Behind The Scenes
Week of June 1, 2026. Aquinas, Thales, Pythagoras
Song of the Week
A Nocturne in D minor: I originally composed it much slower, it sounded far more romantic in my head. Now I cannot tell if it sounds romantic at all I have been near it so much. Perhaps I will revisit it again in a few months with fresh ears.
So, daily, I read with audio and text simultaneously. My E-reader caps at 2.3x, much slower than I read without audio, but dual encoding buys retention I value more than raw consumption. I read roughly 3 hours a day, for fun. I typically study in the evening and lately I have been reviewing the works of Daniel Robinson - Oxford, particularly his thoughts on Aristotle. I have also been refreshing my Latin in the background as of late.
Monday
Sauna/ Training
Read: Hyperion Cantos, 210 pages. Finished the first book.
Hyperion nails a Chaucer structure: seven/six pilgrims, seven/six tales, each in a different genre. The Keats threading is a massive reach and the author is desperate to show off anything learned in philosophy 101. Just know it stops rather than ends, will read the sequel.
Studied: Aquinas, 2 hours. Per se causal series.
Points of intrigue:
Per se: vertical, simultaneous. Borrowed power throughout. Remove the first mover, chain collapses instantly.
Per accidens: horizontal, temporal. Each link causally independent. Grandfather dies, son still begets.
Aquinas concedes eternal universe as philosophical possibility. Five Ways still hold. Never cosmological.
“Infinite borrowing, no lender, nothing lent.” Perfect Compression.
First Cause is not first in time. First in the order of dependency. Present tense. Right now.
Thomist instinct at its sharpest: when truths collide, distinguish. Never choose. Per se/per accidens is evasive imo… right now we will settle on interesting.
Tuesday
Sauna / Training
Read: Children of Time, 210 pages. Humans as primates, full biological comedy visible at once. Plot like children playing from a physicist’s vantage.
Studied: Thales, 2 hours. Latin, 45 minutes.
Points of intrigue:
archē: NOT Thales’s word. Technical sense first attested Anaximander. Likely Aristotle’s retro-projection entirely.
Met. 983b22: λαβὼν ἴσως. “Perhaps having taken.” Aristotle guessing and flagging it. We do not know why Thales chose water. I have many more thoughts than Aristotle on this. I imagine he likely chose water due to a lack of it being the foremost way a living being can die and - it (water) having a fine line (universally speaking) of error for carbon based life forms. Drink the wrong water- dysentery, fall into the water for too long, drown, not drink enough, hallucinate and malfunction and cramp, not drink enough long enough - die. (no idea what was meant by the third - generate heat) It is affixed to nearly all expressions of life. Great choice in infancy.
Replaced Poseidon with water sloshing beneath the earth. Same phenomenon, natural cause. Five innovations in one substitution: monism, conservation, intelligibility, unification, refutability. Smart! (but, whats holding up the water) - seems to accidentally create more mythology.
Enūma Eliš: primordial freshwater and saltwater abysses generating cosmos. The break from myth carries myth inside it. (more myth on accident!)
Anaximander’s objection: water is intrinsically wet and cold. Determinate element cannot impartially generate its own opposites. Posits apeiron, the boundless. Qualitative indeterminacy as solution. (again with the fire)
Anaximenes: reverts to determinate element (air) but adds what no predecessor had. Mechanism. Condensation and rarefaction. Qualitative difference reduced to quantitative difference in density. (interesting move going to an often non seen medium)
The Milesian arc in three moves: stuff without mechanism → indeterminate stuff → stuff plus mechanism. Each fixing a specific defect in the prior view. First critical tradition in Western thought. Lloyd’s: the innovation is adversarial criticism institutionalized in writing.
Wednesday
Sauna/ training in the morning.
Read: Children of Time, 210 pages.
Studied: Thales again, 1 hour. Origin of Species, 20 minutes. Chesterton’s Dumb Ox, 20 minutes.
Points of intrigue:
Thales’s dates: akme system. Intellectual peak assumed at forty. Eclipse of 585 BCE treated as akme, count backward. Birth year 624 BCE is a chronographic construction.
Eclipse prediction: Herodotus, earliest source, says the year only. Sixth century astronomy lacked tools for geographic path of totality. Exact date is legendary exaggeration. (This reminds me of Mark Twain stealing from H Rider Haggard and King Solomon’s Mines for his eclipse - others claim Columbus, but it was Haggard he stole from. Humans have high propensity to grant authority based on cosmic predictions.)
Well story: archaic observers used dry wells as sighting tubes, blocking ambient glare for daytime star observation. Scientific practice. Misread by onlookers. Plato built a parable on the misunderstanding. Bologna, Would bet my bottom dollar he was trying to see Venus clearly - I did this as a boy often!
Called base angles of isosceles triangle “similar” not “equal.” - Benefit of the doubt - May lack concept of exact angle measurement. Heuristic observation.
Psyche in magnets: archaic Greek, psyche = internal principle of motion. Magnet moves iron without contact. Thales identifying natural property, NOT invoking god. Same substitution pattern as Poseidon for water!
Chesterton on Aquinas: has me wanting to read his work on Francis too.
Thursday
Read: Children of Time, 200 pages. Near the end.
Studied: Pythagoras, full session.
Points of intrigue:
Aristotle: “the so-called Pythagoreans.” Never credits Pythagoras himself with a single mathematical discovery. Not once. Very Girard of him.
Plato: mentions Pythagoras by name once in entire corpus. Republic 600a. Way of life only.
Early evidence (Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Aristotle): religious teacher. Metempsychosis. Communal discipline. Reverence for number. That is the historical Pythagoras.
Mathematical-scientific Pythagoras: back-projection from Plato’s Academy, codified by Neopythagorean forgery, naturalized by late biographers (Porphyry, Iamblichus, Diogenes Laertius). Burkert 1962. Field has not recovered.
Pythagorean theorem: Plimpton 322, Old Babylonian, c. 1800 BCE. Fifteen Pythagorean triples. (3367, 3456, 4825) among them. Twelve hundred years before Pythagoras was born. Stigler’s Law. Yikes.
Blacksmith legend: Nicomachus, 2nd c. CE. Six hundred years late. Physically impossible. f ∝ √T, not T. Octave requires 4:1 weight ratio, not 2:1. Story cannot have happened as told. Absolutely ridiculous and relies on peoples idiocy for traction.
Synergy: Thales grounds reality in archē (water). Pythagoreans ground reality in structure (number, ratio). Material cause → formal cause. Huffman on Philolaus: “no Presocratic had made structure a principle with the same status as material principles.” This may be the categorial shift that opens mathematical physics.
Musical consonances: quality reduced to quantity for the first time! Octave 2:1, fifth 3:2, fourth 4:3. Perceptual property fully specified by mathematical relation. Everything from Plato’s Timaeus to Wigner’s “unreasonable effectiveness” follows from here.
Aquinas on Monday. Thales on Tuesday. Pythagoras on Wed / Thursday. Same question across three millennia: what is this grounded in, right now? Water, number, esse. All three refuse temporal question. All three mediated by Aristotle’s categories.
Friday
Read: Ovid, 20 pages. Origin of Species, 30 pages.
Today I will spend the day not studying but rather dedicating thought to those that I am responsible for and thinking about how I can improve their lives further, by either showing them how incredibly valuable they are to me, or ensuring I openly state their worth to me. I would also like to write a letter to my mother since she loves my cursive hand.
Hope to see you next week.
I think the song is romantic. It took me from longing to hope, and then built into passion that softened into a kind of yielding.
Mate this is awesome! A great look into a brilliant mind 💪