Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (500-300s BC)

The first Ancient Greek philosophers held a rationalist approach to the theory of knowledge. This means that they believed true knowledge comes from the mind, which is rational, and not from the senses, which can be tricked. The fact that we do not need to see physical examples in order to understand mathematics was something that fascinated Pythagoras in the 6th century BC (Huffman, 2009). One hundred years later, Socrates argued that people cannot understand the world until they use rational thought to understand the true nature of themselves (Nails, 2009). Socrates was a mind-body dualist, this means that he thought that the mind is composed of a different substance to the brain, one that does not obey the same physical laws. The argument that the mind is made of a substance which does obey the laws of physics is known as physicalism or materialism.

Socrates believed that the mind has an irrational part which is controlled by emotions and this is drawn to the body. Once the mind and body merge, the mind is limited by what we are able to perceive with our senses. The rational part of our mind mostly remains beyond our conscious knowledge, however Socrates believed that it is the job of philosophers to connect to the rational mind in order to become a whole person. Once this is achieved, a rational person will see things for what they really are.

Socrates' pupil, Plato, elaborated upon this theory in The Republic, where he described how the things we perceive on Earth are really composed of ideas, or Forms (Plato, pp.265). A Form is an eternal and perfect concept, something which is strived for but never actualised. All horses, for example, are united by the concept of 'horse', an ideal which all horses on Earth were built to resemble. But it is not just objects that have Forms. Forms also apply to abstract concepts such as beauty. Plato argued that all of the Forms exist outside of the realm of regular perception, in the 'realm of the forms'.

Plato did not trust sensory information because we can confuse reality with the imagination, the most extreme cases happen when we dream or hallucinate but this also occurs when we confuse one object for another. Plato argued that we are often presented with illusions of this kind, a stick, for example, can appear bent in water, yet when we pick it up we will find that it is straight. Things are not always what they seem and we are not always aware that we are making these mistakes. Plato praised mathematics as one of the only forms of true knowledge and disliked art because he thought that we distort our perception even further when we attempt to copy an imperfect image.

Plato's allegory of the cave describes how we are analogous to people who spend their lives looking only at shadows. These people will come to believe that only shadows exist and when someone tells them of the world of light above they do not believe them. Plato argued that it takes a philosopher to leave the cave and see the world as it truly is. Like Socrates, Plato believed this could only be achieved through rational introspection.

As with Socrates, Plato's belief in the soul came from the need to explain human intellect, animals do not possess anything similar and it could not be explained mechanically. The Forms explain how the mind interprets the continuous stream of sensory data it is exposed to by recognising certain, eternal concepts. If our intellect is composed of Forms, then it is eternal and distinct from the body. Plato did not believe that the mind exists in time or space and thought that it would return to the Realm of the Forms upon death.

Plato set up an academy for men to learn philosophy and one of its pupils was Aristotle, who was born in 384 BC. Aristotle rejected many of Plato's theories including rationalism, he argued that the mind does not have innate ideas and compared it to an unscribed tablet, a 'tabula rasa' (Aristotle, 1966). Aristotle rejected Plato's realm of the Forms, arguing that the Forms are concepts devised by men to categorise things. Aristotle argued that the soul is a part of the human body and so also rejected dualism. He did however, believe that intellect was different from any other part of the body as our conscious range is not restricted in the way that our physical senses are. Aristotle argued that intellect does not have a corresponding bodily organ. This means that it does not exist in space, despite having a physical origin.

References

Aristotle, 1966, 'Physics', Books V and VI, Ross, W.D. (Ed.), Clarendon Press, Oxford

Huffman, C., 2009, 'Pythagoras', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Nails, D., 2009, 'Socrates', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Plato, 1991, 'The Republic', Jowett, B. (trans.), Forgotten Books, Charleston