Aristotle isn’t for everybody: COVID "deniers"

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Aug 21

RE: Some COVID deniers will never be convinced.  By Hugo Chesshire.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 7 Aug 21.  Chesshire hold a Masters of Political Theory from Brock University and works in the field of government relations.

As a self-identifying Aristotelian-Thomist-Scholastic Realist – one of the very few still reading the Spectator – I was interested to read an article that proposed to talk about the nature of knowledge itself.  Wow!  Let me pull out my Jacques Maritain The Degrees of Knowledge and enjoy the discussion!  Alas, the author didn’t know what the nature of knowledge was; he was confused about the differences among the kinds of knowledge, uncertainty, and current and ancient understandings of what a science is.

His attack on Aristotle for not being an investigative scientist in the modern sense is ridiculous.  In the first place, philosophy was then and remains a noninvestigative discipline.  In Aristotle’s day, a science was a body of knowledge on any subject matter, medicine and geometry being ancient sciences; and Aristotle’s own collection of knowledge of animal and plant life founded the science of biology.  Formal and final causes were the interests of ancient science.

Modern science began with Sir Isaac Newton, whose interest was in efficient and material causes, and Newton’s scientific method is what launched modern empirical science.

In Dialectics and Rhetoric Aristotle explained that both reason and emotion as well as trust were needed to convince people of something, and even then they may not act on their beliefs.  Coercion is nothing but the employment of pain to make up for the failure of reason, emotion, and trust.  The employment of coercion tends to destroy trust.

The writer’s understanding of Aristotle is woefully superficial and inaccurate.  His nature of knowledge was lost from the get-go.

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The title is a joke on the book Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer J. Adler.

The politicization of COVID has destroyed trust in many quarters.  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris famously said during the 2020 election campaign that they would take no vaccine developed under President Trump because they couldn’t trust it.  Well, Trump’s Operation Warp Speed produced several vaccines in record time, and now that they’re in power, guess who’s hyping Trump’s vaccines?

Then there’s the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci.  The CDC destroyed its credibility with its constant vacillations over masking and vaccines, as well as its bureaucratic Bonapartism, which saw it order unconstitutionally the stopping of evictions for non-payment of rent!  Dr. Fauci has proven to be a pathological liar in the estimation of some for his noble lies – lies told to get people to do things he wants them to do.  You can only exploit people’s trust for so long before it catches up with you.

There is no easy formula for regaining trust.  But to call people COVID deniers because they find you untrustworthy is simply an act of trust-busting coercion.