Aristotle differs from his teacher, Plato, in many significant ways. Identify at least two of those philosophical differences and as a group discuss them. You'll need to respond to the group at least 2 separate times after your initial post.
You can start this thread by discussing whether or not Plato and Aristotle disagree about what the good life is and what Aristotle means by living a life of virtue.
Two things that stand out to me from my experience with Plato and Aristotle are:
ReplyDelete1) Plato believed that a soul would go from one life to the next until it was able to free itself from belonging to a physically form and return to a word without form. Aristotle believed in a soul but believed that the passive part of a soul died with the body and the creative apart lived on to join with God or "prime mover".
2) Plato believed the essential element of each thing or its "essence" came from the heavens and what we see are mirror images. Aristotle believed that "essence" were things themselves and could one day be extracted from the thing.
I agree with your two points and actually used them as one of mine as well. It almost seems as though Plato though the human condition was a trap while Aristotle did not see human condition as a trap distracting the mind from truth, instead Aristotle believed we could use the body as a tool to aid learning.
DeletePlato believed that the true substances are not physical bodies, which are temporary, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. He believed that the objects that we encounter are all shadows of what we know as the perfect or ideal object. These ideals were known as Forms. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed our knowledge of things came form the "here and now," not from a prior knowledge of these "Forms." Furthermore, Plato says the indissoluble nature of the souls is because it resembles the unchanging Forms. On the contrary, Aristotle says the soul unites with the and then dies with the body at death.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Plato was a transcendentalist meaning he believed that to understand truth we must transcend beyond this world in to a higher reality where true concepts exist.Aristotle does not agree with this idea of the human condition and so uses biology as the source of knowledge. This encompasses his view that knowledge is not seen in unchanging Forms but can be gained by observing the world around us.