I found a book title while searching salt group name genesis in chemistry. It is called Aristotle's De Perfecto Magisterio of mediaeval time. why is it called that if aristotele is from ancient greece. couldn't find any info about year of publication and book contents.
I'll tell you what was likely selectively destroyed:
"Πᾶς ὁ βίος ἐστὶ λύπη· δι’ ἀρετῆς δὲ μόνης τυγχάνειν δύναται ἡ εὐδαιμονία.
Ἔστι τις ὁδὸς πρὸς ἀρετήν· αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ Μέση Ὁδός· αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀρετὴ ὡς μεσότης."
Nicomachean Ethics was Aristotle translating The Dhamma into Greek.
He was the first person to learn The Dhamma in full in the west thanks to Alexanders conquests. Socrates and Plato only had fragments to work with.
Before Alexanders conquests, these teachings were largely kept hidden by the Pythagoreans.
Aristotle and Alexander had plans to change planet Earth for the better; forever.
With just a few sentences added back to Nicomachean ethics and with understanding of The Gospel of Thomas:
It becomes clear Aristotle taught The Dhamma.
It also becomes clear Christ and Mohammad taught The Dhamma, too!
Christs "Father" = The Dhamma
Thomas, 108:
Lord Christ said, "Ὁ πίων ἐκ τοῦ στόματός μου γενήσεται ὡς ἐγώ, καὶ ἐγὼ γενήσομαι αὐτός· καὶ τὰ κρυπτὰ ἀποκαλυφθήσεται αὐτῷ."
Hello everyone and welcome to this online reading & discussion group on Heidegger, Aristotle and the Medievals (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.
For the first few sessions we will be reading from this book:
Ideally we would have started with the following short booklet, but sadly it is not out yet. As soon as it is out in paper format we will temporarily switch from reading McGrath to reading:
Along the way we will frequently read Heidegger himself. Usually we will read short essays by Heidegger mostly focused on his early views on Medieval philosophy. The one big exception is that we will read some of the early chapters of Heidegger's "Being and Time" in the new Yale translation by Cyril Welch.
This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the McGrath book. Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of works by Heidegger or Gonzalez. This is a little bit different from my usual format where we read from two books in each session.
The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want us to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.
People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.
Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.
To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 17 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.
Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).
Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:
Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.
This initial reading schedule makes it look like we will mostly be reading McGrath in this meetup. But this is misleading and not true. I want us to get a foothold in McGrath before we tackle Heidegger, but once we have that foothold we will be more or less alternating one session of McGrath with one session of Heidegger himself.
I have found that sometimes people assume that I pick books for these meetups because I agree with them. This is not true! I pick books because they are thought provoking and because I think they will work in a meetup context. But for the record, it just so happens that I do tend to agree strongly with Gonzalez. And it just so happens that I have some serious disagreements with McGrath even though I also have deep respect for his book and expect to learn a lot by engaging with it with all of you in the meetup. Some people like to know where I stand with regard to the books I have picked, so now you know.
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About the McGrath (from the publisher):
The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy is a major interpretive study of Heidegger's complex relationship to medieval philosophy. S. J. McGrath's contribution is historical and biographical as well as philosophical, examining how the enthusiastic defender of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition became the great destroyer of metaphysical theology.
This book provides an informative and comprehensive examination of Heidegger's changing approach to medieval sources―from the seminary studies of Bonaventure to the famous phenomenological destructions of medieval ontology. McGrath argues that the mid-point of this development, and the high point of Heidegger's reading of medieval philosophy, is the widely neglected habilitation thesis on Scotus and speculative grammar. He shows that this neo-Kantian retrieval of phenomenological moments in the metaphysics of Scotus and Thomas of Erfurt marks the beginning of a turn from metaphysics to existential phenomenology. McGrath's careful hermeneutical reconstruction of this complex trajectory uncovers the roots of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology in a Luther-inspired defection from his largely Scholastic formation.
In the end McGrath argues that Heidegger fails to do justice to the spirit of medieval philosophy. The book sheds new light on a long-debated question of the early Heidegger's theological significance. Far from a neutral phenomenology, Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time, is shown to be a philosophically questionable overturning of the medieval theological paradigm.
Is a thing’s form sufficient to explain its persistence through alteration, or does Aristotle’s hylomorphic framework leave us with a deeper question: what makes the same being remain itself while continually becoming something different?
Aristotle devoted the entirety of Nicomachean Ethics Book VII to a problem that remains central to moral psychology: how can a person know what is right and yet do what is wrong? The phenomenon he called akrasia (ἀκρασία), weakness of will or acting against one's better judgment, is not merely philosophical curiosity. It is the central puzzle of human moral life, the gap between knowledge and action that defines what it means to be an ethical agent.
When institutions deploy large language models for ethics education or moral reasoning support, they implicitly assume that model outputs reflect something analogous to ethical deliberation. System produces text about right action, weighs competing moral frameworks, and generates recommendations that sound reasoned. But Aristotle's analysis of akrasia reveals dimension of moral cognition that no text-generation system can access: lived tension between knowing and doing.
For Aristotle, akratic agent is not ignorant. She knows in meaningful sense what virtue requires. Her failure is not epistemic but practical: her knowledge fails to translate into action because her character, or hexis (ἕξις), has not been sufficiently formed through habituation to bridge the gap. This is profoundly embodied account. Knowledge that prevents akrasia is not propositional knowledge alone; it is knowledge sedimented into disposition through repeated action, emotional cultivation, and temporal continuity.
A language model possesses none of these. It has no character to be weak or strong. It has no habits formed through practice. It has no emotional responses that could conflict with better judgment because it has no judgment in Aristotelian sense, only statistical pattern-matching over training data. When AI system produces text about right course of action, there is no possibility that it might fail to act on that knowledge, because there is no acting, no embodiment, no temporal continuity of self.
This is not deficiency that larger parameters will remedy. It is categorical distinction between systems that generate text about ethics and agents that inhabit ethical life.
Aristotle's concept of hexis (ἕξις) is foundation of his moral psychology. A hexis is not belief or rule, it is stable disposition formed through repeated action. We become just by doing just acts, courageous by doing courageous acts (NE II.1, 1103a34). The formation of character requires:
Embodied action. Character is formed through doing, not through processing representations of doing.
Emotional habituation. Aristotle insists virtue involves feeling right emotions at right time (NE II.3, 1104b11). Moral education is education of emotional responses.
Temporal continuity. A hexis is stable disposition persisting across time. Language model generates each response independently, conditioned on current context and weights. There is no persistent self whose character strengthens or weakens over time.
There is deeper insight in Aristotle's treatment of weakness of will. The akratic agent, precisely because she struggles, reveals something about structure of moral cognition that perfectly compliant AI conceals.
When commercial model produces ethical recommendation, output is seamless. There is no hesitation, no internal conflict, no trace of struggle between competing motivations. The system produces what appears to be conclusion of reasoning process, but absence of visible struggle is not evidence of resolution. It is evidence that no struggle ever occurred.
The person of self-control who overcomes temptation through effort shows us architecture of moral cognition in operation. Corporate AI systems lack this architecture entirely. When AI produces confident ethical judgment, it is not product of resolved internal conflict, but statistical inference.
Practical wisdom, or phronesis (φρόνησις), requires navigating this gap between insight and action. An artificial system that presents seamless moral text obscures the central dynamic of ethical life.
Does Aristotle's analysis of Book VII prove that computational moral agency is a category mistake, or can formal dialectical systems serve as useful pedagogical mirrors for human character formation?
I am upset because vast quantities of my time were wasted reading irrational nonsense, falsely believing it was profound.
Aristotle is the great master. He is the destroyer or barbarism. I have never encountered a clearer or sharper thinker in my life. If Aristotle had not come into the world it would have been necessary to invent him.
Apart from the man’s metaphysics, he deals in reality. Was there a scientific mind before this mind?
Reading Aristotle at this point in history is like leaving the psychiatric ward to dine with the scientists. His crucial, foundational insights remain fully intact and relevant. They’re even more relevant now after the chaos and confusion of so much ego-driven modern philosophy.
I advise you begin with the master. I advise you return to the master. His words are striving to free your mind from the automation of your emotional confusion.
I thought this might be of interest.
It's been my view for a while that Aristotle was not using a private language, so when he used terms, everybody pretty much understood what he was talking about, even though he talked about it somewhat differently:
Is an unrealized potential something that really exists in the substance, or is potentiality only intelligible through reference to a possible future actuality? More radically, does Aristotle’s metaphysics allow us to say that a being is partly constituted by what it could become, even if that possibility is never realized?
I’m especially interested in whether this creates a tension between Aristotle’s commitment to actuality as ontologically prior and his account of change as the actualization of potentiality.
I don't know if it's the purpose of Aristotle's categories but it curious that if you think of the elements as genera, you can think of the various species of fire, air, water and earth. For example, a stomach is a sort of the digestive system and is the internal fire that burns food. Skins, bones, muscle are the types of earth These are differentiated by the quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, active and passive categories. For example, the position and quality of the fire differentiates it from other organs and other species of fire that can be found in other objects like a vegitation. Which collects light or fire
Most AI assistants are designed to give one answer.
Yumea is built around a different idea:
What if you could explore the same question through different wisdom sources and perspectives instead of getting a single generic response?
Over the past few weeks I've added a few features that I think make the experience much more interesting.
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2. Professional Mode
You choose which wisdom sources you want Yumea to use when answering. For example, you can focus on philosophy, spiritual texts, or specific thinkers depending on what you're looking for.
3. Freestyle Mode (New)
This is the feature I'm most excited about.
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I also wanted the experience to feel natural for more people, so Yumea now supports:
You can ask in your preferred language and receive responses in that language.
I'm not trying to create another chatbot that just answers questions.
I'm trying to build something that helps people think better, explore different perspectives, and learn from thousands of years of human wisdom without needing to read dozens of books first.
Still very early.
I'd genuinely love feedback:
If an AI like this existed today, what would make you actually use it instead of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or other assistants?
If you're interested in trying Yumea when it's available, feel free to join the waitlist
( https://launch.li/p/yumea-ai ) I'm currently collecting feedback and improving the product based on what people suggest.
