Aristotle made unprecedented contributions to all categories of knowledge, but perhaps his greatest gifts came from his examinations of the foundation of “knowledge,” itself. In other words, in the absence of some external authority, such as Plato’s Realm of True Forms which Aristotle rejected, how can human beings “know things.” The philosopher asserted that the basis of knowledge (episteme) lay with an examination of everything […]
The proper balance
As noted in the last post, Aristotle placed a lot of importance on good parenting. To him, the life of a philosopher was, hands down, the best one, but he clearly understood that not everyone could manage it. Aristotle wrote that self-discipline served as a vital pre-condition to a life based on reason, and that required a lifetime of practice. When a parent forbids a […]
A good problem
The fact that Socrates wrote nothing, himself, but made such an impression on others, makes him pretty easy to write about. Moreover, the fact that Plato’s central arguments about the Realm of Pure Forms cannot stand up to rational scrutiny makes discussions of his ideas relatively straightforward. However, when it comes to philosophers who have a vast range of good ideas, matters become much more […]
Cave people
Plato uses allegories beautifully, and one of my other favorites appears in The Republic as “The Allegory of the Cave.” Plato originally used it to help illustrate his understanding of how the perfect concepts in the Realm of Pure Forms appear imperfectly in human minds. In his usage, the light of a bonfire partially illuminates a cavern. Inside the cave, people are chained in such […]
One Ring to rule them… oh, wait.
Plato spent a lot of time, in The Republic, in discussions about Kallipolis, in specific, and politics, in general. However, we have to remember that he did so as a means to discuss the nature of justice and virtue, whether such concepts had objective definitions, and whether it benefitted human beings to adhere to those concepts, once he’d managed to discover those definitions. In the […]
A beautiful city?
Of all the contributions made by Plato to Western philosophical thought, probably the area that received most of his attention lay in the realm of political philosophy. As a descendant of Solon on his mother’s side, and the Athenian king, Codrus, on his father’s side, young Aristocles breathed politics as part of his everyday life. Moreover, the defeat of Athens at the hands of the […]
An Odd Sort of Mind
I think it’s pretty safe to say that Plato’s philosophy evolved through time, and his masterwork, The Republic, marks the transition between his early work (heavily inspired by the thinking of Socrates) to a middle period (where he started to explore more ideas). In The Republic, Plato continued his examination into the ideas of justice, beauty, virtue and compassion, and tried to get a handle […]
Illusory Forms
In his desire to come up with objective definitions of concepts such as “justice”, “virtue” and “beauty,” Plato (as Socrates before him) struggled with the reality that the definitions of those terms seemed, at least on the surface, to vary a lot from one culture to the next – and even from one individual to the next. That seemed to loan the expedient ethics of […]
An Imperfect Genius
Socrates may have resisted the title of “teacher,” but he nonetheless had students, and the best and brightest of them made such profound contributions to Western philosophy that, arguably, every work written since his day has amounted to a series of critiques and rebuttals of Plato. Unlike Socrates, Plato (a nickname that meant “broad,” given to him by his wrestling instructor because of his strong, […]
The Gadfly
At last, we come to one of the most pivotal thinkers in the history of Western Civilization; a man who, ironically, claimed vast ignorance of just about everything, and who spent his time ostensibly asking questions of other people to try to learn what might actually qualify as truth. We don’t actually know all that much about Socrates, the son of the stonemason Sophroniscus and […]