Plato and Aristotle

[MorkandMindy]

These two main basic ways of thinking and seeking to understand the World are still in use today and are having ongoing 'territorial disputes' even as we read this post.


I'll grossly simplify it as a starting point


Plato said that all truth was revealed from outside our present human existence - it is as though we now only see the shadows of the real reality behind the World.

And 1 Corinthians 13 expresses this very well:

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.


.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Back then there was a big demand for mathematics, mainly geometry. Large buildings were being constructed out of stone and there was a demand for ways so showing that they would not fall down.

Plato considered the circle, and how anyone looking at an imperfect circle could see that it was imperfect, even though most people had never seen a perfect circle. He felt each person had a soul which had seen the ideal forms and that was why people knew everything in the World was imperfect.

Plato was dismissive of Aristotle's approach that great truths could be deduced by studying ants and flowers and the wind in the way Aristotle thought was possible.

 

[MorkandMindy]

The painting shows Plato on our left pointing upwards; his source of authority, and Aristotle gesturing down to the Earth which was his.


Based on this it could be said that religions are Platonic, relying on revelation from above, and sciences are Aristotelian, relying on observations of things below.


Aristotle felt Plato was unable to give a good answer to the question of how he knew there were perfect things in 'heaven' and imperfect things on Earth.

 

[MorkandMindy]

It is true that the higher parts of the Church were interested in the works of Aristotle, and not just his ethics, and this is an important point for another discussion, but in the main


the church on the ground was teaching the primacy of revelation, whether through the Bible or through the saints, and claimed to be the source of all truth, and that science was relegated to a dark corner where it repeatedly failed to turn lead into gold.



It should therefore come as no surprise that the arrival of science on the scene was only made possible by

 

[memoriesbymichelle]

It should therefore come as no surprise that the arrival of science on the scene was only made possible by

By what? are we supposed to guess? cuz I'm not that smart LOL

 

[MorkandMindy]

(sorry bout that, the garage was ready to work on my car so I left a cliff hanger...)


the arrival of science on the scene was only made possible by a 'new star' in 1572 and a comet in 1577.

The stand taken by the Church was that heaven was perfect and timeless and no change could take place in it, so this was a challenge to the Church's authority and the few interested in science began to speak up.


It gets slightly confusing because the Church accepted Aristotle's observations and thoughts from way back more than 600 years before the Dark Ages started, but could not improve on them nor would it allow them to be contested, because the Church had an approach that was much like Plato's - that truth could only come from heaven, not from Earth - so the 'facts' came from Aristotle but the method from Plato.


Aristotle's teaching on comets was a boon to the Church as he explained that comets did not follow the trajectories of the planets and therefore were not in the heavens at all, but were therefore phenomena in the upper atmosphere: 'he described comets as a phenomenon of the upper atmospherehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere, where hot, dry exhalations gathered and occasionally burst into flame'.

This explanation allowed the Church to avoid contradicting the literal interpretation of some Bible passages. But there was trouble to come...

 

[dayhiker]

by looking at the earth as not part of the fall but part of God's creation and that God had given u dominion over the earth.

 

[MorkandMindy]

The appearance of a Nova ('new star') in the heavens violated Church teaching on the eternal unchangeable nature of the heavens, and the arrival of an actual comet disproved Aristotle's teaching because it didn't look like 'occasionally burst into flame' at all.


And this time the apparent location of the comet was recorded accurately by observers all over Europe and these measurements showed the comet was at least four times as far away as the moon, so it certainly wasn't part of the atmosphere.

So both the new star was in the heavens and so was the comet.

 

[dayhiker]

Always good to have an actual connection to the physical world in what we think is real. While God is outside the earth, He created the earth so we see His glory and power from what is created. Sometimes I have to shake my head at things Christians say when its so contrary to the nature if things even if it has to be because God made it that way! Like God makes things that don't work!

 

[MorkandMindy]

Aristotle - so what had he been doing and how did his school of philosophy develop in subsequent millennia? According to Aristotle we can make important discoveries about the universe just by looking at everyday things.


A very good example would be Newton and the apple. Newton considered the apple falling to Earth - would the same thing happen if he was on Jupiter? There were four big moons orbiting Jupiter, was it possible that the same force as brought the apple to Earth was keeping those moons in orbit?


A number of discoveries were necessary to allow this line of thought. One was Galileo's that motion seemed to just continue unless there was something to stop it. So the moons didn't need horses pulling them.


And Newton's own first 'law' of motion: 'Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed'.


In short, the moons must have a force toward Jupiter keeping them from going off in a straight line, so an apple would indeed fall to Jupiter, that gravity constrained them into orbital motion, but the orbital motion in turn also kept the moons from falling onto Jupiter that the gravity would otherwise have caused.


So from an observation in a little place on Earth on a day in the 1680's was deduced a truth that applies everywhere in the Universe for all time.

Aristotle would have been pleased.

 

[memoriesbymichelle]

What's the moral of the story?

 

[Doctor Strangelove]

The church has at times mis-used Aristotle. There was a sort of literalism about everything he said while neglecting the truer, deeper aspects of his thought. Aristotle introduced a theory of causality - it is hard to imagine science without Aristotle's material cause and efficient cause. Aristotle had his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, send him plants and animals from abroad to study. He strictly speaking was not a scientist, but his contributions to philosophy like his system of classifying things (as he classified plants and animals) led the way to science even though he might have gotten a lot of facts wrong.

 

[MorkandMindy]

What's the moral of the story?

Hi Michelle

I was explaining what a paradigm is by using a real-life example as the change in thinking from reliance on revelation to reliance on discovery.


Initially I was thinking of the belief in the 'Dark Ages' that any attempt to discover anything yourself was entirely pointless because our minds are corrupt and our senses not as good as those of Adam, so if he didn't see it neither would we.


But I already used that explanation in 'wrong Paradigms' and it didn't work so I decided to take two actual contrasting World views, those of Plato and Aristotle and the change over between them which in Europe was around 1600.


The story of the two is meant to demonstrate two different ways of thinking which are two different paradigms.



As Dr. Strangelove has intimated there is a lot more to the story and it is certainly worth getting into it.


But now I definitely have to stop thinking and start experiencing... sleep.

 

[MorkandMindy]

So where in my opinion are Plato and Aristotle now?

Plato claimed that truth came from a pre birth experience in an ideal place where everything was perfect, where we saw the perfect circle, the perfect square, the perfect olive tree, the perfect woman and the perfect man.


There is a lot to be said for pre birth knowledge because without it we really would have nowhere to start. But instead we pick up language rapidly and the concepts of birds and trees and rocks so easily compared with trying to write a computer program that can so something as simple as distinguishing between a male and female human (you try it).


I would say this pre birth knowledge is 'instinct' which is like the BIOS of the brain. And I would not distinguish between hard-wired links between various parts of the brain and parts of the body they receive information from or send commands to, and the more recently genetically encoded associations which are also passed on genetically.



A note on BIOS
When you start the computer there is nothing in the RAM where programs are generally run. The first thing the computer has to do is find out which ports things are attached to, which drives are attached and where... Without that the PC can not load the operating system.

Similarly the brain needs somewhere to start in trying to make sense of the World and of the sounds around us.

 

[MorkandMindy]

My present understanding, and I am not a philosopher, is that Plato got the source of these instincts and ideal forms wrong, that in fact they were not learnt by the individual in pre-birth experiences but most were inherited genetically. Babies do become acclimatised to particular sounds in the womb and are comforted by hearing them later, hence I said 'most were inherited genetically' some were learnt in utero - but none came from the land of ideal forms.


However he was right that they exist, that there is a lot of instinct in humans and it goes from blinking at a loud noise all the way up to people like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz we instinctively don't like. And that we form ideals and that these are crucial to allow ideas to be transferred my means of language. But we don't get them in a land of ideal forms either but have a method referred to as 'prototyping' to develop them out of what we see around us.


So Plato was right. What of Aristotle? Well he was right too.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Plato was right that we need some basics at the start and ideals in order to communicate and the more closely these signifiers match up from person to person the more accurate will be the communication. The same applies to philosophical debate as to communication.

And we do tend to see what we expect to see, and there have been plenty of experiments that support that hypothesis, so score one for Plato.


But then how do we make progress? By making observations and trying things out. Man learned to keep a fire going (most likely it was a boy who first found out how to feed a fire), kill a mammoth, build a house, and so on from what we have around us, so score one for Aristotle.


The instincts are essential for the start, but they don't change much from generation to generation. Knowledge gets passed on down the generations, and that is a valuable gift to us much like Botticelli's Venus arriving from outside, but that can only be added to by ourselves making observations, experiments, hypothesising, and trying things out.

Plato makes us people but Aristotle moves us out of the Stone Age.

 

[blackribbon]

Science is much older than the 16th century. They were doing brain surgery with patients surviving in Ancient Egypt and the architecture in the cities alone shows an advanced understanding of physics. Much of the ancient knowledge was lost when the library in Alexanderia was burned by the Romans. Even much of Platos and Aristotle's works were lost in that fire.

 

[memoriesbymichelle]

I think we also make progress by studying history. I used to hate history in school. I always thought, it's in the past, who cares? BUT as I got older and just a tad wiser I realized the reason studying history is so important and that's so (hopefully) we don't make the same mistakes over and over.

I also like that the word history is HIS story because for me, that is the beginning point...God. And the bible even talks about knowledge and wisdom coming from God. Solomon asked for wisdom and God granted him that request and much much more, but without God we can know nothing IMO. That's my paradigm

 

[dayhiker]

And what a nice paradigm it is!

 

[memoriesbymichelle]

And what a nice paradigm it is!

I like it!