acknowledging the rich heritage of these ancient Greek ways of thinking. Thus, it is
rather ironic that contemporary teachings seem to focus on stripping down Plato
and Aristotle’s works to the bare minimum, with little to no recognition of the
underlying context that greatly defined their systems. Concepts like Plato’s Allegory
of the Cave and works like Aristotle’s Physics are turned to simple buzzwords that
supposedly carry the majority of the wisdom of these thinkers. This ignores the
importance of the influence of previous philosophers like Parmenides, and the social
and political context, in defining Aristotle’s and Plato’s systems of philosophy. The
unwise to ignore the philosophers that preceded them. After all, a great deal of their
work and beliefs were influenced by that of earlier philosophers: Plato was inspired
composed of perfect geometric shapes (Greene 159), while Aristotle followed the
everything (Physics, Book II). However, the biggest influence undoubtedly came
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from the philosopher Parmenides, who posed the Greek philosophical community a
catastrophic question: does change happen? (Lindberg, 32)? This paradox, about
philosophers, many of whom turned away from the previous monistic philosophies
(in which there is a singular elementary function that defines the universe) towards
(Lindberg, 27). Aristotle and Plato where no different, and both created new
explanations of change that fit into their natural philosophies: Plato by separating
the perfect world of forms in which change does not occur and the imperfect world
of the material in which change does occur (Timaeus, Form, Copy, and Space),
Aristotle with the four part system of the material, the formal, the efficient, and the
final, drawing a line between an object’s potential form and its actual form (Physics,
Book 5). Clearly, their work was noticeably affected by the questions posed by their
predecessors
You may have noticed my tendency to not label the pre-Socratic philosophers
Aristotle and Plato based on the works of earlier philosophers. The pre-Socratic
itself, was absolutely unable of discerning truth, and that only through internal
the concept that nothing exists but atoms and the void (Lindberg, 34), the other
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presenting the paradox of perceiving change in a constant world (Lindberg, 32).
This is where Plato and Aristotle truly define themselves as natural philosophers:
despite their numerous differences, both agreed that perception, to varying degrees,
could be used to deduce truths about the universe. In other words, by observing the
natural world with their perception, truth could be discovered. This separated
Aristotle and Plato from their predecessors by linking their philosophy to the
natural, physical, and attainable world, and places them into their own classification
as natural philosophers.
randomly: philosophers after Socrates didn’t just choose to view knowledge from a
more earthly perspective, but rather shifted because of the political situations that
surrounded the philosophers. This is where the unison of social context and
philosophy truly emerged, and is how we can understand the stark differences
between Platonic and Aristotelian ways of thinking. During the era of Ionian
(Greene, 102) were completely disjointed from the political environment of the
world. Thus, there was no need to incorporate the material world into their
philosophy, which focused on mental analysis rather than real world use. This was
not the case for Aristotle and Plato: both of them where directly influenced by the
political and social dynamics that defined Athens and Macedonia at the time. To
attempt to ignore reality and think only abstractly while the physical world visibly
changed around them due to politics and society would have been foolish. They had
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to incorporate the real world into their natural philosophy in order to make sense of
it all.
Given that Aristotle studied directly from Plato, it would seem odd that their
natural philosophies diverged so much. This reinforces the significance that the
specific political context the two lived in had in the formation of their schools of
thought. Plato did not live in a stable society: political turmoil was the status quo in
a declining Athens, and even his own teacher Socrates had been crushed by the
city’s instability (Lindberg, 35). Such chaos must have bewildered Plato: if there
exists so much uncertainty in the day to day events in the world, how could one find
truth in the world. No doubt this was a primary driving force in the creation of his
“two worlds” philosophy: if the flawed nature of the real world was incompatible
with truth, then there must exist a perfect world, a world of forms, in which the ideal
truth is found. The material world is only an imperfect copy of the perfect world,
and observations of it can only take us so far (Lindberg, 36-37). Despite this, Plato
did not abandon the material world completely in his philosophy: after all, in
Athens, the most sought after knowledge was that which could be used to support
civic duties and skills. Any sort of philosophy had to be grounded in the day to day
abstract is knowledge useless in civic duties. Thus Plato accepted that, while our
perception cannot give us the whole truth, they can give us a shadow of the truth,
which through further reflection can be fully revealed (Timaeus, Form, Copy, and
Space).
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Aristotle’s position regarding perception and observation strays very far
form Plato’s limited acceptance of them as ways to uncover truth. In his very
thorough biological works and research, it is clear that Aristotle puts a great deal of
faith into perception, and fully believes that truth is attainable within the real world
(Lindberg, 46). The reason behind this divergence in natural philosophy can be
explained by contrasting the chaotic Athenian society Plato lived in with Aristotle’s
imperial Macedonian decent. Aristotle had major connections in the powerful court
of Macedonia, most famous of which was him teaching the future Alexander the
Great (Lindberg, 45). Being raised the stable, consistent environment of the
powerful Macedonian empire must have given Aristotle a very large amount of
confidence in the orderly nature of the world: things weren’t chaotic, were
would believe that truth could be acquired from reality: he was an imperial
philosopher, one who depended on his own perception and observations to form
Aristotle and Plato, as well as their philosophies. The very different environments
both men thought in can explain the differences in their natural philosophies. They
explained the world in ways that fit the world they lived in specifically, so it is no
surprise that, them living in very different worlds, they would have different
understanding.
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October 9th, 2014
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