Plato & Aristotle on Knowledge

Plato presented his philosophical inquiries in the form utilized by his mentor, Socrates, that form being the Socratic dialogue. The philosopher-teacher would ask questions of his followers-pupils, and they would answer. Socrates would guide the discussion and convince his followers through reasoned argument. Aristotle did not usually make use of the dialogue form, though he did write some dialogues. Most of his work is in the form of treatises which may or may not have been lecture notes. Plato created the Academy, a school to convey his ideas, while Aristotle created the Lyceum as a rival institution.

Plato approached the issue of knowledge and found that ideas, as he used the term, are not only something in human consciousness but somethin

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omething that exists independently of human thought. It is indeed part of the human soul from birth, because the soul has beheld the immoral Forms in their purity before the embodiment at birth. Birth is a traumatic event and causes the soul to forget these truths. It is then up to the individual to spend the rest of his or her life addressing the soul to find what the soul already knows. We come to the truth, then, as a matter of rediscovery. Socrates in the dialogues acts as a guide helping his students to remember rather than teaching them something that comes from outside themselves. Aristotle was originally one of Plato's students, but he came to disagree with what he called the "other-worldliness" of his teacher. For Plato there were two worlds, the world perceived by the senses, and the world of the Forms, the ideals of which the objects in this world are only pale imitations. Aristotle disputed this, asking how, if the Forms are the essences of things, the Forms could exist separated from things, and how, if the Forms were the cause of things, they could exist in a different world? Aristotle made a distinction between form and matter, but he said that these two features of reality could be distinguished only in
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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