Plato and Aristotle
MUST – Explain Plato’s Cave allegory and Theory of Forms.
SHOULD – Evaluate Plato using Aristotle.
COULD – Defend and challenge Aristotle’s Prime Mover theory using
arguments against the Cosmological Argument.

Plato – Inspirations
 Socrates
 “True knowledge (episteme) comes from knowing that you know nothing.”
 What is “The Good”?
 Socrates was executed for his beliefs and understanding if reality.
 Pythagoras
 Pythagoras believed in immortality, religion, mysticism and the
objectivity of mathematics.
 Maths existed abstractly.
 Parmenides
 This world is changing and temporal.
 Reality is eternal, unchanging and timeless.
 Heraclitus
 There is nothing permanent in the physical world – through our
senses.
 Doxa can give you no true knowledge.

Plato – Cave allegory

Plato – Symbols
 Prisoners – Human beings trapped in the temporal
world.
 Shadows – The experiences we receive in this spacio
temporal world – shadows of the truth.
 Puppets – The Forms which cause the shadows that we
experience – true knowledge.
 Free prisoner – The philosopher who does not at first
understanding reality and will eventually be killed for his
beliefs.
 The Sun – The essential Form of Goodness – source of
the Forms and truth

Plato – The Sun
 Visible World – The Sun
 Source of growth and light which gives:
 Visibility to the objects of sense and
 The power of seeing to the eye
 The faculty of sight
 Intelligible world of the forms – The Good
 Source of reality and truth which gives:
 Intelligibility to objects of thought and
 The power of knowing to the mind
 The faculty of knowledge
 Plotonius (3rd
C) associated the EFG with God!

Plato – Forms
Look,
different
trees!

Plato – Forms
The true essence
of trees
Ahh …
these are all
poor
imitations –
mere
shadows –
of the true
essence of
tree.

Plato – Forms
 Ephemeral Vs Eternal
 We live in an ephemeral (spacio temporal) world
 Our world changes and decays.
 Copies and Forms
 Everything we experience (doxa) is a decaying copy of an ideal
form existing outside of time and space.
 We encounter MANY copies through experience.
 They are all copies of ONE Form we can recognise through reason.
 Recognition
 We never learn new things when we identify the forms.
 We recognise what we already know from a previous existence.
 We remember beauty when we see it in the visible world.
 The physical world is an illusion … there is no spoon!

Plato – Forms
 1. Transcendent
 The forms are not located in space and time.
 2. Pure
 The forms only exemplify one property, e.g. blackness, circularity
 3. Archetypes
 The forms are archetypes, they are perfect examples of the property that they exemplify.
 4. Ultimately Real
 The forms are the ultimately real entities, not material objects.
 5. Causes
 (1) They provide the explanation of why any thing is the way it is, and
 (2) they are the source or origin of the being of all things.
 6. Systematically Interconnected
 The forms comprise a dialectic process leading down from the form of the Good moving from
more general to more particular, from more objective to more subjective.

Plato – Forms
 The Forms are perfect
 The Forms are unchanging
 The Forms exist eternally
 The Forms are abstract
 The Forms can be encountered when we are in the eternal
world between ephemeral lives
 The Forms are reflected in the ephemeral world
 The Essential Form of the Good illuminates the Forms
 The Essential Form of the Good manifests the Forms in the
eternal world.
 The Essential Form of the Good enables us to recognise the
Forms (justice etc) in the ephemeral world
 Plato never fully explained what Forms existed, he was
focussing on the Forms of ideals like justice and beauty.

Plato – Criticisms
 Relation – Aristotle questioned the causal relationship between
Plato’s Forms and things we encounter.
 Dualism – Aristotle rejected dualism (body and soul) which
Plato needs for the Forms to exist.
 Third Man – Aristotle argued that if man had a Form, that Form
has a Form back to infinity. This makes no sense.
 Absolute Morality – If there are Forms of justice etc, is there
absolute morality?
 Plausibility – Is it realistic to assume that we all know all the
Forms already?
 Memes – Dawkins argued that ideas we have of justice etc are
just memes that survive.
 Infinite Forms – Plato never fully explains what there are Forms
for, deodorant cans? One legged pirates etc?

Aristotle – Form and Matter
 Form
 Aristotle believed that the Form of a thing was not an
abstract entity but rather that which is common to all
examples of things.
 These things are all legged platforms you can sit on, so they are
the Form of Chair.
 The wax stamp can be defined as: Wax [MATTER] and Coat of
Arms [FORM]
 Matter and Form
 All substances are composed of matter and form:
 What the thing is made of: carbon, hydrogen etc.
 What the thing is made to be: rock, human, planet etc.
 Aristotle would argue that the Form of a human is the soul.

Aristotle – Four Causes
 Episteme
 Aristotle believed that episteme came from experience.
 Four Causes
 All things have four causes:
 Material Cause – Matter: What it is made of.
 Formal Cause – Essence: What it made to be.
 Efficient Cause – Agent: What caused it to be.
 Final Cause – Purpose: What it is meant to accomplish.

Aristotle – Good and Bad
 Good and Bad
 Good and bad are judged by the object’s ability to fulfil
its final cause, not by any ‘moral’ association to its
intended purpose.
 A gun is GOOD if it is successful in firing a bullet irrespective of
what it is being fired at.
 An oven is GOOD if it is successful in heating up, irrespective of
what it is heating up.
 Soul
 The soul of the thing is its Form
 The soul of the stamp is the symbol.
 The soul of the human is his character.

Aristotle – Prime Mover
 Motion
 Everything that exists is in a permanent state of ‘movement’ or ‘motion’ –
change.
 1. The physical world was in a constant state of motion and change.
 2. The planets seemed to be moving eternally
 3. Objects or motion is always caused by something else.
 4. Objects in the physical world were in a state of actuality and potentiality.
 Prime Motion
 Everything is in an ‘actual’ state with the ‘potential’ to become another state –
An actual cow in a field is potentially a piece of roast beef!
 P1. If things come into existence they must be caused to exist by something else.
 P2. If something is capable of change that means it is potentially something else.
 C. There must be something that is the cause of ongoing motion in the universe  Prime Mover
 Prime Mover
 Aristotle postulated that there was a Prime Mover that was itself ‘unmoved’.
 The Prime Mover could not be in a potential state as it would need another
mover to act upon it, it would not be the ‘Prime Mover’, but yet another ‘mover’.
 The Prime Mover must be an actual state that moves all things.

Aristotle – Prime Mover
 Characteristics of the Prime Mover
 1. Necessary– it cannot not exist.
 2. Actuality – Unchanging means it cannot be potentially anything.
 3. Good – the lack of goodness means potential to do better.
 4. Final Cause – the ultimate explanation for why things exist.
 5. Origin of all movement, e.g. the action of being moved.
 6. God – [God is] a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration
continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. Aristotle, Metaphysics
 Characteristics of God, the Prime Mover
 1. Indivisible – divine simplicity.
 2. Complete reality – the cause of all that is.
 3. Constantly thinking – Therefore it must be of itself that the divine thought
thinks (since it is the most excellent of things. Aristotle, Metaphysics.
 4. Transcendent – God does not interact in any way with the world.
 5. Impersonal – God is pure Goodness and Thought, not a person.