AND SOARS WITH UNDIMMED AND UNWEARIED PASSION TILL HE GRASPS
THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF THINGS.”
Republic 490a
KEY IDEAS
Plato’s school, the Academy, survived for over 800 years, until the Romans decided it was a threat to their new-found Christianity.
PLATO 247
a kind of intellectual vision that enables us to recognize the particulars of sense for what they are. This in essence is the Theory of Forms, for which Plato is best remembered (see also pp.76–81).
KNOWLEDGE
Plato agreed with Heraclitus (see p.238) that all things in the world perceived by the senses are forever
becoming something else.
No matter how enduring, all facts about physical reality will one day cease to be. But knowledge, Plato reasoned, has to be of what fully is, and he took this to mean that we cannot truly have knowledge of the world of the senses. So knowledge must concern the Forms, or those objects that do not change and decay: which fully are what they are. In this way Plato divides reality into two realms, the physical world
of becoming, and a world of being full of eternal and perfect Forms. It is the task of the philosopher to come to a full awareness of the Forms that underlie the shifting world of the senses. Following Socrates’s lead, the method to achieve this is “dialectic:” a cooperative union of minds which, by critical questioning, would gradually analyze concepts and draw closer to the truth. However, to grasp the Forms requires apprehending the ultimate reality, which is the Form of the Good. Plato saw this as the goal of all inquiry because it is in terms of the good that all explanations should be made. In other words, before we can explain anything we need to recognize in what way it is good for its purpose.
IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL The dialectic is essentially a method for analyzing the concepts we already possess, albeit largely implicitly. For Plato, we ordinarily have only implicit knowledge of Forms and the task of philosophy is to bring the knowledge latent within us to consciousness. Thus learning is not really discovering anything new, but recollection. Plato draws parallels between this method and
a priori reasoning (see p.66) in mathematics.
Recognizing the truth of a geometric proof, for example, is possible because we are not really learning anything new, but simply recognizing something we were acquainted with prior to birth.
If all knowledge is recollection, as Plato claims, this shows that the soul exists before birth and leaves room for the possibility that it might survive bodily death.
PLATO’S UTOPIA The Republic represents the fi rst of many attempts to outline an ideal society.
Plato rejects democracy as a system of government on the grounds that the people are not well qualifi ed to rule. Those who are likely to rise to the top in a democracy are not going to be the types of people we would want to have governing.
His model is a state in which internal confl ict has been abolished and each citizen fulfi ls their allotted role. This means instituting a rigorous regime of training and selection to produce an elite group of rulers who are wise and incorruptible. These, the guardians of his state, will truly deserve the name “philosophers” because they are genuine lovers of wisdom. And they must acquire knowledge of the Good, so that they can govern effectively for the good of the state as a whole.
The infl uence of Pythagoras and Socrates is key to Plato’s philosophy, but it is hard for the historian of ideas to extricate Plato’s ideas from those of his teachers. From Pythagoras, Plato learned that the world appearing to the senses is too unstable to be an object of true knowledge, as well as the more mystical elements of his thinking, the importance of mathematics, and the idea of philosophical speculation as a means of purifying the soul. From Socrates, Plato gained his interest in ethical issues and the importance of acquiring knowledge of the good through dialectic.
INFLUENCES ON PLATO Plato regarded the arts, including
Greek theater (above) with great suspicion. He believed them to be a false representation of reality.
Aristotle was born in Stageira, northern Greece. He had connections with the royal family of Macedonia, his father acting as physician to King Philip. His parents died when he was young and at the age of 17 Aristotle was sent to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy.
There he remained for 20 years as student and teacher until Plato’s death.
But he was passed over as the next head of the Academy, possibly because of his opposition to certain Platonic doctrines, and left Athens. In 343 BCE he accepted an invitation to become tutor to the King’s son, Alexander. After Philip’s death, Aristotle returned to Athens, now aged 49, and set up his own school —the
Lyceum (also known as the Peripatetic School, because of Aristotle’s preference for pacing up and down when discussing philosophical problems). However, like Socrates before him he was charged with impiety, in 323 BCE, and rather than allow the Athenians to “sin twice against philosophy” he escaped, only to die a year later of a stomach complaint. The story that he died by throwing himself into the sea because he could not explain the tides is probably apocryphal.
The extent of Aristotle’s infl uence on Alexander has caused much conjecture, but his former pupil’s many conquests and the library in Alexandria ensured the enduring legacy of Aristotle’s ideas.
ESSENTIAL TEXTS Metaphysics; Nicomachean Ethics; Politics; On the Soul.
Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great as a boy, and in time his ideas spread and endured across an empire that stretched to the Indian Ocean.
Aristotle
b 384–322 BCE n Greece
The sheer range of Aristotle’s work is staggering, and the subject divisions and names he deployed have endured to this day: ethics, logic, metaphysics, meteorology, physics, economics, and psychology. For more than 2,000 years, his infl uence on European thought has been profound.
LIFE AND WORKS
ARISTOTLE 249
Aristotle was deeply infl uenced by Plato but was suspicious of the otherworldly elements in his teacher’s thinking, and in particular the view that knowledge of the world cannot be accessed via the senses.
The trajectory he pursued on leaving Plato’s Academy is far more empirically minded and values the piecemeal investigations of the scientist.
Knowledge, for Aristotle, is not a simple matter of disinterested speculation, but involves getting one’s hands dirty.
Where Plato saw mathematics as the paradigm for
knowledge, Aristotle saw the importance of observation of the bewildering variety of phenomena in this world.
His critique of Platonism
also points out that knowledge must be grounded on what it is possible to experience, and thus the starting point for philosophy must be the senses. If we start to speculate on what lies beyond our experience we stray into mysticism.
WHAT IS EXISTENCE?
Aristotle was interested in the question of “being:” of what kinds of things there are, and what it is for something to exist.
His concern with this world inevitably drove him to take issue with Plato’s Theory of Forms (see pp.76–81)—the view that a world of universals exists independently of particular things.
Aristotle reckoned that universals have no existence beyond the many exemplars we see around us. So, there is no such thing as the ideal oak tree, distinct from those growing around us. Things or
“substances” are comprised not just of brute physical matter, but also of the form that it takes. What makes a plant or animal what it is is not the material stuff from which it is composed, but the way
this is organized. Different oak trees are the same not because they are made of the same substance, or (contrary to Plato) because they resemble the “Form” of the oak, but because they share a common structure. Inanimate objects similarly take a form that determines their characteristic activity or usage. For example, the organization of the parts of an axe determines what it is in terms of its function: to chop wood. Defi ning
things in terms of their purpose makes Aristotle’s theory of
substances “teleological.” He saw everything in the universe
as defi nable in this way.
Aristotle’s notion of form also led him to disagree
with Plato on the nature of human beings. He did
not see our essence as a substance distinct from our physical bodies. So the idea of the self persisting after the body has gone is nonsensical.
ETHICS AND POLITICS Aristotle views us as primarily social beings and government as there to help us achieve a good life within society. As its role is to facilitate rather than dictate, he rejects the idea of Plato’s state run by philosophers, believing that a democracy is more likely to achieve this goal.
Humans strive for wellbeing and the means to achieve this is to live virtuously and engage in intellectual contemplation.
Aristotle offers practical guidance in how to live the good life, identifying the virtues we should pursue for human wellbeing as lying between two extremes of vice – generosity, for example, being the “golden mean” between the two extremes of meanness and extravagance, and so on.
SEE ALSO 왘 Plato (pp.244–7) • Plato and the Forms (pp.76–81) • Dualism of mind and body (pp.124–7)