Plato & Aristotle

Answer : The Aristotle notion of causation is very comprehensive. In the tradition of investigation, the search for cause is a search for answers to the question “why?” Moreover Aristotle also emphasizes on “how” a particular cause brings a particular effect. Both in the Physics and in the Metaphysics Aristotle placed himself in direct continuity with this tradition. At the beginning of the Metaphysics Aristotle offers a concise review of the results reached by his predecessors.The modern notion of causal theory lacks a complete understanding of the range of possible causes and their systematic interrelations. Put differently, and more boldly, the use of causality is not supported by an adequate theory of causality. Aristotle’s insistence on the doctrine of the four causes as an indispensable tool for a successful investigation of the world around us explains why Aristotle provides his reader with a general account of the four causes. Here Aristotle recognizes four types of things that can be given in answer to a why-question:

The material cause: “that bronze out of which statue is made”, e.g., the bronze of a statue.

The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.

The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.

The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.

All the four (types of) causes may enter in the explanation of something. The modern notion of causality mentions only two types of causes called the material causes and the efficient cause. It does not go in the details of why a certain thing happens. Rather it tries to explain how exactly happens. Moreover Aristotle includes the mental concept in its causal theory by laying an emphasis on the formal cause. But in the modern notion of cause-effect relation there is no mention of psychological factor. In addition to it the phenomenon like water converting in to ice does not conform to the Aristotle’s notion of cause-effect relationship where there is no final and formal cause. But still his cause theory is very significant as it helps define and explain the mechanism of evolution that is something based on the Aristotle’s notion of causality.

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Answer : The Allegory of the Cave, also commonly known as Myth of the Cave, Metaphor of the Cave, The Cave Analogy, Plato’s Cave or the Parable of the Cave, is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate “our nature in its education and want of education”. Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows.

According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. The Allegory is related to Plato’s Theory of Forms, wherein Plato asserts that “Forms” (or “Ideas”), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge. In addition, the allegory of the cave is an attempt to explain the philosopher’s place in society. This relates to the idea of forms as people struggle to see the reality beyond illusion. The ordinary objects we see around us “to the prison home, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the Sun. And in applying the going up and the seeing of what’s above to the soul’s journey to the intelligible place, we not mistake my expectation, since we desire to hear it. A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true.

At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the region of the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of good; but once seen, it must be concluded that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful – in the visible realm it gives birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible realm, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it.

After “returning from divine contemplations to human evils”, a man “is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when – with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkness – he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself.

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Answer : Aristotle was not the first person to engage in a causal investigation of the world around us. From the very beginning, and independently of Aristotle, the investigation of the natural world consisted in the search for the relevant causes of a variety of natural explanation, including artistic production and human action. Here Aristotle recognizes four types of things that can be given in answer to a why-question:

The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue.

The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.

The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.

The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.

All the four causes may enter in the explanation of something. Consider the production of an artifact like a bronze statue. The bronze enters in the explanation of the production of the statue as the material cause. Note that the bronze is not only the material out of which the statue is made; it is also the subject of change, that is, the thing that undergoes the change and results in a statue. The bronze is melted and poured in a wax cast in order to acquire a new shape, the shape of the statue. This shape enters in the explanation of the production of the statue as the formal cause. However, an adequate explanation of the production of a statue requires also a reference to the efficient cause or the principle that produces the statue. For Aristotle, this principle is the art of bronze-casting the statue. In thinking about the four causes, we have come to understand that Aristotle offers a teleological explanation of the production of a bronze statue; that is to say, an explanation that makes a reference to the telos or end of the process.

Moreover, a teleological explanation of the type sketched above does not crucially depend upon the application of psychological concepts such as desires, beliefs and intentions. This is important because artistic production provides Aristotle with a teleological model for the study of natural processes, whose explanation does not involve beliefs, desires, intentions or anything of this sort. Some have contended that Aristotle explains natural process on the basis of an inappropriately psychological teleological model; that is to say, a teleological model that involves a purposive agent who is somehow sensitive to the end. This objection can be met if the artistic model is understood in non-psychological terms. In other words, Aristotle does not tamper with the nature because his study of the natural world is based on a teleological model that is consciously free from psychological factors.

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Answer : Aristotle starts his arguments with the thought that Plato’s theory of forms with its two separate realms failed to explain what it was meant to explain. It does not explain the world and its permanence. By separating the realm of forms so radically from the material realm, Plato made it impossible to explain how the realm of forms made objectivity and permanence possible in the material realm. Aristotle elaborated this general criticism into two more particular objections:

According to Plato, material objects participate in or imitate the forms. It is in virtue of this relation to the realm of forms that material objects are knowable and have order. Yet, Aristotle argues, it is almost impossible to explain what exactly this participation or imitation is. The properties that the forms have (eternal, unchanging, transcendent, etc.) are all incompatible with material objects. How, for example, can a white object be said to participate in or copy the form of whiteness? It seems that the metaphor of imitation or participation seems to break down in these cases because of the special properties that Plato ascribes to the forms. The only link between the realm of forms and the material world, then, breaks down. The forms cannot explain anything in the material world.

This argument, like the first one, was first given by Plato himself in his later dialogues. It is related to the first objection, but is a more technical way of getting at the main problem with the theory of forms. The resemblance between any two material objects is explained by Plato in terms of their joint participation in a common form. A red book and a red flower, for example, resemble each other in virtue of being copies of the form of redness.

Because they are copies of this form, they also resemble the form. But this resemblance between the red object and the form of redness must also be explained in terms of another form. What form does a red object and the form of redness both copy to account for their similarity? One can see that this will lead to an infinite regress. Thus to explain the similarity between a man and the form of man, one needs a third form of man, and this always requires another form.

The explanation of the original similarity is never given; it is only put off to the next level. Aristotle, then, thought that in order to explain coherence and objective knowledge in this world, form must be located in particular individual objects. Yet, he still had to explain how things could change, how they could have permanence, and how we could have knowledge. He still had to address the problem of reconciling the objective and subjective views of the world. Instead of splitting the world into two separate realms, Aristotle divides objects into two parts or aspects: form and matter. All objects are composed of a certain material arranged in a certain way. The material they are composed of is their matter. The way it is arranged is their form.

All objects then have matter, or the material, of which they are composed, and form, the way the matter is arranged. It is the form of a thing, however, that makes a thing what it is. When the child knocked down the block wall, the blocks or matter remained. The wall no longer existed, however, because the blocks no longer had the arrangement or form characteristic of a wall. It is the form of an object that makes it the particular object that it is. It is also the form of a thing that we know when we have knowledge of it. To know a wall or a person is to know the peculiar arrangement of matter or their form. This is what makes them what they are.

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Answer : According to Plato, the soul is immortal, and in previous lives it learnt about the unchanging, eternal Forms that are the ultimate reality. In this life, we are distracted by our senses and forget about the Forms. Learning about them, then, is a matter of recollecting what he have learned in past lives. All learning, according to Plato, is recollection, and so is the process by which we bring ourselves closer to the Good. Plato’s recollection is contrasted with Hegel’s mediation and Kierkegaard’s repetition as one way that change can be accounted for.Plato does not provide evidence for the idea of recollection as a whole. For example, Plato says that recollection is recalling something that has been previously known.

However, not everything an individual experiences is based on recollection. A person, who sees a hat for the first time, may not recall anything based on viewing the hat. Instead, they acquire knowledge from the experience of seeing a hat. Therefore, experiencing something is a means of acquiring knowledge. The problem in Plato’s argument is that he does not make a case for why developing values cannot be based on experience. For example, he asserts that individuals are born with a sense of ‘absolute beauty’ which is used to determine the level of beauty of a scene or an individual. Recollection is not merely bringing to mind an intellectual concept once forgotten. For Plato, the idea is far more powerful. As a human is helped to recall, he passes through stages of thought and experience. he cannot rationally justify his satisfaction every step on the way. The would-be philosopher may make use of likely stories…, dialectic, and hypothesis to stimulate his memory. Once the memory is triggered, it seizes his mind, and his is changed. He can no longer doubt the truth of what he has remembered. He also understands the reasons for each step in the rational journey that led him to the recollection. Further memories of goodness, truth, and beauty are more likely. In fact, correctly used this one truth can be the key to unlock every important idea that he has forgotten.In his dialogues The Phaedo and Meno, Plato, through the form of Socrates, puts forth the idea that all learning is recollection. In The Phaedo, to prove that the soul is immortal, Socrates asserts the view that all learning is recollection and we simply need to be reminded of facts that our immortal souls are aware of. In Meno, Socrates attempts to show the truth of this belief by doing complex geometry with a nearby slave boy.

Socrates leads the boy through a series of questions, and he answers correctly lending to Socrates’ idea about learning. His brightest pupil, Aristotle, disagreed with this view and put forth a differing view in his work The Metaphysics. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle puts forth the view that universal information is gained through experience and not recollection as Plato had said. Man connects a series of events into a causal chain through experience. For instance, gathering the fact that a certain remedy has helped two different sick people get better is simply a matter of experience. In his view, art is even greater and closer to wisdom than experience. Experience belies art, in that art is created by the formulation of universals from many individual experiences.

Extracting the universal idea that the remedy given to those two people will help all people afflicted with the same sickness is a matter of art. The main difference comes in that men of art know the causes of things, while men of experience simply know how to deal with them. For instance, a carpenter may know that when wood gets wet it becomes warped, but a man of art knows the chemistry behind such a change. Therefore, a man of art is to be seen as wiser, because not only do they know what happens, they know why things happen.

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Answer : Plato has made clear distinction between knowledge and opinion. Opinion can’t be wrong, but it can be valid or invalid based on your knowledge of the subject at hand. Opinion is what you think or believe or feel on a subject. Knowledge is the amount of instruction, learning, or experience you have on a subject. Opinion should be based on knowledge.

Otherwise it’s just people wasting valuable air. If an opinion is based upon Here say and not substantiated by any type of physical evidence, it is worthless and no one should be entitled to that type of opinion. If opinion is indicative that you believe in Fairy Tales, it harms no one. But if your opinion contradicts common sense and it causes trouble, then you should not have a right to that opinion. That type of opinion is wrong from the start. The words “I believe” are worthless without proof that what you believe has a basis in truth. I don’t believe has the same effect. Opinions without evidence to back them up are just opinions. Anytime a change in the view on something may reveal the fact that previous opinion was wrong. Or you might find out it was based on false facts. It is easier think in terms of beliefs and knowledge.

Plato is of opinion that knowledge being a true belief that is tied down by a lot of ropes: so well justified. This is helpful because it explains how we can get to knowledge: we start by having an opinion (or mere belief) that is true, and then that opinion gets supported by other beliefs that are true— until the view becomes as secure as it might get. Opinion is subjective; knowledge is objective...to an extent.

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