If you're over 55, instead of comb-overs, golf and colorful body creams it's worth preparing yourself for the inevitable retardation of aging by going back in time to reacquaint yourself with Aristotle's understanding of an element of the Psyche which these days is referred to as "Cognition." But first you must rid yourself of the Stoic conclusion that Logic is one of the three essential parts of philosophy, and embrace Aristotle's Organum by dismissing Logic as merely a preliminary tool used for all Disciplined and all Reasoned Enquiry. For Aristotle, Logic, despite the rather obnoxious Greek First attitude he offered his ex-pupil Alexander the Great, didn't hold with the Stoic position that presented logic as an elitist shell around the delicate yolk of physics and ethics, and as a result produced a monopolistic empiricism that didn't believe in throwing dung at the wall or shovels and as a result stifled inquiry, dulled passion and voided most of the fun in life. Aristotle's central theme in his exploration of reasoned understanding was to know the cause of a thing, and following that up by knowing that the thing cannot be otherwise. A nifty way of describing the scientific method. You start with sense perceptions, what your eyes, your mouth, ears, fingers and so on tell you. Your sense perceptions dutifully give appearance to your imagination which plays with them, looks them up in your memory, thus armed, the mind moves on from details of the appearances your senses have noticed and produces a universal about which, someone in your filing system there may still be a record of prior engagements with said appearance and in turn this is then given to a process of deduction that produces an explanation of the witnessed phenomenon which may bare some semblance to true things. Then, as a non-stoic you of course have to add the elements of dung throwing, what you'd prefer to believe, and shovels, digging through your imagination for alternative "facts." Somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age the average male's share of physical and cognitive capacities enter a sort of stasis rich with potential for the charlatans of the culture, medical and advertising industries and at the age of seventy, retardation gathers pace as the cogs of cognition begin to fail, we start dribbling from the nose and the side of the mouth, find ourselves offering vicious and unnecessary opinions conjured out of midair and by the time we're comparing the decline of the Weimar Republic to the Temperance Movement in the USA that produced 18th Amendment in 1920, which was repealed by 21st Amendment of 1933 while struggle to remember the name of the road we've live on for over twenty years, we're well past time for the grave.
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