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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]