Plato & Aristotle

"The School of Athens," by Raphael
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In class I made reference to a famous painting of Plato and Aristotle. They are the central figures in the famous fresco seen here on the left. Raphael has placed them and their philosophies at the center of the Athenian school of philosophy in Ancient Greece.

It is often thought that the hand gestures of these two great men represent the central tenets of their teaching. For Plato, the world can be understood through the eternal Forms. Aristotle, in contrast, held to a more empiricist view of exploration. In other words, Plato reasoned from a more cosmological and theoretical (a priori) foundation, and Aristotle reasoned from experience and observation (a posteriori).

Of course this is overly simplistic, but it is a great philosophical example of how important one's starting points are to one's ways of thinking. Plato's philosophy, over the years, has often lead to ways of thinking that are suspicious or even degrading of the material world (a strong dualism between what is material and what is more metaphysically non-material). Aristotle's philosophy, lead to more materialist views of the world, valuing the surety of material investigation and reasoning (what would later be thought of as the scientific method). Both philosophers, however, did hold to a more cosmological universe with eternal and sure laws than is often assumed in our day and age. Their assumption was that there were laws already present to be discovered and adhered to.

I'll end my thoughts there, because we have now moved past the importance of starting points toward the application of one's methodology. Of course, that is where the fun really begins...