Introduction to Philosophy

Achieve Test Prep: Philosophy

putting the capacity of sight into the soul; the soul possesses that already but it is not turned the right way or looking where it should and this is what education has to deal with.”

Plato attempted to resolve the conflict between an unchanging, ultimate truth and the everyday flux of our circumstantial lives by proposing two different worlds: the world of becoming (of our physical world) and the world of being (a realm of eternal and unchanging truths that is knowable through the exercises of reason). The world of being is populated by ideal forms, archetypes, or essences of everything that exists. In our everyday world of the senses, we experience only imperfect examples of, or participants in these forms, but through careful study, reflection, and reasoning, we can begin to apprehend the true and eternal nature of the forms. The Allegory of the Cave is a vivid metaphor for this quest to understand the ultimate essences or truths of things. Plato’s belief that genuine knowledge of essential forms can be achieved through innate or inborn ideas and the faculty of reason makes him a rationalist. In contrast, philosophers who believe that true knowledge is best achieved through the sense experience are regarded as empiricists. Aristotle: Reality is the Natural World Aristotle was a student of Plato’s and a philosophical naturalist. He was convinced that reality consists of the natural world and that this natural world follows orderly principles and laws that we can use to understand it. There is no separate supernatural reality as in Plato’s world of being and its eternal forms. Aristotle was convinced that Plato’s epistemology was flawed because Plato was never able to provide an intelligible account of the way the physical dimensions of this world participate in the eternal forms. Aristotle believed there is a human soul but it cannot be separated from the body and we are entirely creatures of nature, just as are all forms of life. We are unique because of our ability to reason, but beyond that, there is no other reality than this world, either before birth or even after death. Metaphysics is not the study of non-physical realms or entities; rather, it is the study of the natural world and the study of humans as an integral and inseparable part of the natural world. Like Plato, forms are an important part of Aristotle’s metaphysic and he believed forms were embodied in physical objects existing completely within the natural order. Everything that exists has both a material element and a formal element, and although we can separate these two in thought, they cannot be separated in reality. For Aristotle, this was Plato’s fundamental mistake, believing that formal elements of things could be abstracted and then elevated to a superior status of ultimate reality. In Aristotle’s metaphysical system, there are two basic categories of things: Matter, which refers to common stuff that makes up the material universe and form, which refers to the essence of a thing, that which makes it what it is. Matter and form together combine to create formed matter or substance that is all the familiar things we see in the universe and require each other to exist. The general conceptual framework for Aristotle’s work has come to be known as hylomorphism, which means that an individual organism consists of both matter and form. Hylomorphism claims that

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