Aristotle had a system in which form is actualized by existence to form essence. But yet form didn't even exist before it had existence! This paradox was fine for students of Aristotle through the ages because their system has the ultimate reason and cause in an infinite being who was the father of the world. Many of us find a supernatural allpowerful bodiless father who watches you like a massive eyeball all the time to be absurd, so we structure reason from within the womb of phenomena and find paradox and whimsy within the world as part of what it is be to in-the-world

Why not start with recognizing and acknowledging faith, mere belief, as what it is, a speculative claim that can ground nothing except speculative argument for speculative conclusions. And these have their uses, but not as a ground for knowledge. — tim wood

:up:

I'm linking 'cause' to 'reason' in a manner suggested by the 'principle of sufficient reason'.

The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or a cause. — Wayfarer

And this not an argument but a presupposition, and by all accounts in many cases efficacious, But if you wish it to be a fact, demonstrate that it is a fact.

Btw, Heidegger wrote a book titled, The Principle of Reason. It starts, "The principle of reason reads: nihil est sine ratione.. One translates it: nothing is without a reason" (3). And off to the races through thirteen lectures and a summary address, all on the principle. And it's been a while, but I do not now, book in hand, find the word "cause" in it. Certainly not indexed or in any glossary. Your linkage, then, seems gratuitous.

Do you know how to ride a bike? How do reason, belief, ground, and argument fit here?

But more importantly, you left out one rather important bit: truth. — Banno

It seems to me experience, as ground, except that no argument is necessary. You get the experience, learn, and ride. As to truth, rather the questions when do you know truth, and by what means? And to be sure, while it may be true that a person knows how to ride a bicycle, I don't call the ability itself a truth, but a skill, even if a learned skill.

But I intended the OP to be about argument. Of course good argument can lead to knowledge and a fortiori truth. But the relation of truth to knowledge not my topic here, nor one I would look forward to. Nor, I suspect would you, if history on these on PF and TPF a guide. But perhaps I misspeak. .

Aristotle would have popped himself if he was told that a tightened string has more mass than a relaxed one, — Gregory

But it's not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJauaefTZM&t=5s
Relativistic mass is a convenient fiction. Or so I understand from the video.

Aristotelians have never been good scientists — Gregory

Like saying Bill Russell was not a good basketball player.

There's a further argument that Greek presuppositions about their world precluded the possibility of a modern science. Modern being quantitative. For Pythagoreans it was numbers. For Plato ideals. So Aristotle created a qualitative science, which in parts is still with us.

Why not start with recognizing and acknowledging faith, mere belief, as what it is, a speculative claim that can ground nothing except speculative argument for speculative conclusions. And these have their uses, but not as a ground for knowledge. — tim wood

Speculation is fundamental to the search for knowledge. It goes by the name of hypothesis or theory or intuition or inspiration.

It depends on what use you put them to.

Reason then a ground for the good.
— tim wood

Why is reason a ground for the good? — Fooloso4

That is correct. It is the use you put them to, not the things themselves

And reason a ground for the good, for the reason that reason cannot ground just anything, cannot ground evil, for example. Or maybe this a bit of Pangloss: the world of reason being the best of all possible worlds. And maybe it is, if we ever become reasonable enough to find out!

Speculation is fundamental to the search for knowledge. It goes by the name of hypothesis or theory or intuition or inspiration. — Fooloso4

I grant it! But not knowledge itself.

the world of reason being the best of all possible worlds. — tim wood

So, is it reasonable because it is the best of all possible worlds or is the best of all possible worlds because it is reasonable? Either way, you have not separated reason from the good.

Speculation is fundamental to the search for knowledge. It goes by the name of hypothesis or theory or intuition or inspiration.
— Fooloso4

I grant it! But not knowledge itself. — tim wood

One can go from speculation to discovery without having to first build a foundation.

I'm linking 'cause' to 'reason' in a manner suggested by the 'principle of sufficient reason'.

The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or a cause.
— Wayfarer
And this not an argument but a presupposition, and by all accounts in many cases efficacious, But if you wish it to be a fact, demonstrate that it is a fact. — tim wood

Referring back to your OP, you proposed:

Four ingredients: reason, belief, ground, argument. Others seem species of these four. And each of these its own distinct place and function, beyond the bounds and constraints of which become destructive. — tim wood

This list omits causal relations, which are surely as fundamental to knowledge as the other terms. So I'm saying that unless you acknowledge the relationship of 'cause' and 'reason', or, alternatively, the connection of cause and effect as constituents of rational judgement, then your proposed inventory of the fundamental constituents of knowledge is incomplete.

Beer may be made from many different ingredients, but beer is barley, for even when other grains are used, barley is included. We may say figuratively, then, that knowledge is our kind of beer, and scarcely can I drink enough of it but the drinking increases my thirst for more. But what the ingredients? Which the barley of our thinking? Four ingredients: reason, belief, ground, argument. Others seem species of these four. And each of these its own distinct place and function, beyond the bounds and constraints of which become destructive.

And it seems, at least from evidence here, that we won't agree on the most important ingredient. But I will argue for reason. — tim wood

Not a beer drinker, myself. To say that ‘beer is barley’ would then lead to an assumption that my distaste for beer is equivalent to a distaste for barley, but that would be a mistake. I like barley. I’d argue that this probably has something to do with the particular way these ingredients are structured, rather than my distaste for any particular ingredient, no matter how important it seems.

Physicists have to think in lots of novel, unintuitive ways to come up with breakthru ideas. Aristotle thinks unintuitive thinking is by definition wrong thinking and he is at fault there. As for compressed strings, I've routinely heard from physics videos that compression increases mass and that we can measure that, but I don't want to derail your thread

The cause of the universe is the infinite series of physical effects. That might not have a relationship to a reason for the universe

The cause of the universe is the infinite series of physical effects. — Gregory

This is waffle. The subject has a pedigree in philosophy, it has bounds, and terms of argument. This kind of statement falls outside them.

No, the Aristotelian error is thinking of cause and reason in the same line of thought

Reason itself a tool, like a 3/8ths-inch wrench, and with the same moral significance, which is to say none. Similarly with "the" good. — tim wood

Actually, I think your argument maps pretty well against the aformentioned 'critique of instrumental reason':

In ancient philosophy the concept of ‘reason’ was an objective and normative. Reason was held to refer to a structure or order of what ought to be which was inherent in reality itself and which prescribed a certain way of life as objectively rational.

Human beings were thought to have a (subjective) faculty which allowed them to perceive and respond to this objective structure of the world; this faculty could then also be called reason in a derivative sense. Even when ancient philosophers spoke of reason as a human faculty (rather than as a structure of the world), their conception of it was ‘substantive’; humans were thought to be able to use reason to determine which goals or ends of human action were worthy of pursuit.

This is why I brought in the 'four causes' argument, as it retains the notion of final ends being the grounding reason for the nature of things - that things exist for a reason, and not just on account of detecable antecedent causes; which is what was abandoned by modern philosophy under the heading of 'teleology'. It goes on:

Post-Enlightenment, the ‘objective’ conception of reason becomes increasingly implausible. Reason comes to be conceived as essentially a subjective ability to find efficient means to arbitrarily given ends; that is, to whatever ends the agent in question happens to have. The very idea that there could be inherently rational ends is abandoned. Reason becomes subjective, formal and instrumental.

The historical process by which reason is instrumentalized is in some sense inevitable and irreversible. The philosophical position called ‘positivism’ draws from this the conclusion that reason itself should simply be identified with the kind of reason used in natural science, scientific reason being a particularly highly developed form of instrumental reason. The point is to arrive at an exact depiction of reality as it is and of the causal laws that govern events is to allow humans to manipulate the world successfully so as to attain their ends.

This is what I believe you have referred to previously as 'the common coin of existence'. It goes on:

For this to be possible, according to positivism, the terms that figure in significant scientific discourse must be clearly defined and their relation to possible confirming or disconfirming perceptual experience must be clearly specified. Reason, the positivists think, can be a guide to life only in a very limited sense. Its role is restricted to discharging three tasks: (1) it can criticize a set of beliefs and ends for failing to satisfy certain minimal principles of logical consistency; (2) it can criticize a given choice of means towards a given end on a variety of possible empirical grounds, such as that the means in question will not actually lead to the envisaged end, or will have undesirable side effects; and it can propose more appropriate means; (3) it can unmask inherently non-cognitive beliefs, for instance value judgments, that are presenting themselves as if they had cognitive content.

Adapted from here.

There is no "final cause" because the end of the universe hasn't happened. Ends are within the framework of an eternal set of effects with the latter caused by the one before. There is no reason for a rock except in the reason we perceive it with

There are gluten-fee beers. They do not contain barley. — Banno

And there is virtual sex. Do you detect a flaw?

From our friend the internet
"beer (n.)
alcoholic drink made from grain, generally barley, infused with hops and boiled and fermented, Old English beor "strong drink, beer, mead," cognate with Old Frisian biar, Middle Dutch and Dutch bier, Old High German bior, German Bier; a West Germanic word of much-disputed and ambiguous origin.

Probably a 6c. West Germanic monastic borrowing of Vulgar Latin biber "a drink, beverage" (from Latin infinitive bibere "to drink," from PIE root *po(i)- "to drink"). Another suggestion is that it comes from Proto-Germanic *beuwoz-, from *beuwo- "barley."

Beer, then, either or both a drink, and a drink made of barley.

Gotta rest for a while. Back at it shortly.

alcoholic drink made from grain, generally barley, — tim wood

This list omits causal relations, — Wayfarer

Ok, great! You must know what cause is; what is it; what is a cause? A question I have asked before: a stick of dynamite explodes: what caused it to explode?

Reason was held to refer to a structure or order of what ought to be which was inherent in reality itself

Maybe I'm not understanding the language, or context is omitted, but pretty clearly for the Greeks what ought to be was manifestly not in nature.

If I may characterize more generally what seems the disagreement between us, it is that you want (your) religion to be real in ways that I hold it isn't and cannot be. Namely I find it housed and entirely existing in ideas and nowhere else. And to the degree this is accurate, all I can say is that if you want your religion to be real, make it real. My point made elsewhere that religion has its own house, so to speak, and not only a perfectly good one but arguably the best, and only, possible one. But you wish to find it resident in the lesser house, nature and nature's reality, and insist that it's there. Stop insisting and wanting, intead demonstrate and prove. The world waits, and no doubt large parts of it would breathe a deep sigh of relief when once you have made manifest in the world their God. .

There is no "final cause" because the end of the universe hasn't happened. Ends are within the framework of an eternal set of effects with the latter caused by the one before. There is no reason for a rock except in the reason we perceive it with — Gregory

All well and good. Unfortunately completely confused. Aristotle's final cause has no temporal component and has nothing whatever to do with whatever it is you're talking about. You can look it up.

I'm saying that life doesn't has to be seen as predetermined by a Final Causality that permeates everything. You don't seem to disagree

Not at all. But you've whizzed off on a tangent that has nothing to do with anything Aristotelian, beyond a resemblance of some words both use. Btw, just for the heck of it, did you get my Bill Russell reference?

I got the reference but my point was that scientists who study Aristotle do worse in science than those who purposely reject it

I got the reference but my point was that scientists who study Aristotle do worse in science than those who purposely reject it — Gregory

Ah. Ok. I would have guessed most working scientists know little or nothing about Aristotle.

I find presiding over all reason. — tim wood

As do I, the exceptions being accident or pure reflex.

Have you forgot near-beer? And I believe some claim to have zero percent alcohol. But this like blueberry muffins or muffin or cake mix that per the ingredients are absolutely innocent of anything blueberry. Or crabcakes without crab, or a lobster dish without lobster. Coffee without caffeine, except in this case the labeling is clear and explicit.

When you order a beer where you are, do you accept whatever they bring you never mind what it actually is? Hmm. Would a fraction of that permissive spirit inhabit your philosophy. Or better, your rigor in the labeling of imbibables.

...zero percent alcohol... — tim wood

Small beer was the common drink - in the place of water - for centuries because it did not cause dysentery. Small beer is beer.

Your recipe for beer and your recipe for knowledge suffer the same difficulty: they are too restrictive. In both cases, it's more about the process than the ingredients.