ng the motion of the Mover" (Koons). Koons points out that "Like Plato, Aristotle quickly concludes that this immaterial being must be a mind." It has been observed that "To the extent that Aristotle endows universals with reality, he is Platonic in thought" ("Plato and Aristotle").
Koons (1998) explores in some depth the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines of God. He notes that Plato ascribes two attributes to God right from the start("animacy," or life, and "immateriality." Plato "argues that the First Cause of motion is very similar to living humans and animals, since in both cases we see self-generated motion" and that "unlike inanimate matter, living organisms move spontaneously, at the direction of their desires and rationality" (Koons). Plato deduces that "The first cause moves spontaneously, so it is probably alive" (Koons). Koons notes that "This seems to [be] an argument from analogy (God is like a living thing), or perhaps an argument to the simplest explanation: why postulate two different kinds of self-generated motion when one will do?"
Plato moves subtly from the living thing to the soul, concluding that "the First Mover is an immaterial soul" that "by its very nature, is only a passive transmitter of motion" (Koons). This suggests that the soul is not living, as a body that is living "moves itself spontaneously" because "there is present in the matter some immaterial principle (soul) that is the cause of the motion" (Koons). Plato's concept of God, although he refers to God in the singular, tends toward the pluralistic, because he believes that "there are many souls, some greater than others," although there is also a "supreme or first Soul, that is the source of the greatest and most fundamental motions, such as the revolution of the fixed starts around the earth" (Koons). Plato's conclusion is that "this First Soul is rationa
...