So, let me introduce ourselves, not look at photo, this is, yeah is that me behind this beard, this is my original face, I am Priyank and I work for ViewClip as a senior quality engineer. Also working for ViewClip. So, before we start, would like to know what is the expectation that you have out of this presentation, anyone from crowd, what do you think, what you want to learn, sorry, ok, it is not a source lab, it is a mad lab, ok, anyone else, sorry, sample test environment for automation, yeah. We will definitely give you data points on that. Any aspect not involved, I think, alright, if there are no other expectations we will proceed. So, before we actually get on to this session, it is important for you to understand the app that we are working on. So, note that we are not selling our product in any way, we are not promoting it and also we are not saying that this solution will work for each and every one of you in your project, ok. We are presenting this more as a case study, so we want to talk about the experiments that we did, the things, where we failed, what we learned from them and where we are at now. So, we are presenting this as a case study. The app that we are working on is called View, it is over the top entertainment app, it is similar to your Amazon Prime Netflix, right, so it is a video streaming app and we have a whole lot of content that we display, it is dynamic content, so it is bound to update based on whoever program sets the way they want. There are different movies, like categories like movies, TV shows and so on. Of course, we have the search functionality where users can search and play the video. We have the download functionality, so users can watch it even when they are offline and their data will not be consumed when they watch it. The business model that we have is called Premium Model. So, we have a whole lot of content that is available to users for free. There is also premium content for which users have to subscribe, right. And for the users who subscribe, they see an ad-free premium experience and the users who haven't subscribed get to see ads while they play videos. So, that's how we are doing our monetization, it's a premium model. And we also have offers. Now, I'll give an example of offers, right. If you are a Samsung user, if your device is Samsung, maybe certain versions, certain series of the phone, then you may get an offer which says you get 90 days of premium ad-free experience, right. So, we have such device-based offers and we also have other type of offers like carrier-based. So, if you're on a Vodafone data network, then you might see some type of offer. If you're on an Airtel data network, you might see some other types of offer. So, we've got a whole lot of things here in terms of offers as well. And just to understand the scale of things, so we have an Android app, we have an iOS app, we have a website as well. We have presence in a whole lot of countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Middle East, and so on. And we have just a very large fragmentation of device OS combination. So, we support a whole lot of device OS combination. So, I'm a testing perspective. For a testing perspective, I would see that this is an opportunity along with the challenge. The first thing that I would consider, there is so much device and OS fragmentation are there. So, we need to test our application across various device and OS combinations. Having said that, she already mentioned that we have some of the offer which is carrier-based. So, that means we also need to support our end user getting proper offer or not. So, that has to be tested. Along with that, it's a streaming application. So, it should work on your various network condition, be it 3G, 4G, or your home Wi-Fi. And just like any other applications, there were so many new features are coming and you need to regress your existing functionality. So, you need to ensure that by including new features, it is not any breaking things on your existing application. Last but not the least, the thing is that all this testing activity should give that pair visibility to business about your overall quality of product. So, I would say these are the opportunity, not along with challenges also. So, the thing is that we have so much device fragmentation, device and OS fragmentation, and we think that manual testing with all these possible device and OS are not feasible solution. However, manual testing is the must, I would say that because so many things that we need to think about manual testing because some of the issues caught by manual testing only. But such device and OS coverage are not possible by manual testing. So, automation is the must, automation is the lifesaver for us. So, but we need to test our automation across various range of devices. This is again not possible thing. So, we need to find out what are the most used devices by our application users. So, we need to filter it out. Now, can someone tell me, how can you figure it out? What are the most used devices by your application from crowd? Definitely, analytics is the one way, is the one way basically. We also use analytics, but in our case, we have our application already spent one and a half year in a public domain. So, we already have some sort of historic data. So, based on that, we started and we analyzed that these are the most used devices and we making our own device lab. Making our own device lab right from the beginning, right? That doesn't seem ideal. So, we conducted a lot of experiments. We tried out a few things, failed at a lot of them, and we want to share that with you today. So, when we first started off, we started writing tests on emulators. We tried to use emulators to run our tests, but that didn't work too well for us. One is, we struggled to get our app installed on the emulator. We used to get ARM translator-related issues. Of course, we could work around it by building our app to support Intel architecture. But then, that would not really be the app that the end users use, right? And our end users are not using emulators, they are using real devices. So, that was one of the reasons we said, no, we don't want to go ahead with emulators. Also, when we tried to run some tests on the emulators, it was extremely slow. So, when then we decided to not use emulators. So, the next ideal thing would be a cloud-based solution, right? So, in case of cloud-based solution, the issue is that in some of all the cloud infrastructure are being hosted in either US or European countries, where our application is not being supported. As long as you launch an application, you would be getting, app is not supported within this particular country. Because our application uses IP-based, first, our application use your, check your IP, and if it belongs to allowed area, then and that you would be allowed to launch your application. Otherwise, it would show the error message. Second thing that we have about device-form issues, like carrier-based simulation is not possible. So, that means you cannot simulate good upon or idea simulation within your cloud premises. So, that is the there. And the third thing that device options. So, most of our application user are located in Indonesia and Malaysia. The device which our end user uses are not present in device form. So, this is the limitation that we have about cloud-based options. So, it again, it didn't work for us. So, we couldn't use a cloud-based device form. So, then we decided that we want to go ahead and build our own in-house device lab, right? Now, Priyanka has been talking a lot about building an in-house device lab with your devices that are most used by our consumers, right? So, did we build an in-house device lab with the devices that are most used by our consumers? What do you think? Yes, okay. What do others think? Okay, we're not really using emulators, but okay, that's one option. You're saying that users in the field itself, but for automation? So, okay, some people think that we actually use the devices that are most used by our consumers. I'm really happy you think that way. But unfortunately, that's not the case, not automation-friendly. Now, what do I mean by that, right? Oppo is one of the devices that our consumers use a lot. But to run an automation test on an Oppo device, we have to enable developer options which need capture, okay? Let's say we did that manually anyway. After 10 minutes of inactivity, the developer options get turned off automatically. So, it is extremely tricky for us to run automation on these devices. We don't have them in our device lab. So, the ones that are very frequently used by our consumers, like are in the top range, but not necessarily the most used ones. But does that mean we ignore devices like Oppo? No, we use them for our manual and exploratory testing, because those devices are equally critical too. A little about our criteria, like what our criteria is for automation. Yeah, so in our case, our automation criteria, first of all, we need to cover all the critical path of our application, because we have 10 plus millions of users. So, we need to ensure that our automation cover all the critical user journeys. Like in our case, search should work well and video, you should be able to download and play. That has to be tested and along with that various, some of the PPP feature, particular for offers and everything. So, that has to be tested very well. Second thing that it should align, your automation should align with your CI CD. So, that means as long as your any chain that happened, be it from your API side or your front end side, that has to trigger automation automatically in order to get faster feedback. So, that is the another criteria and whatever you do, it should generate meaningful and content rich report, that really value addition for business as well as the QA community, QA also. So, that is the there. Now, let me take you a deep down of our automation technical stack. So, first thing we use Cucumber JVM to define business rules. So, we use I mean all the step definition has been formed in Cucumber JVM plain English. It can be easily understood by any non-technical person also. Second thing is that it is a tool selection. So, our application present in Android as well as the iOS, it's a cross-platform applications and we do not want to maintain two separate codebase just for automation. So, APM it's a good tool that so within the same script, you can cover both the platform. Third thing we use Gradle. The interesting aspect is that it is not building only our project, it also do some sort of infrared activity like spinning off APM server, as well as dispatching your feature files across the devices. So, that way we leverage Gradle capability within our automation. And last and last option is the last thing that we have. We need to analyze our test trends. We need to analyze our failures in order to find a flaky test. Some could be automation issue. Some could be genuine failures. So, we need to analyze also. So, we have a TTA integration. It's a test and analyzer, which is a brainchild of Mr. Anand Bagmar. Anand, can you just wave your hand? Yeah, thanks. So, in case of any integration you want, you can contact him. Yeah, so these are the technical stack that we have. We can briefly talk about CI, how we set it up and a few things that we have done. So, our automation tests, E2E tests are triggered in three different ways. One is when the app code changes and the app builds, then we trigger the test to ensure that this latest version of the app does not have any issues. We also trigger tests when API is changed. When backend code changes, then again we ensure that the tests are green. And finally, if we make changes to the test code itself, then our tests run again. So, these are our trigger points. We are using Jenkins as our CI. So, we have different Jenkins jobs, which basically run the Gradle W command. And they run tests on Jenkins nodes. Now, these Jenkins nodes are mapped to different devices. So, these nodes select which devices to run the tests on and they handle that. This looks like in a very high level. We check out our code. In the Jenkins node configuration itself, we've set environment variables with the device IDs. That's how we are doing it. So, whenever our pipelines run on certain nodes, right? Yeah, I mean we are doing parallel in some sense. So, our job is a pipeline, right? We have multiple pipelines which get triggered automatically based on whatever the triggers I mentioned. So, these things get triggered in parallel. Now, always your jobs are connected to certain nodes in Jenkins. And these nodes, we have set environment variables on these nodes with the device IDs. So, let's say we have a pipeline which would run tests on a Samsung A5 devices. Now, we in our lab have two Samsung A5 devices. So, both those devices, the IDs are present as environment variable Jenkins nodes. So, when this pipeline gets triggered, tests are run on both these devices, A5 devices. Now, similar setup we have for let's say a Moto G5 device. So, if we might have multiple Moto G5 devices, their IDs are present in environment variables of the Jenkins node. And then when a pipeline triggers that, then it runs on these devices. Does that help? Oh, how it starts the thread? We'll come to code in a bit. I can show you what we do there. We're using grader to control all that. We'll come to that in a bit. Any other questions at this point? No, it's fine. It's great that we're having this interaction. So, feel free to ask questions. Yeah, why? You're saying, yeah, I just want to know, like, why do you have to run the same test on, you know, two devices which are of same configuration? You said, like, you have two SA devices and you provided those. UD IDs in the Jenkins node, right? So, in that case, it triggers on both SA. Does it give any value add? It doesn't run the exact same suit on both. We do distribution there. We run few scenarios on one and few on the other. Okay. It looks something like this. Very simple. We're just taking out our automation code, copying the app from an upstream pipeline and then building our tests and running them. For now, our tests take around 40 minutes. Which is not ideal. We're trying to get it down a little further. And then we, of course, publish our reports, archive the artifacts. And as Priyank mentioned, reporting for us is very crucial because our business teams look at it. So, we have very rich reports. Are we using Kukumba reports? Take an example of reports where we show the scenarios that ran and you can see something red, which means that this is a real report and the test actually says a lot of information. So, we capture the build number, the APK build number, so that it helps us in debugging when we have to look at it later. We also capture API side details. So, the API version and so on. We also record videos for the scenarios that we run. That helps us in debugging. Now, we're using a gem called Flick for this. Initially, when we started doing Android automation, we used to use ADB screen record. The thing is it, of course, we couldn't use the same thing for iOS, that was one. And the other is it has a limitation of recording videos for a max of three minutes. And some of our tests were longer than that. So, then we used this gem called Flick, which supports both Android and iOS and that's what we've been using now. Would like to add about it. So, in iOS, you would be capturing GIF. In Android, it is picking up MP4. Very critical thing that we do is the analytics automation. Why this is important? Because a whole business, almost the entire business depends on analytics, like on analytics data. For example, which content to show at which location is probably, is kind of determined through the data that we have. The other reason I'll give an example. We, as I mentioned earlier, that we have a premium model. So, we also track how many ads users have seen. And that kind of helps us in actually getting money from those ad providers. So, analytics basically is extremely crucial for our business. So, it's important for us to test analytics. And what we do is we test it at the source itself. So, our Android app is the one that generates this, as in the apps are the ones that generate analytics events. So, when we run the test, we check the events there itself. So, we are checking them at the source. As mentioned, we use PTN for multiple different reasons. So, this is an example of a graph which shows the test execution time over a period of time. The spikes are failures in our tests. There are quite a lot of them. So, now what this could help us with is, let's say you're seeing an upward trend with time. Then it could mean that maybe the performance of the app has degraded. That's why the tests are taking longer. Or it could just mean that there is something wrong. Maybe you change the test and maybe there is an additional, I don't know, explicit weight or something which is causing an issue. It could be anything. So, it kind of gives you an insight into things that might be broken. And of course, you need to do more analysis to figure out what exactly is the cause of it. The other reason we use TTI is to compare test runs. So, let's say we ran the same suit on a motor device and on a Samsung device and it passed on one of them. So, we can compare these runs and figure out which were the failures on one and why it didn't fail on the other. Maybe that gives an insight into an app related issue which says, hey, on certain versions, certain ways there is an issue problem. Or it could just mean we've not written great tests. There are some flaky things. Around and then we need to debug that. So, of course, it doesn't pinpoint into what exactly the issue is, but it gives you an insight into things where, which will help you to look at it further. The days on which test run. This is the time it took in seconds. Execution time. Yes. Okay. This is one of the graphs. TTI, of course, provides a lot more. Do you want to say something about it? As Lawan had mentioned, right? No, this could be because of either showing trends in execution time. It could be noting it's taking more time because of app performance issue. It could be because of test issue. You have added some more extra validations, extra assertions over there, actions that could be there. Or it could indicate something else in terms of infrastructure. So TTI just gives insights into what a test execution is and with human mind that context, you have to see what potential is going on. In this case, you could see there are pretty much three set of data points where the test execution has happened, right? One is very much at the low, which is a high density of execution times. Second is in the middle and third, there are some peaks, okay? So my guess right now, just looking at this, this is a real graph by the way, but it's also a very old graph. The ones at the bottom means that test did not even run. That's why it almost failed instantly, right? And it could be for various reasons. It could be there was a problem in the APIs. There was a problem in the video playing because of ads or pop-ups that are the way we handle it. Because the tests are handling the video play, which also means handling the offers and the ads that come in skipping the ads. In some cases, there were very genuine issues which we found on device specific. So this gives an insight into what is happening and you can potentially look at this and say, oh, there is a lot of failures that happen at particular point in time. Is there something happening with the infrastructure at that time? Or is there some builds or deployments going on, right? So this is one of the meanings you can infer out of this kind of chart to see what is going on in the application. This is execution trend per test case. Per test case over a period of time. Yes, it has been mentioned there. Yeah, each bubble over there is a test execution. Okay, so for any one test, you could say, okay, I want to see a login test. How much time is taking for login? Over a period of time, how much time is it taking? So that kind of, yes, it's one test. It's only for one test. Yes, we have automated. So basically our backend, so we have a separate SSID within our office premises and our backend system that understand like, if you get a request from that particular IP address, consider that as a Buddha phone offer or I mean any other offer, carrier based offer. So that way we provide some, I mean provision to do carrier based integration test within our office premises. It's a simulation of that. So as we spoke about pre-did parallel execution by having different pipelines itself which get triggered when the code changes or when a new build is there or a backend deployment happens. We've also done distribution. So to answer your question again, and I think part of your thing as well. Using Groovy's deep part pool, I think the number of devices that are connected as an argument. So it basically spawns that many threads and we run all these scenarios on the devices. So what happens here is that we acquire a device that is free. Now this device pool is just a map of, let's say a device ID and status, whether it's acquired or not and a few other basic things. So we acquire a device that is free and then run a scenario on that device. Now when this, like if there are multiple devices connected then different tests get assigned to them and then when one becomes free, immediately it gets assigned the next step. So we're not determining upfront which scenarios should run on what. We're not doing that distribution upfront. We're doing it runtime almost, right? As in when the devices become free. And we're doing APM server management. So this is actually a very simplistic approach. We get the, we decide a port number based on the ID of the device and then we start our APM server on that port. And then have a session with that device. Like the APM server will have a new session with that device, right? Of course this doesn't happen on every test run. So once we, this is a very simplistic version of what we actually have but if let's say an APM server is started once for a device then we don't stop it and start it again till like the entire execution is done. All the scenarios are clear. Is that clear? Does that help you? Is it one APM server with multiple sessions to serve multiple device IDs? No, one device is connected to one APM server instance So see 10 devices are connected to you you start 10 APM. 10 APM server, it is there. So will it down the overall speed? Haven't faced that issue as of now because we have 16 GB RAM connected Mac mini. We haven't faced that issue. But definitely we want to improve that by, I mean since now APM is supported like within one APM server you can allocate multiple sessions. So it's definitely we want to do this. So the latest version of APM has that we haven't moved to the latest version yet that's why we have this code. Me too that for I have asked the question. Okay. Yeah. Yes. That's what you mean. Yes. You continue the execution of multiple test cases across the test. Yes, yes, yes. So you don't have the state problem or something like that. You need to bring back the state of the device. We clear app data between tests but there isn't anything else that we particularly have to do in our case. So we use the same thing. No, we do, right? It is clear the app data before each test runs. So it's starting with a clean app install but each device has got a similar to user per device. So there are some APIs that are written which also clears up the user details from the backend systems along with clearing the app data before running the test. It's always running in a clean state unless there are scenarios which need persistent data across sessions. Sorry. So let's just repeat the question. Okay. The question was why are we clearing data every time because in real world, the users will use the app continuously not clear the data. So we have multiple scenarios in it. Let's say in a test, what we want to do is just download a video and go offline and play it and that's one scenario. And let's say in another case, we want to play a video from the recently watched section. Right? Now these two are actually different tests. They are separate concerns. If we do not clear the data, it is possible that initially we were expecting there to be no recently watched and then something gets added to that recently watched section after a video play. But if I had already played a video in my previous test run and then just continued here, then I would see recently watched item already there. But it is dependent test cases in that case.  So if you store all the previous information, then probably you may lose that. The tests have to be independent, right? Yes. See, I'm using the times of India I've been used today and just closed it. And then again, next day I launched it and again, another news. So I'm doing this continuously activity. So when I am going to test this, I should not clean the data every time because maybe there is a tutorial on the launch of app. Maybe there are some ads as you implemented the AdMob. So starting point should not be clean. What do you say? Right, so there are multiple things that that I can think of right now. One is we are distributing our tests at scenario level, right? So even if we do serialization, then we cannot just say that, you know, now because this device is free, assign it the next test because then again, we might face the same issues, right? That was one of the reasons. The other thing is that let's say, I mean, it's true that this kind of a scenario does happen in real life, but then what I would think is maybe we, like if it is extremely important for us, then we maybe have one scenario which tests these things, right? Like launches the app, plays a video, closes the app, pre-launches it again and then plays something else. That's what I'm saying. So we can have a test, we already do. So I think it also comes on to the intent of the test, right? What are you trying to achieve? There are some APIs that I mentioned where we clear the user data before launching the app, right? There are also some APIs which sets the user state in a particular case that I want this user to be expired subscription user. And then I launch the app, then how does it behave? So not everything has to be chained as tests. We should be leveraging different strategies to set up data to say, okay, now if this is the state of the application, how is it going to perform? Depending on the intent, that's what would happen. Depending on what the test is supposed to do. So we can take the steps that we've done is surround ADP utils. So what happened initially is we used to go back home after work with the green bill and then come back the next day and see that some of the bills are red, right? What was going on? Then when we checked, we found that some of the devices had lost ADP connectivity. Now there were a few devices in our lab which would lose the connectivity at 8 p.m. every evening and we still don't know why. So what we did as a workaround is we wrote some scripts that would just reestablish ADP connectivity and then after that we didn't have test failures because of this reason. The other reasons we had test failures were sometimes randomly the devices would lose internet connectivity. So then we wrote some scripts to connect to the internet, the Wi-Fi of our choice and then we would do it before every test runs and then proceed. So then the test again didn't fail for this reason. So these are a few things where we failed for reasons that we had not expected at all and we did some work rounds to just help us proceed. So now let me just walk you through about overall mad lab journey, how we started. So this is very simplest thing. We connected our Mac with one simple Android device. We started QA scripts and it worked well. So after that we procure a few more devices. This is again very basic approach. All the devices were initially connected, I mean hook up with two way tapes. So sometimes glue become weak and device drop off. So that happens. So how we communicate we procure industrial Velcro tape. So all the devices were connected. I mean gel with this tape only, which probably in using mechanical industry by hooking up your hammer and some of the tools. So that way we started and all the devices, all the cable passes through that one magical black box. Do you know what it does? Has anyone idea? It's a secret ingredient of our automation by the way. It is just, no, it is just what I say. It's a cable manager. It doesn't do anything. It's a carpet for our house.  So that is that. And after that we procure a few more devices. We have our own device grid within our office premises. Yeah, you can see a few more devices. So currently we have 18 to 20 devices that connected with three Mac mini's devices coverage in terms of we have various section of Android, Moto, and as well as the iOS devices also. So still it has so much scope to add a few more devices, few more places are still empty. I hope we will cover it soon. Similar with this kind of setup also. Can anybody guess what? Pretty well connected to. We don't have a photo of the one with the doors open. Maybe we'll share it sometime. Stealing phones, yes, that's what happened. So this is placed right in the middle of our office. So it's at a place where you enter and you see it looks nice and extremely accessible. So if somebody wants to test something on an SA device, the easiest thing would be to just walk over, unplug it, and then do your testing. And what we realized is maybe we didn't communicate enough to people that they shouldn't be touching these devices. So what we did was we just use the board and wrote something. We cannot do fencing, right? So this is the only way that we can do. It says do not touch these devices unless you want to be killed by a mad woman. No, guess who will be mad lady?  So this was our mad luck journey. Now we'll show a quick demo. It's just a small test which a lot of you might have, as in probably our APM users, so you would have seen this, think like this, but this is just a basic test where we are launching the app and searching and playing for a video. Don't search, it's a bindi while I'm only able to. Yeah, this is a basic video stream. We pause and check the time and things like that. So by the way, 2x fast. Yeah, it doesn't run so fast actually. What we wanted to cover as part of this session, I've written a lot about MATLAB on his blog. That's one of the nice sources to get more information. We've also, the infra part of our code is open source. That's one Anand's GitHub repo, that's also available. TTA is again open source, that's also available. The Wi-Fi related scripts that we have written, that's also open source, which has a link with us. Yes. That's the content about anyway. Sorry, you had a question. I just have a few clarification. How did you do region specific tests? That's a good question. So the advantage of our app is that we detect location based on IP. What we did is like the mapping of IP to location is also stored in our database table. Like we cache it in some sense. So in our testing environments, we've cached a few IPs like that. And what those IPs are, basically, we have public IPs with different SSIDs. So in our Wi-Fi related script that we spoke about, we connect to any of these SSIDs based on which region we want to run the test on. So let's say I connect to an SSID called Middle East. So then that my public IP is already mapped in my table, in my backend. So then I am treated as the user from Middle East. That's how we're doing it. We could use VPN. We do use... Does VPN doesn't work because video streaming on that, it becomes a challenge for running tests. So flakiness in that and getting ads over the VPN, it can become a problem. So that introduces a lot of, already these are end-to-end tests which needs a full environment setup. Adding VPN makes it more complex. We do use VPNs at times for manual testing, but not really for running. I have a couple of questions. One, can you talk a little bit more about how you managed iOS challenges, iOS device specific challenges one. And two is something related to what you've mentioned about the Oppo phone. So, I mean, there's probably a little bit controversial. Why didn't you consider rooting it? I mean, I understand it's not the perfect solution, but did you consider that? What were your thoughts? What was your strategy behind that? Right, I'll answer your second question first. We did consider rooting a few phones, but we also looked at our analytics data and most of our users didn't have rooted phones. So we decided that that might not really be the best approach for us. It is very contextual. I mean, that's of course one way of solving this problem. But we thought we would rather use it for our exploratory testing which would give us more value in our opinion. That was the reason. But we did have a few phones that were rooted that were used for testing as well. And for iOS, so can you repeat? I have lost the context. For the iOS, what challenges? iOS devices, right? I mean, it's a little bit more close to the wall garden. So what kind of challenges did you face?  So for iOS, yeah. Almost, yes. Automation-wise, this is not possible in iOS. I, to be frank, that. Yeah, so we haven't done the switching of network on iOS yet. On what? Like, our Android suite is in a decent shape. iOS is not that mature yet. We're still working on it. We haven't been able to do the Wi-Fi changes and things like that on iOS yet. And to your question, yes. It is the same suite. What we do, like in both our apps, our business flows are actually the same. So except for the screens where your elements are different, apart from that, the flows are completely the same. So we reuse all that except where we have to actually do the like click, play, you know, actions like that. So we've basically created factory which would either do an Android click or an iOS click based on what is the driver that is initialized. But the rest of the code we are using. So all the business layer, what should go next, where it should go, everything, all that is used. So sorry, in the interest of time, we'll just take one last question and then we can have follow-up one-on-one conversations. Sorry, there was a question over here. Thank you for your talk, man. It was nice. Is your app is hybrid or native app? It's a native app. The second question is regarding in-house device form. It was nice and implemented. Do you have any suggestion that one PC can handle how many devices? You know, any metrics we have? Sorry. One PC can handle how many devices? One system having, for example, a 16 GB RAM of two CPU cores. How many devices can be connected? So in our case, we have eight devices connected to one Mac mini. It works. Sorry? Yeah, so we have, okay. So we have a Mac mini of 16 GB of RAM and it can accommodate easily eight devices without an issue. Oh, thank you. And in case of iOS, if you have iOS device, make a room for your Xcode. Okay, yeah. Thank you, thank you. Okay, sorry. For the rest of time, we'll have to stop further discussions, but any follow-up questions, I'm sure Priyanka and Launay are around for some more time. Also, we have a little time before we get back to track one for the panel discussion, which will be happening over there. So thank you very much, Priyanka Launay. Thanks. It was insightful. Hope everyone got some value out of it. Thank you. Thank you.


This is Chris Pipe. My friends call me Banksy. I'm back again guys and today We got some indie games to give away. Oh, yeah, we got some keys this week guys Normally we do three games a week, but this week we got five now in this video that you see behind me You're gonna see all five games that we got keys to if you want to play some of these games or get involved Fill out the form below and go for it guys. Also the indie game channel is Rocking and not only are they rocking they're doing reviews and they are taking Submissions from the partners. So check out that channel that link is also below guys. We are rocking this week We've got minors not in a weird way. We've got like minors with hats on we got plants We got zombies. We got cows. We got murder. We've got Automatic machine guns that we got a bunch of things guys. So enjoy the video Let us know what you think click the link below and go. This is your boy Banksy. I'll be back with them more shortly. Cheers


Welcome to this lecture on aspects of western philosophy, lecture 7 and this lecture is on medieval philosophy. And primarily there are two important thinkers, the contributions of two important thinkers are going to be discussed in this lecture. The first one is Saint Augustine and the second one is Saint Thomas Aquinas. These two important thinkers are selected because of their contributions, because of their relevance in the hall of philosophy on the one hand and particularly in the development of what we today designate as scholastic philosophy or medieval philosophy. So, the important topics which we are going to discuss today are Saint Augustine and his problem of evil, Saint Thomas Aquinas' concept of faith and reason and the third one is proof for the existence of God which is primarily proposed by Saint Thomas Aquinas. So, these three are the important topics which we are going to concentrate today. And when we talk about medieval philosophy as I have already indicated, the important thing to be focused is primarily the contributions of Christianity as a philosophical theology that is going to be discussed. And when we talk about the relationship between philosophy and religion, primarily Christianity in the context of Europe, it is during the last period of Hellenic speculation Christianity became popular in Roman kingdom. So, it was during that period when there was a visible decline of the Roman empire on the one hand and also the glorious Greek philosophical era on the other hand. So, these two were happening simultaneously on the one hand and on the other hand you could witness the emergence of Christianity as a more organized religion. So, Christianity required a philosophical support on the one hand and these two civilizations the Roman the Greek Roman civilizations they require certain institutions or some very strong institution which would support cultural life. Because with the demise with the decline of the Roman empire there is no strong institutions in Europe which would support strong cultural institutions. On the other hand Christianity as a religion cannot progress without strong philosophical and theological support. So, these particular period in human history in European history is very crucial because it brought together two very important institutions or two very important periods actually. One is the Greek Roman civilization the philosophy their culture and their moral and world outlook on the other hand Christianity as a religion. And this is what I mentioned during the last period of Hellenic speculation Christianity became popular in the Roman kingdom and on the other hand in turn Christianity was influenced by the philosophical traditions of Greek or Roman world. And again to give a rational expression to fundamental Christian beliefs Christianity required philosophy the Hellenic thought early Christianity had to justify its faith to reason. Because the Greek or Roman culture as we have already seen in the previous lectures of this course was predominantly rational their methods of enquiry were rational. And the Greek civilization had already given birth to many phenomenal thinkers like Socrates Plato Aristotle and many others. And Christianity on the other hand is a religion which is primarily based on faith. But with faith alone a religion cannot gain acceptance in a culture you need to justify faith in the light of reason. So, this is what Christianity or the Christian early Christian thinkers were trying to do. So, the apologist philosophically defended faith in the Christian tradition this is what the apologist did. They philosophically defended faith and they also had to formulate doctrine and theories like philosophers formulate doctrines and theories in order to substantiate and justify their world pictures. These thinkers also had to do that to what is revealed through the Bible has to be justified rationally by formulating doctrines and theories. To expose, systematize and demonstrate the Christian dogmas by the schoolmen and this in these attempts of the schoolmen the birth of scholastic philosophy what we today understand as scholastic philosophy as emerged. So, I repeat to expose, systematize and demonstrate the Christian dogmas in the light of philosophical theories developed by the Greek philosophers primarily by Plato and Aristotle. So, the two important thinkers I have mentioned just now Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. We can see the influence of both these great masters of European thought Plato and Aristotle. Augustine in Augustine's philosophy will see both the contributions or the influence of both. But Saint Thomas Aquinas is predominantly an Aristotelian yet he is a person he is a philosopher who had written commentaries to Aristotle's work and taken lot he has taken a lot from Aristotle's philosophy in order to justify and substantiate Christian faith. Now, scholastic philosophy it accepts the truth of Christianity without questioning them. So, this is one very important point to be underlined. Scholastic philosophy as said though we call it philosophy though the rational aspect is emphasized wherever there is a tension between faith and reason. Scholastic thinkers had a tendency to accept what is important in faith. They always considered faith as more important than reason though later on we could see that there are attempts particularly by people like Saint Thomas Aquinas to find out that there is no real tension or there is no real contradiction between faith and reason. But still the acceptance of Christian belief or Christian dogmas without questioning them is so central to scholasticism. Philosophy at the service of religion hand made an of theology. So, we could see the birth of systematic theology during this period and philosophy has been treated as an hand made an of theology it is just at the service of religion. And then we can see that Postel Paul offers a Christian theology for the first time. So, it is often said that Saint Paul is responsible for the institutionalization of Christianity as a religion. That is because he is the first one to offer as Christian theology per se in the most systematic and accepted manner. The Gnostic attempted developing a philosophy of Christianity. This is what is furloughed the Gnostic they tried to develop a philosophy of Christianity and by reconciling Greek metaphysical doctrines with the dogmas of Christianity. So, I have mentioned in the beginning of this lecture itself that this is precisely the aim of scholastic thinkers to reconcile the great philosophical metaphysical insides of the Greek tradition with the principles or with the revealed truth that is present in the Bible. The apologist furloughed with more systematic approaches. So, this is how scholastic philosophy gradually developed. And when we talk about medieval philosophy we can say that it is the period from the end of the Roman Empire in Italy until the Renaissance. So, this is what the historical period which we mentioned to. The period from the end of Roman Empire in Italy until Renaissance Italian Renaissance and till that period we normally designate we normally refer to as medieval philosophy or scholastic age. We can be more precise by saying that it is from the fifth to fifteenth century AD almost 1000 years. This period is also known as dark ages because these people as I have already mentioned considered treated philosophy as an anemdian of theology. It is at the service of legion faith was more important than reason. So, in that sense philosophers started calling it a dark ages. The philosophy of western Europe between the decline of classical pagan culture and renaissance and that which dominated European thought from Augustine to renaissance. So, another way to put it is this from Saint Augustine to renaissance. So, Saint Augustine in that sense is a very important and very crucial thinker in this hall tradition of medieval philosophy, but at the same time we have to recognize we have to realize that Saint Augustine is a very important philosophers in the hall history of European philosophy. So, this is what we are trying to do in this lecture. Latin was the Sanskrit of medieval philosophy. Sanskrit in India was the language of the learned class. It was the language in which all scholastic, all scholarly works were composed of in India. We can see all great Puranas, Shastras, everything was composed in Sanskrit. Similarly, Latin was a Sanskrit of medieval philosophy. All great scholarly works across Europe were written in Latin not in their respective mother tongues. So, even we can see that even French and German philosophers when they write, they write in Latin not in their respective mother tongues. And now let us see some of the very important historical factors that triggered the development emergence of scholastic philosophy. As I already mentioned the collapse of Raman civilization and other related important historical events that come to our mind. This is a very important factor, the collapse of Raman civilization. As I already mentioned it in the beginning of this lecture, afterwards the empires social structures also collapsed. This is very important. Any great civilization, it requires certain social structures which was very strong, built on certain fundamental moral assumptions, fundamental certain fundamental beliefs. So, with the collapse of Raman civilization, these social structures of the empire also collapsed. So, the European civilization required another social structure, another set of cultural social structures to sustain its civilizational beliefs or its civilizational strength. The church was the only institution in that sense capable of supporting intellectual culture in the entire Europe during this period. And till 12th century this was the situation. So, we can see that from 12th century onwards there is a gradual change. By 15th century it culminated in renaissance, but till then it was all dark ages. Christianity was the only institution. It was the only institution which supported all forms of intellectual intervals in Europe during that period, almost 1000 years. And now let us see the major influences of scholastic thinkers, scholastic the schoolmen and primarily two philosophers whom we have mentioned, but there are many others. The two important thinkers as I have already indicated are Plato and Aristotle. The doctrines of Plato and Aristotle and the entire Athenian philosophy, not just these two thinkers, the Hall of Greek philosophy were philosophers or philosophy was a great influence for this schoolmen, but primordially these two thinkers. And one of the schoolmen Berthius who lived between 480 to 525 AD brought commentaries on Plato's and Aristotle's works. Slowly they are trying to digest the Greek philosophical insights into Christianity. The Jewish tradition was another significant influence because primarily Christianity itself is an offshoot of the Jewish tradition, the Jewish civilization. The Old Testament is an accepted text for all the three Abrahamic regions. So, the Jewish tradition was also a great influence for them. The early Islamic philosophers were also influenced by the Greek thinkers. So, their influence is also visible in the development of scholastic philosophy and even the Indian thought, Indian thinking. Though many western philosophers would not accept it, would not acknowledge it openly, there is sufficient reason to believe that the Greek philosophers themselves were tremendously influenced by Indian philosophers, Indian thinkers. There was a very active commercial and other forms of cultural interactions between these two great civilizations, the Greek, the European, the Greco-Roman primarily the European civilization and the Indian civilization. So, naturally there were a lot of exchanges, intellectual exchanges that had taken place during this period. So, the influence of the Indian thinkers or Indian philosophical traditions were also there and it was acknowledged by some European thinkers and naturally when the Christian, early Christian philosophers when they try to accommodate or when they try to sort of interpret their dogmas and beliefs in the light of Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. These insights of these great other philosophical traditions also would have played a very important role. Later by 12th century Aristotle became more influential or rather Aristotle became the most significant influence on the scholastic thinkers. Now, let us see a little bit of Platonism and Christianity because Plato, the first system builder in European philosophy has come up with a very special kind of philosophy which separated, which introduced a dualism, appearance and reality. What appears? This world, this world of sense experience according to Plato is unreal. What is real? Reality is constituted of abstract universal ideas or forms which are eternal, which are imperishable. The world of these objects are subjected to destruction while eternal realities will never perish. This is what the crux of his philosophical ideas were and in connection with this philosophical ideas Plato also developed a theory of eternal soul, which was taken by Christianity as well because according to the Christian belief the soul, the human soul is also eternal. The moral development of the soul is also something which Christianity would have taken from a Platonic philosophical assumptions and the separation of the soul from the body because there is a fundamental separation Plato envisages between soul and the body. Soul is something which is eternal, body is something which is perishable and which is reminiscent of the form and matter distinction which Plato makes. But of course there are certain difficulties, certain significant problems which Christianity phases when it tries to interpret its fundamental dogmas in the light of Platonic thought. The first one is the doctrine of resurrection in Christianity and Plato's notion of reincarnation. So, Plato's notion of reincarnation is almost very close to the Indian concept while Christianity never believes in reincarnation. Christianity the notion is resurrection there is a Christian world is constituted of the heaven, the hell and the world. So, there is a heaven and the natural abode of the soul is the heaven it has to go back that is a teleology built into it. But Plato conceived the possibility of reincarnation, rebirths which is very close to the Indian belief. So, there is a kind of tension between these two assumptions and again Plato envisages a union of the soul with the ultimately good. This is again I would say a reminiscent of the Indian ideal the conception of the Atman the soul being one with the ultimate universal soul which is conceived by Plato in a very significantly different way. But still you can see that there is a sort of similarity between these two views, but Christianity never conceived it. Christianity separated God from man, God is a creator for Christianity and it to conceive that the human soul or the individual soul becoming one with the universal soul or God is blabbering according to Christian belief. So, these are some of the difficulties which Christianity as an organized religion encountered with Platonic philosophy. With these fundamental ideas in mind let us now start examining the contributions of Saint Augustine who lead between 353 AD to 430 AD. Saint Augustine is conceived as the most influential of all middle ages thinkers and a showed that there is no fundamental a position between religion and philosophy or faith and reason. So, usually there is a belief that faith and reason would not go hand in hand. There is a fundamental contrast or fundamental contradiction or tension between faith and reason because faith demands absolute faith, absolute submission to something without any questioning and reason is always built reason is always sort of based on questioning why certain things happen. So, there is a contradiction between these two, but Augustine was trying to show that there is no fundamental contradiction between reason and faith or philosophy and religion. Religion can aid philosophy in its rational pursuits this is what he was trying to assert and Christianity can be enraged by revealing its philosophical basis. So, this is what he thought by revealing the philosophical basis of Christianity philosophy can do a real service to Christianity. So, he was trying to do that and this his book The Confessions which is even today conceived as a classic a philosophical classic is one of the most influential and important philosophy works of all times. So, this is what some basic information about Saint Augustine and when we talk about his intellectual endeavours, the works of the Platonist influenced him significantly. So, we could see the influence of Plato here in the case of Saint Thomas Aquinas the influence of Aristotle is more visible, but here Augustine was more influenced by the Platonist. The separation of physical from spiritual substance is a very important problem in Augustine's philosophy and again when we talk about his important philosophical views the only knowledge both having is the knowledge of God. So, this is from where he starts. So, we can see the influence of Plato here even in Plato the most significant the most important knowledge which according to Plato is wisdom the highest wisdom is knowledge about goodness. It is the knowledge about goodness. So, Plato actually starts with that question all his philosophical endeavours begin with the question what is goodness how do you know it. Similarly, here goodness is replaced by God or rather equated with God. Augustine equates goodness with God and affirms that the only knowledge both having is the knowledge of God. God created substance not only order and arrangement. So, everything was created by God including substances everything in this world order arrangement God was responsible for everything in this world in this universe and time was created when the world was created till then there was no time before God created world there was no time with the creation of the world time also emerged. God is eternal and hence timeless God is beyond time it is God who created the world and time. So, he is beyond all that. So, these are some of his fundamental assumptions which is again taken from or rather substantiated by Plato's philosophical positions. God is the ultimate source and point of origin of everything in Plato it is the idea of goodness from where everything emerges. So, God here is the ultimate source of everything God is equated with being goodness and truth. So, this is Augustine's position you can see a dualism here see here you have something called the sensible world. The sensible world is private and isolated transitory objects and on the other side you have the intelligible world which is public and open to all enduring objects and he says the intelligible realm holds out the prospect of fulfilling our desire for the unity that we seek in friendship and love a unity that we can never really be achieved as long as we are immersed in the sensible world and separated by physical bodies subject to inevitable dissolution. So, this is again Plato that can never be achieved the highest goal can never be achieved because it is something which a prospect of fulfilling our desire for the unity that we seek in friendship and love. So, this can never be achieved if you are stuck to this world of perishable sensible objects again when you talk about legion and philosophy the question of faith and reason the relationship between faith and reason comes into picture reason is capable of comprehending God. This is what Augustine was trying to effort because usually there is a belief that reason can never attain reason can never comprehend God. God is a matter of faith, but Augustine underlines the fact that reason is capable of comprehending God. God has given reason to us because the primary purpose of reason is to understand God understand everything including God. So, it is God who has given us reason God has given us reason in order that we may know all things including God. To philosophize is to see truth directly and without the intervention of the eyes of the body and again reason is the eye of the soul. So, he is trying to equate again you can see the influence of Platonism he is trying to equate reason with not with the body, but with the soul that separation is so fundamental in Plato as well as in Augustine.  So, here Augustine makes a point very clear he says that true philosophy is identical with true religion. So, there is no real fundamental separation between philosophy and religion as if you know we can see with today philosophy is a rational interval which deals with secular objects and on the other hand religion is something which demands faith acceptance this and that. No the true philosophy according to him is true religion itself and both have the same strivings for the eternal it is based on the same principle to understand the eternal to know the eternal. So, both philosophy and religion aim at that God despise reason his first born son which is God himself to us in order to make us more perfect than other beings and again chronologically faith precedes intelligence. So, this is what he was trying to assert. So, though there is no fundamental contradiction of tension between these two chronologically faith precedes intelligence in order to understand a thing we must first believe it then we can try to rationally comprehend it. Faith is a condition of knowledge he asserts this it is a condition of knowledge and it is a provisional state inferior to knowledge and ultimately resolves itself into it. So, every knowledge begins with faith according to him. Understand what we firmly believe see the rationality of our faith and understand in order that you may believe believe in order that you may understand this is the famous agustinian phrase I repeat understand in order that you may believe believe in order that you may understand they are mutually complementary for in a scheme of things when you focus on the concept of God it is so central to agustin's philosophy for that matter to the entire medieval philosophy, but for agustin more importantly God is the being beyond whom outside of whom and without whom nothing exist everything is God in that sense. So, it looks like a sort of tantism which is actually not correct, but God is the being beyond whom outside of whom and without whom nothing exist. God is the beginning the middle and the end of all things again he is good and yet without quality he is good and yet without quality he is great without being a quantity. So, agustin was trying to sort of capture this God which is not possible to capture with reason alone. So, you could see that he develops a scheme which involves everything reason, faith, understanding, comprehension everything and everything surrounding the concept of God which fundamentally remains as a reality which is identical with goodness. Goodness, justice and wisdom are not accidental attributes of God, but is in a most essence God is goodness itself justice itself, wisdom itself they are all in a most essences of God omnipotence omnipresence and eternity are is divine essences. So, these are in a most and divine essences of God and everything is in God though he is not the all he surpasses or rather he goes beyond everything though everything is in him he himself goes beyond everything you cannot put everything together and say that it is God. God is not just a combination or a putting together of everything he goes beyond all that again he is the creator of intelligence and yet superior to it he has created intelligence no doubt in that he has created reason no doubt in that, but he is beyond that he is beyond his creations the creator is beyond his creations creator is greater than the created objects he is present everywhere without being bound to any place you cannot bind him to one particular place and say that God is here God is everywhere is present everywhere he exist and yet is nowhere we cannot say that he we cannot pinpoint him to one particular location and say that he belongs to that location he lives eternally and yet is not in time he is the principle of all change and yet immutable and reason encounters antinomies in speculating about God this is an issue which we are going to discuss further when we come to modern philosophy particularly to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Hegel because it was Immanuel Kant who highlights this issue that reason encounters antinomies when it tries to speculate about ultimate reality. So Augustine also recognizes this and says that reason cannot comprehend God completely reason states what God is not or with reason alone one cannot contribute God's nature in its entirety reason can only conceive God partly not completely, but one cannot comprehend God in the fullness of his perfection to comprehend God in the fullness of his perfection one needs to be perfect, but no one is perfect except God. So God's creations cannot be as perfect as he himself is. So in that sense complete or absolute or perfect comprehension is impossible. God is in that sense absolutely holy and cannot will evil in him willing and doing are one what he wills is done without any intermediate being and again in him are all ideas or forms of things. So everything is there in him though he goes beyond everything else everything of its form to him is the ultimate creator of everything and he created the world out of nothing a continuous process of creates the continuous process it goes on world depends on him every time world depends on it is not that God has just created world and left it like that it still depends on him every moment it depends on God time and space are also created by him God has created matter God created the world and on account of his infinite love and this is what he says. So as I already mentioned if this is a case if everything is created by God in one sense we can say that then everything is God because he is created everything, but as I already mentioned this might indicate a kind of pantheism which is actually not correct pantheism is the view which says that God is world and world is God identifying world with God or God with world is pantheism Augustine's position is very close to pantheism but is fundamentally different because he says that everything is in God no doubt but God is beyond everything God is more than that God and the world are different in that sense they are different the doctrine of X and hello is something which makes him not a pantheist and now we come to a very important problem which the hall of scholastic philosophy grappled with the problem of evil. I would articulate it in this way as it is done by David Hume in his dialogues concerning natural region he is he or the deity willing to prevent evil but not able then he is important is he able but not willing then he is manoeuvrable is he both able and willing when then is evil so this is a question or to put it in another words where does evil come from seeing that God who is good has created all these things good Augustine in his confessions. So, the problem is to articulate it differently God is the cause of everything God is absolute goodness the hall of creation is an expression of his goodness everything that exist is then good he would have built everything for the best of his creatures then what about evil if all these propositions stated above are true if God has created everything if everything God has created is good for his creatures then what about evil evil also is his own creation evil cannot create itself so everything is created by God including evil and if everything that is created by God is for the good then evil also should be for the good which involves a contradiction so if everything is good then evil also must be good how can evil be good is it a contradiction this is the problem the problem of evil. Now let us try to understand the answer the way in which these thinkers provided a solution to the problem every kind of existence is good even evil this is what they say like the shadows of a picture it belongs to the beauty of the hall this is Augustine's view like the shadows of the picture which is actually a limitation of the picture in one sense the shadows are something which is unavoidable inevitable limitations but they add to the beauty of the picture evil as such is not good but it is good that evil is present it is good because evil is a privation of essence evil is the omission of good it depends on the good it is only an absence of good it is not a positive presence it is only an absence like a shadow if there is no good there is no evil privation of good is evil it is an absence it is the absence of something which nature ought to have so in that sense we can say that moral evil comes from a defective will the worst evil is turning away from God now the question is why did not God omit evil which he could have as nothing is impossible for him nothing is impossible for God so God could have omitted it but he did not do that why he preferred it to serve the good this is the answer given by Augustine he wanted he wants evil to be there to serve the good to enhance the glory of the universe so this is Augustine's view real evil does not exist evil is a privation of the good the presence of evil makes man responsible and this is how he tries to so Augustine takes up a very some of the very important some of the very crucial questions of scholastic thinking scholastic philosophy and tries to answer them the first one is the concept of God itself is elaborated by Augustine and when you try to understand the concept of Christian God as a creator God as a father figure then and particularly try to philosophically substantiate this view then naturally you encounter several problems like the most one of the most important problems which you encounter is the problem of evil and the answer given by Augustine to the problem of evil is that evil is only a privation of goodness it is like shadows of a picture which would add to the glory of the universe rather now with this we will wind up our discussion on the contributions of saint Augustine now we will come to the next philosopher saint Thomas Aquinas who is a very important thinker as I already mentioned these two are treated by many as the most important thinkers and when it comes to saint Thomas Aquinas the primary objectives are to demonstrate the rationality of the universe as a revelation of God relationship between philosophy and theology and faith and reason to bring out this to show how philosophy and theology or faith and reason supplement each other to demonstrate the superiority of faith which every Christian philosopher every scholastic thinker was trying to do this when you see saint Thomas philosophy as I already mentioned in the beginning he was one of this scholastic thinkers who was greatly influenced by Aristotle while Augustine was mostly influenced by Plato you can see the influence of Aristotle more prominent in Thomas there is a synthesis of Christianity and the philosophy of Aristotle in Thomas works and he had written commentaries on Aristotle's work like on the solve Nicomachean ethics metaphysics all these are very important works in Aristotle's philosophy and Aquinas approaches as I already mentioned Christian theology prior to Aquinas was predominantly Platonic like Plato it refuted concrete physical reality and emphasize the realm of abstract and purely spiritual forms and ideas Aquinas adopted a form of Aristotleianism and opposed this predominantly Platonic point of view which was there in scholastic philosophy. So, when you try to understand is Aristotleianism Aristotle is different from Plato primarily because in Aristotle the kind of dualism which Plato maintained is absent of course, Aristotle was also a dualist, but for Plato form and matter are absolutely separated one is real the other one is unreal, but for Aristotle maintained both for him both form and matter eternally coexisted he treated the abstract universal forms as the last the concrete objects in this world as equally important. So, the physical world for Aristotle has some value similarly for Aquinas also the world which is a creation of God is a valuable world is an important reality or in other words soul and body are in a union like form and matter in Aristotle soul and body are in a union and against the prevailing body negativism for which Plato was responsible body and the natural world have value in Aquinas philosophy. So, as in the case of Aristotle we can see a compromise here as well the domain of God which is pure and the world which is not as pure as the former knowledge of God faith or reason. So, these are all issues which we will find in Aquinas philosophy and when we talk about knowledge and the Roller philosophy all our intellectual knowledge rise from senses. So, here again like Aristotle who believed that all knowledge begins with sensations he also says that all our intellectual knowledge rise from the senses. All philosophy start with what we know about existing objects and common starting points to human thought are downed in sense perception and philosophy should identify them. Aquinas is Aristotleianism unlike Plato Aristotle saw the empirical world as real as I mentioned knowledge about and the empirical world is a major concern for Aristotle and for Aquinas as well created world is not to be completely negated scientific intervals can be legitimized and reason has its place and value in human intervals, but it has its limitations as well. So, again we are back to the problem like reason and faith how to reconcile them. So, there is another way which Aquinas tries to reconcile reason with faith with reason alone we cannot demonstrate things like trinity incarnation originals in creation of the world in time and sacraments etcetera. There are certain things which reason cannot understand philosophy cannot deal with these things say for example, the concept of trinity which is so central for Christian world the Christian dogmas one of the very important Christian dogmas which cannot be understood by philosophy they are revealed truths beyond reason not objects of philosophy can neither prove nor disprove them. So, reason alone we cannot either prove or disprove them yet they are not unreasonable. So, to understand this to accommodate this he develops a two fold theory of truth about the religious claims religious claims always call for a two fold theory of truth one the one which the enquiry of reason can reach cannot understand see for example, that God exists. So, reason can give provide proof for the existence of God which he actually gives and that which surpasses the whole ability of the human reason which reason cannot do anything see for example, the conception of trinity. So, he was trying to argue that there is no real contradiction between these two the one which is reason can understand and the one which surpasses the domain of reason and matters that are revealed are not necessarily unreasonable this is what he was trying to argue if you believe in them their reasonableness would become clear. So, faith in that sense is presupposed we cannot provide rational proof for the mysteries of religion they presuppose faith. Faith is a matter of will that commands acceptance and it is an inner instinct coming to us from without something which comes from within something which is part of our natural constitution according to him. God invites us to believe it is it is God's own invitation in that sense. So, here there is a court from Aquinas which would indicate the two fold mode of truth. There is a two fold mode of truth in which in what we profess about God. Some truths about God exceed all the ability of human reason such is the truth that God is trying, but there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach such are the truth that God exist that he is one and the like. In fact such truths about God have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers guided by the light of natural reason. This is from Aquinas, Sama, Contra, Gentilas, chapter 1 book 1 chapter 3 and number 2. So, the two fold theory of truth can be articulated in this way there is reveal theology which is dogmatic which is beyond errors and there is rational theology which is philosophical, but it can and reveal theology is a genuine speculative science. It is not based on natural experience and reason science concern with knowledge of God nobler than any other science. On the other hand rational theology can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. So, now we will move on to the last topic which we are going to discuss in this lecture. The proof for the existence of God as I already mentioned the two fold theory of truth tries to argue that there are certain things which reason can understand which can be proved that is that God exist God is one and the like. St Thomas Aquinas has come up with certain proof for the existence of God which are known as the five ways. They are the celebrated five ways or the five proofs for the existence of God. God as the necessary cause of certain observed phenomena like motion, existence of efficient causes, reality of contingency, different grades of perfection in the natural order, and directed activity of natural objects. Each one of them is an observed phenomena and God is conceived as a cause of them. So, this is the way in which these arguments for the existence of God are designed. Now proof for God existence. So, Augustine outlines as I already mentioned five proofs. The first three ways deal with the cosmological argument which is again taken from Aristotle. The fourth deals with the moral arguments that there is a moral governance we can see in this universe. And the fifth proof relies on the teleological arguments which says that there is a design in this universe and which presupposes a design. And when we talk about cosmological argument which is again as I mentioned based on Aristotle's conception of prime mover or the unmoved mover. In Aristotle we had seen this that there is motion in this universe and motion presupposes a mover who itself is unmoved. So, the concept of unmoved mover, universe demanded the existence of something which moves other things without itself being moved by anything. This is what Aristotle says in his metaphysics book 12. All moving things presuppose an unchanging unmoving entity and this is the first way from motion. Motion implies the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. A seed becomes a tree. It moves from the form of a seed to the form of a tree. So, the potentialities are actualized. So, motion implies the reduction of potentiality to actuality and something that is already in actuality alone can move a thing from potentiality to actuality. So, it presupposes a form which is already a tree that prompts the seed to move and a thing cannot be both a mover and moved at the same time. Objects in this world cannot be self moving. They presuppose a mover. Whatever is moved is moved by another and that by yet another. This cannot go to infinity otherwise it would become infinite regress which is not possible. There should be a beginning for this moment. Hence, there must be a first mover who itself or himself is not moved which is unmoved, unmoved mover which is God. Now, the second way is based on the idea of efficient cause which says that the world has an order of efficient causes. Everything in this world has a cause. A thing cannot be the efficient cause of itself as it cannot be prior to itself. So, an object cannot be its own efficient cause because then theoretically or logically the object should be present prior to its existence which is impossible. So, there must be another object which is the cause of this object. Every efficient cause as a prior cause but this cannot go on infinity. There should be a beginning and that is God. Therefore, there must be a first efficient cause who is God. So, that is the second way. The third way is from the reality of contingency which says that certain things are found to come into being and be destroyed and hence they either may or may not exist. Objects in this world, most of the objects in this world they come into existence prior to that they did not exist and they also will perish after some point of time and after that they do not exist. So, they may or may not exist. They are contingent. We are not sure about them either existent or non existent. If all things were mere accidents then nothing would actually exist which is not true. I mean just because objects may or may not exist, just because they are all contingent all things cannot be so. If that is the case then nothing exist we would have to conclude that nothing exist which is not the case. Hence, not all things are mere accidents. There must be one necessary existing being. Every necessary thing must have a cause of its necessary existence but the chain of causes cannot go back infinitely. Again it comes to that cosmological argument. Hence, there must be something necessarily existing through its own nature not having a cause elsewhere but being itself the cause of the necessary existence of other things and this is God. So, that is the third way and when we come to the fourth way from degrees of perfection, we find degrees of perfection among things. There are greater and less degrees of goodness truth and nobility in this universe. Different things have different degrees. They exhibit different degrees of goodness truth and nobility. These are in relation to something which is perfect. So, how do you say that this is greater than that always in relation to something which is the greatest. So, that relating entity something that is the truest the best the most noble and the greatest being. This is God the cause of the existence of all things and of the goodness and of every perfection whatsoever. And now we come to the fifth way which is the last way which is an argument from design. I quote we see that things which lack knowledge such as natural bodies act for an end and this is evident from their acting always or nearly always in the same way. So, as to obtain the best result. Hence, it is plain that they achieve their end not fortuitously but design it. Now, whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exist by whom all natural things are directed to other end and this being we call God. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia article 3 question 2. So, this is the fifth way from design. All natural objects are arranged according to a plan. There is something intelligent by which all natural things are arranged in accordance with a plan and that is God. So, let us summarize God is the first mover. He is the first cause. He is the necessary being. He is the greatest being and he is the intelligent designer. This figure will provide you a summary of the five arguments, five ways, five proofs for the existence of God provided by Saint Thomas Aquinas. We will now conclude our discussion on this medieval philosophy. So, we have taken up two important thinkers, Saint Thomas Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas and their contribution. Some of the important issues which we have discussed are the problem of God, the problem of faith, the problem of reason and faith, the link, the relationship between reason and faith. The question whether there is a real contradiction, real conflict between these two and the scholastic thinkers were trying to show that there is no real contradiction or a real conflict between these two approaches, faith and reason. They rather complement each other, but at the same time they were trying to highlight, underline the importance of faith over reason and then in which these thinkers were influenced by the Greek philosophers, particularly by Plato and Aristotle. Plato's influence is more visible in the case of Saint Augustine while Saint Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotelian. With Saint Thomas Aquinas, he says that or rather he develops a two-fold theory of truth which ultimately argues that truth or God can be attained, God can be approached from two directions or religious truth can be understood from two directions through faith and true reason and both ultimately reach the same destination. He says that faith is something which is more important than reason, but reason as such has got certain limitations, but it can do certain things. For example, it can actually prove the existence of God, it can demonstrate that there is only one God who is a creator God, all those things, but Saint Thomas Aquinas is more known for his providing a proof for God's existence which is primarily based on Aristotelian insights, the cosmological argument number one, then argument from design and moral governance. So, we have seen the five ways and which would in a sense summarize the contributions of or the nature of thinking propagated or advocated by the scholastic philosophers. Thank you.


and the NFL PA looks like it's about to come to an agreement. Now, it's been ratified at this point by the owners. Right, not unanimously according to Adam Schefter, but still it passed. And the players have until tomorrow to ratify it. And what it essentially is, is two more playoff teams, seven playoff teams at conference, only one team with a buy. And the first playoff weekend would be three wild card games on Saturday, three wild card games on Sunday. And it also would entail a 17 game season and three exhibition or preseason, whatever you'd like to call it. I call it garbage, but I mean, I don't have a terrible problem with it. If it was in place this year, Don, what the Rams would make it? Rams would make it in the NFC and eight and eight stealer team would have made it in the AFC. And, you know, what I said, the cost is true. People's heads don't explode about football, but here's the one thing I don't get. So with a 17 game season, you're gonna play more home games or more road game certaincies. So your nearest competition might have an advantage or this we haven't seen anywhere. And I wonder if this is the case, every single team would play a game in London or Mexico City. That's what I think is gonna end up happening. Maybe not right away, but I do think you're seeing such an appetite for games in London and Mexico City. Can you create that 17 times during the course of the year so that now everybody has to play at least one? Now, where could they play? Can you put a game in Toronto? I guess you could do that, although that's not really a disadvantage the way having to go into London. Maybe they have a full slate in London. Well, yeah, you know, and I think that's where the television package would come from. Because you can create another network. Because as you said, the Saturday and the Sunday would be a triple header. Yep. You can create another network to come in to take one of those three games. There's be a one o'clock, a 430 and an 830. Or you could give ESPN another playoff game. You could. And turn Monday night football into ABC. But you would ask for more money from ESPN. You know, that's probably what you would do. So either create another network or make a network pay more money. What you can also do, and I heard this back a few years ago, when some of those London games were the 930 games, remember the 930 in the morning? Where if you did that every week, every Sunday, then you would have a 930, a one, a four. You know, the 430s in the night game, you would create a quadruple header every single Sunday. And maybe you get a network or maybe the 930 London games, which would be every week, would be an Amazon or Facebook, or you could maybe sell those as the streaming ones. People might not freak out as much because it's a 930 game. What you're doing is you're creating another television package. It's gonna just print money for the NFL. Now, I don't know if the players are gonna ratify this, but if they do, then stop complaining about injuries and stuff like that because you're just taking the extra money. So if they do play the 17 game season, their cut of the pie will be 48 and a half percent. The owners will get 51 and a half percent. And that's worth billions of dollars over the life of a 10-year year. Which I don't understand why players care because most of them aren't gonna play 10 years anyway. They're not gonna see the majority of that, but you can't talk about injuries anymore. You can't talk about how you're afraid of head injuries and the owners can't either. If you're gonna expand the 17 game, and you can say, well, they were playing an extra, a pre-season game. Those games that you never even play and they're not, it's such a scene-hitting. I know, and I do think there's something to that, especially the length they've gone to change the rules to protect the players. But how much more is one game? Because sometimes you end up playing one more game than other teams. If you're the wild card team. Right. When the Giants won those Super Bowls, they had to play the four playoff games, counting the Super Bowls, opposed to some teams only playing three. So sometimes you end up playing the extra game anyway. If it adds some revenue, and then one less pre-season game. Yeah, but now if you play 17 games, you'd be playing that extra wild card game in the 17 game. No, you're right. Listen, it's a lot. It certainly is a lot. It's certainly more than when we had it. Remember, we used to have 10 games, then 12 games, then 14 games, then 16 games. It's the way things are going. And the one less pre-season game really doesn't matter because most of the starters always mail in the last pre-season game. So the second pre-season game would be a big deal. So listen, I guess the NFL could turn around and say, take a look at what's been happening with two a days being gone. Training camps aren't nearly as long. Training with pads don't happen as long and as often as it did back in the day. So for the extra money you're gonna get, hey, how important is it to the players? Right, if you really don't wanna play the extra game, that means you're gonna have to turn down a significant amount of money. How are they willing to do that? And also part of it is they could be offering lifetime health care, which is a big deal to NFL players. So there are things there and there's gonna be less practices with pads, which is gonna just make the first four weeks of the season a joke, more of a joke anyway. That's true. There's a lot of things there. And one of the things that they're requesting and they might get is less disciplinary power by Roger Goodell, where he can't be judging jury. Well, those are things they want. And you're gonna have to give something for that, right? But I will tell you this though, if I'm the players, I have to just wonder just a little bit, why are the owners so anxious to ratify this? Now you said it wasn't unanimous, but still, that could be the old oaky-doke by then on, we don't love it that much. Why are they so desperate to get this done? Their TV deal's not even up for another couple of years. Well, maybe they just want to get the ball rolling to give that confidence that by the time you get to where these television networks are expiring, that that's even more money that you can get. Absolutely. And this would also mean labor peace since that last strike season. 2011. So it's a long, no, that was just a Hall of Fame game. Right, just a Hall of Fame game. But a regular season game was like 86, I think, or 87? No, you're going, yeah, you're going back to 87. That's the last time that any regular season games were affected. So at the end of this contract, that would have meant you'd have over 43 years of labor peace. I mean, that's valuable to television networks. They know that for 10 years, they could promote this and they can make this work. No, I just think getting your ducks in a row as quickly as you can is a good thing. I find it curious that it wasn't unanimous, so there are some owners that aren't in favor of this. Now, it could be Jerry Jones who voted against it because he's steadfast on an 18-game schedule. So let's not sit there and say any owners that voted against this were thinking for the players. They might have been thinking, I want an 18-game schedule. I want more teams of the players. We don't know why they voted against it, but the majority, they got what they needed. And then we'll see over the next couple of days whether the players are out of fight. I would assume they would. And this is probably what we're looking at, Peter, for the upcoming future. It's just, this is silly and just sort of like nerdy and spazzy of me. I just hate the numbers.  I hate seven playoff teams on each side. I just, which is so weird. It just feels so greedy. It's odd, no? Well, I mean, I'm not gonna knock you for feeling that way, but anybody that romanticizes sports into not being a huge business, they're just missing the point. They're looking to maximize their dollars. Well, think about this. In 1976, the 1976 season was the last year of the 14-game schedule. So in 77, when they expanded in 76, in 77, they went to the 16-game schedule. So how many years is that? That's 43 and 43. So in 43 years was the last time they expanded the schedule. So it's not like it's happened all that often. They're at a disadvantage, Peter, because of the fact that they know if they can add 20 games. Remember, the USFL schedule was 18 games. That would just be an unbelievable amount of money that they can get. It's just that obviously the damage to the player sometimes is gonna make them wanna vote against it. But really, is it that crazy when you look at the 81-game schedules in hockey and basketball and the 162 games in baseball? Yeah, but the extra 60 minutes of that kind of pounding, that means a lot. I mean, we've already dealt with head injuries over and over and over again. But we're also gonna have to live with something here, and that is what's happening in basketball with the maintenance days, with what's the exact phrase again, the... Load management. Load management. You're gonna get that in the NFL now. You might get it. Maybe this deal will be another week of a buy, and then you could push the Super Bowl, the present's weekend. Which is also what everybody's been talking about anyway. Why are they in such a rush to play the Super Bowl? They can own February. Totally true. So if you added another buy, Peter, how taxing would it actually be on these players if they're able to get the days off? And we have a drop appropriate for it. Finally, my double buy drop would come to make sense. Yeah, or we'd have to retire at one of the two. Now, people are saying how it affects the records. I guess it could. Records are not the same. The records are not the same in baseball. And by the way, the records are already messed up. Let's be real. All the passing records, you basically can no longer compare to anything pre-2000. And we made the adjustment in 77 when we added two games, right, Peter? Of course, they've been different forever. My question is this. Can you, to me, I guess it's more of a statement. I don't mind going to 17 or 18 games if I'm the players, if you get the lifetime health care. If you get the lifetime health care, to me that feels like an actually somewhat fair trade-off. But this is what I'm at with. This is what the owners would probably ask the players. We'll develop the plan, but you're gonna have to take some of your money to put into that in order to have that. So then it becomes an argument how much of a percentage should the owners pay for that? How much should the players pay for that? But yet the extra revenue should be put into a pot to take care of the players after they retire and take care of all those players like Earl Campbell who's in a wheelchair for the sacrifices that he gave the Houston Oilers when he played. It is amazing what you pay for lifetime health care. I mean, baseball has a great health care for once you're retired, but you have to pay like $30,000, $40,000 a year for it. So it's not free. Now, I wonder if this means that they're gonna pick it up for the rest of these players' lives? All right, we'll take some.


Crimean bridge is under threat. Expert outlines purpose of Ukrainian strike on Zankhoi. The Ukrainian strike on the airfield in occupied Zankhoi is a preparation for a large-scale attack on Crimea, and the subsequent strike on the Crimean bridge stated the Ukrainian expert Oleksandr Musienko in a commentary to RBC Ukraine. According to the expert, the goal is to destroy the enemy's air defense systems and open the northern gates of Crimea. The expert clarified that globally this should be interpreted as preparation for a large-scale attack on Crimea to disable particularly important and valuable objects for the enemy. I would even say that it is a preparation for an attack on the Crimean bridge. This algorithm involves disabling air defense systems and radars after which more damaging strikes are delivered to the enemy. So I would say that this is the main goal, Musienko said. A guest on Russian state TV has decried Ukraine's attack on a large Russian airfield in annexed Crimea that is reported to have killed up to 30 Russian personnel and wounded a further 80 people. Russian military expert Vladislav Shurigin said during an appearance on full contact with Vladimir Solovyov that the strike served as a rehearsal for a future Ukrainian attack on the Kersh Strait Bridge which connects Russia with the Crimean Peninsula. Host Solovyov is one of the most prominent figures in Kremlin-backed media. The Kersh Strait Bridge serves as a key supply route for Russia's forces and is Moscow's sole land link with Crimea, the Black Sea Peninsula annexed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014. Shurigin said that the attack on the Russian navy's Zankoi airbase, which is reported to house the 39th helicopter regiment of the 27th mixed aviation division, served as target practice for a future Ukrainian strike on the Kersh Strait Bridge, also known as the Crimean Bridge. Shurigin claimed Kiev used 780 ACMS missiles in the attack on Wednesday and that the strike was a rehearsal to test how Russia's air defence works. He said an attack on the Kersh Bridge will most likely take place on May 7, although he did not elaborate on why he highlighted that particular date. Two people have been killed in a Russian attack on the city of Denepro on April 19. Six more have been killed in the city of Senelnikov, including two children and 29 other residents of the Oblast have been injured. The five-story building in Denepro was partially destroyed and on fire, potentially trapping people under the rubble. Two infrastructure facilities were damaged too. In Senelnikov, four private houses were partially destroyed and eight more were damaged. The region had survived another massive attack, with Ukrainian air defence forces shooting down some of the enemy targets, including nine missiles in the morning and two more overnight. However, some missiles still managed to hit their targets.Ian Pavlorad, an enterprise was damaged, while the cities of Nikopol and Marinets were shelled with artillery in the evening, resulting in damage to two private houses. The number of casualties continues to rise as the rescue operation is ongoing. The Russians also attacked the Nikopol district. In the evening, they shelled the town of Nikopol with artillery, and Marinets-Romata overnight, damaging two private houses. Unfortunately, the number of the dead and injured will grow. We are continuing to clear the rubble of the damaged houses. Aid stations have been set up on the ground. Psychologists are at work. The police are accepting statements from those affected, Interior Minister Iyer Klementko said.