it seems above God he says in effect that it is we not God who willed this rule into being in his ethics just as in his epistemology substitutes creation for discovery his words are these always

so act that the will who regard itself at the same time as making Universal moral law through its own Maxim the third formulation of the principle is the idea of the will of every rational being as a will that legislates universal law Kant writes that this autonomy of the will is the property that the will has of being a law unto itself but this principle really lessens morality rather than exalting it for if the moral good is not discovered and received but created and willed into being then there is no ground for reverence or gratitude

or piety towards this good and there is no room for surrender to God's will which is the essence of Holiness or sanctity Kant is a humanist he is not an atheist but the relation between man and God for Kant is not worship or adoration or obedience to God's will Kant calls that heterotomy or Conformity to the other and he rejects it insisting instead on the autonomy of the human will at the last judgment Kant expects to see man not God on the throne what is common to cause new epistemology and kant's new ethic is that

both substitute activity for receptivity in the two powers of the human soul the mind and epistemology and the will in ethics Kant says that what we think is Discovery is really creation both of the order in the universe and of the order in Morality we not God created both the natural order in the world and the moral order in human life he has man replacing God in both Genesis 1 and exodus 20. Aristotle was a pagan and Kant was a kind of Maverick modernist Christian he viewed Jesus as the ideal ethical teacher though not the

divine Savior from sin yet Aristotle justifies wonder and worship all and adoration gratitude and obedience whereas Kant glorifies human freedom and creativity Kant grew up as a pietist that was the name for a Protestant sect something like the Amish the Mennonites or the Puritans but piety in the theological sense piety toward God has a harder time finding any home in kant's thought than in the thought of pagan Aristotle St Thomas built a great structure of Christian theology on Aristotelian human foundations I do not think he would have found it possible to build on conscient foundations

yet Kant does Supply Christians with a profoundly central idea in ethics that is not an Aristotle or in any Pagan the principle that every single human person every rational and moral being is an end in himself and not a means to any other end and therefore demands respect rather than merely being used as an instrument all people are ends not means therefore to be loved rather than used Saint Pope John Paul II made that a central principle of his anthropology and his ethics it's significant that Aristotle like all pagans took for granted that slavery is

natural saying that some men were born to be slaves slavery was definitively abolished only in modern times because the notion of human Freedom not just political freedom but moral Freedom was deepened by humanists like Kant as well as by Christians like the popes who condemned slavery long before Lincoln and Wilberforce and excommunicated the practitioners of the slave trade in the New World Christianity agreed with secular humanism here for a reason secular humanists did not have that every man is a child of God and created in God's Own image and therefore it is in the very

nature of man to be free to have free will Kant overdoes human freedom and virtually divinizes it but Aristotle ignores it and neither of these two errors excuses the other one [Music] [Applause] [Music]