Ocr RS - Plato’s & Aristotle's worldview summary including Plato's world of forms and Aristotle's prime mover and 5 causes in a detailed and easy-to-understand way
Plato
Plato’s worldview is influenced by his desire to provide solutions to
some of the key pre-Socratic debates that were then current. Plato
tries to answer questions about the possibility of certain knowledge
in a world where everything changes.
Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, had said that everything
flows; panta rhei there is no unchanging essence to anything.
Both Plato and Aristotle attempt to respond to this issue raised by
Heraclitus. Plato thinks that the consequence of Heraclitus’
challenge is that true eternal unchanging knowledge cannot be
gained empirically, i.e. from a posteriori observation.
Plato concludes that we must give up on the attempt to gain
knowledge through experience and look to a priori reason alone.
True reality must be perfect, eternal and unchanging. But Our
minds are trapped in a state of ignorance, which is why we
experience imperfect, transient and everchanging things in the
world of appearance.
Plato claims there are two worlds: The world of forms and the
material world of senses. He argues that true knowledge is only
grasped through the world of forms.
These Forms are non-spatial, they are the things which really exist.
The Forms are also an ideal standard - meaning they are absolute
and objective.
Plato argues In the world of appearances, everything we
experience is a ‘particular’. Particulars are the objects of
everyday experience. They are imperfect representations of the
form they partake in from which they gain characteristics. We
never sense abstract things, only particulars - we can see a
, beautiful face but not beauty itself. Many things can be beautiful,
so they share something called beauty even though they are
different. Therefore, there is a universal idea of beauty which really
exists or it could not be shared by many different things. The Form
of Beauty is indestructible because even if you destroyed all
beautiful things, you would not destroy ‘beauty’. And it is
independent because beautiful things share in it but it is not limited
to them.
This Plato called a Form.
This means that the Forms must exist separately from the
particulars. They do not exist in time and space - you do not destroy
beauty by destroying every beautiful thing.
They are also Logically prior to particulars, which is to say
they take precedence over them. This is because the
particulars are what they are by virtue of the Forms, whereas
the Forms are what they are by virtue of themselves.
The Good is the supreme Form - because it is only by this
Form that all the other Forms are capable of being known.
Eg, what do the Forms of Beauty, Justice, Truth etc all share in
common? They are all good, so they must participate in the
Form of the Good.
Plato distinguished between knowledge and opinion.
This is due to the fact that whereas opinion might be wrong,
knowledge cannot. You have no way of knowing what is
false. Therefore, just as knowledge is about what is real,
ignorance is about what is not real, because being ignorant
means not knowing anything at all. Plato argues that
knowledge about the world of Forms is only revealed through a
shadowy representation of the real world through a posteriori
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