Plato vs. Aristotle

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AuthorTopic: Plato vs. Aristotle
Master
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quote:
Originally written by Student of Trinity:

Plato and Aristotle do seem to share an unwarranted confidence that they are enunciating final answers. That's inevitable, I suppose, in the rush of excitement over learning so much, so fast. Learning that things are harder than they seem was and is a slow and painful process.
Exactly the same problem arised in the Fin de siècle: People thought that they were almost done with physics. Then came Einstein, Planck and some others and proved that they were only starting.

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Posts: 3029 | Registered: Saturday, June 18 2005 07:00
Off With Their Heads
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quote:
Originally written by Najosz Thjsza Kjras:

All parties concerned suck. By providing answers about the nature of reality rooted in supposition, they changed learning from a process of experience to a process of acculturation, a trend which continues to this day in the wank-fests that pass for philosophy and literature departments.
They didn't change any such thing. The pre-Socratic philosophers were not in any way concerned with experiment or even "experience," whatever your definition of that vague term is. They were concerned with theories of everything, just like Plato and Aristotle.

I'm not sure what your problem is with modern-day philosophy and literature departments, but I doubt you could come up with anything better than what they regularly do.

quote:
Similarly, by learning enough that you could quote Aristotle (for the sciences) or Plato (for the arts) on anything ipse had dixit, you could fly by without learning anything in the academic circles of Europe.
Your Latin is terrible. :P

Also, if you try to be a scientist solely on the basis of Aristotle, I don't think you'll get very far in the academic circles of Europe. I think you're being a more terrible wanker with this statement than any department of philosophy ever was.

quote:
The long and short of it is, until a society develops the scientific method, philosophy is useless at best and at worst an impediment to progress. Once you've got enough of it, you don't even have to learn anything.
You'd be surprised to know, then, I suppose, that ancient natural philosophers did discover things about the world. Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes, for example. Science in the ancient world was a strange thing and not very recognizable to us, but then, science as we know it is only about three or four hundred years old, and people still were able to figure things out for several millenia before that. It wasn't the incredible rush of expansion of knowledge that we've experienced since, say, Galileo, but there was technological progress nonetheless.

quote:
While Plato and Aristotle did the best they could with what they had, they retarded scientific progress by centuries, maybe millenia, by providing easy answers that meant nothing.
It's interesting to note that Plato's actual answers are often far less definitive than your dismissive treatment would suggest. Socrates goes around trying to figure out what makes a man virtuous and wise, and he comes to some conclusions, but not much. It's the question that matters, because apparently people had not done very effective or systematic probes of the issue before. Some of the moral and ethical questions posed in Plato's work are still debated today, even when Plato did give answers, because there's no reason we have to accept his answers, and people didn't, even in the ancient world. (Indeed, his dialogues may be in part for the purpose of discussion and debate, not to give final answers to things, because his predecessor Gorgias wrote similar works for that very purpose.)

It's worth noting, too, that Plato's influence was not merely by his ideas, which are the most easily accessible of his contributions in today's world. His writing style was of utmost importance in the history of Greek prose, because he was an unparalleled master. Ask any classicist who the greatest prose stylist of Greek was, and Plato's name is invariably on the short list.

Also, their contributions to oratory and various other area of the humanities were enormous.

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Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
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Here's an example of what I like about Aristotle:
Aristotle's four kinds of causality. This is a typical Aristotelian list. But I am somehow persuaded that this one really is, as they like to say in Mackinsey, 'mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive'. And to establish such a MECE list for something like causality is pretty profound.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
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Perhaps I'm missing something about that causality list, but it doesn't seem MECE to me. In fact it doesn't seem even remotely profound, but rather a somewhat arbitrarily incomplete semantic investigation into the different lexical entries for "cause" (the Greek word, anyway). There's not even any explanation for how or why he arrived at those four items, rather than others. What am I missing?

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Well, the efficient and final causes cover the two directions of time. Normally in physics one only recognizes efficient causes, that an event is preceded by its cause; but in human terms the purpose of an event is often the answer one wants when asking, Why did it happen? Why did the nail pierce the wood? Because I hit it with a hammer. Why did I swing the hammer? In order to drive the nail.

The material cause is your basic reductionist approach: what something is made of is its explanation. We do often accept accounts of composition as explanations. This kind of cause has nothing to do with time, but it does involve telling a story. Analyzing material cause involves unpacking a term or concept, looking at it in more detail but narrower scope. The material cause of a forest is trees.

My own idea of what the formal cause is does not seem to be all that clearly explained by Aristotle, so either I'm reading him wrong, or he (or one of his transmitters) garbled this one. I take formal cause to be along the same axis as material, but in the opposite direction. You step back, deliberately losing sight of such obscuring details as composition, and look to a wider context, in which the thing you are explaining plays some comprehensibly simple role. The formal cause of the trees may be the forest. And certainly this kind of thinking is sometimes what we want when we ask Why.

So I find Aristotle's four causes to cover both directions along two orthogonal axes, and in that sense to be mutually exclusive. I think they are collectively exhaustive because I've never heard of any recognizable sense of cause that they didn't cover between them. And because I have a sort of crackpot pet theory that scale should be considered a dimension somewhat like time, so that it would be natural to have four kinds of cause.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
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Is the formal cause sort of a systemically explained cause, then?

At any rate that makes much more sense. Maybe that wasn't the best translation. Philosophy certainly isn't the easiest thing to translate.

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Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00
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quote:
Originally written by Slartematographer:

Is the formal cause sort of a systemically explained cause, then?
If I'm understanding it right, the source code of a computer program, or the blueprint of a building, would be an example of a formal cause.

[ Tuesday, April 10, 2007 23:40: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00
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quote:
Originally written by Kelandon:

quote:
Originally written by Najosz Thjsza Kjras:

All parties concerned suck. By providing answers about the nature of reality rooted in supposition, they changed learning from a process of experience to a process of acculturation, a trend which continues to this day in the wank-fests that pass for philosophy and literature departments.
They didn't change any such thing. The pre-Socratic philosophers were not in any way concerned with experiment or even "experience," whatever your definition of that vague term is. They were concerned with theories of everything, just like Plato and Aristotle.

They're as much to be execrated as Plato and Aristotle, for what it's worth. I'm simply proposing that as far as the sciences, and with them any meaningful measure of human progress, are concerned, SPA were a step backwards, not a step forwards.

quote:
I'm not sure what your problem is with modern-day philosophy and literature departments, but I doubt you could come up with anything better than what they regularly do.
This line of rebuttal is ill-concieved to the point of offense and merits nothing but scorn. You are not a child, Watts; do not argue like one.

quote:
quote:
Similarly, by learning enough that you could quote Aristotle (for the sciences) or Plato (for the arts) on anything ipse had dixit, you could fly by without learning anything in the academic circles of Europe.
Your Latin is terrible. :P

Also, if you try to be a scientist solely on the basis of Aristotle, I don't think you'll get very far in the academic circles of Europe. I think you're being a more terrible wanker with this statement than any department of philosophy ever was.

You'd get plenty far in the academic circles of Europe before the Enlightenment, and that was what I meant. This was not clear from my syntax, and I apologize.

quote:
quote:
The long and short of it is, until a society develops the scientific method, philosophy is useless at best and at worst an impediment to progress. Once you've got enough of it, you don't even have to learn anything.
You'd be surprised to know, then, I suppose, that ancient natural philosophers did discover things about the world. Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes, for example. Science in the ancient world was a strange thing and not very recognizable to us, but then, science as we know it is only about three or four hundred years old, and people still were able to figure things out for several millenia before that. It wasn't the incredible rush of expansion of knowledge that we've experienced since, say, Galileo, but there was technological progress nonetheless.

The gains made by natural philosophy were largely coincidences: people thinking to find a solution to problems that were largely thought unsolvable. But those weird, unconventional-thinking advances were not what Plato and Aristotle were known for; in fact, if anything, they were regarded as formidable intellects because not a thing they had to say came from left field.

Which makes a sort of sense for a society without a sense of historical place like Greece's, or really any pre-modern country; the great Greek natural philosophers were not free-thinkers but astoundingly able at extending out the system at hand to its logical conclusion. Which is great if the system at hand was handed down as-is from on high, but not so much if it isn't.

That the system at hand wasn't handed down from on high was pretty much a later understanding, and it was at that point that the reliable spread of progress you mentioned occured.

quote:
quote:
While Plato and Aristotle did the best they could with what they had, they retarded scientific progress by centuries, maybe millenia, by providing easy answers that meant nothing.
It's interesting to note that Plato's actual answers are often far less definitive than your dismissive treatment would suggest. Socrates goes around trying to figure out what makes a man virtuous and wise, and he comes to some conclusions, but not much. It's the question that matters, because apparently people had not done very effective or systematic probes of the issue before. Some of the moral and ethical questions posed in Plato's work are still debated today, even when Plato did give answers, because there's no reason we have to accept his answers, and people didn't, even in the ancient world. (Indeed, his dialogues may be in part for the purpose of discussion and debate, not to give final answers to things, because his predecessor Gorgias wrote similar works for that very purpose.)

The problem is that, once Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were removed from the context in which they wrote, they wound up doing more damage than good. If modern society had evolved from ancient Greek society, you could count them as provocative forces for human understanding, but as the ancient Greek flourishing of inquiry was ultimately not to last, what the provokers of debate and askers of questions became was discussion-stiflers and producers of stock answers.

That is the context in which they are the most immediately relevant to any of us.

quote:
It's worth noting, too, that Plato's influence was not merely by his ideas, which are the most easily accessible of his contributions in today's world. His writing style was of utmost importance in the history of Greek prose, because he was an unparalleled master. Ask any classicist who the greatest prose stylist of Greek was, and Plato's name is invariably on the short list.

Also, their contributions to oratory and various other area of the humanities were enormous.

I'll accept that Plato has an extreme aesthetic importance without even making my usual contemptuous disclaimer about your fixation on the classics; he certainly did.

However, going back to my previous parallel to China, during the same period SPA lived and worked, the Chinese underwent a similar flourishing of philosophy and inquiry; however, the same process inevitably occurred. While the region was far from politically stable, it enjoyed a degree of social stability; incursions from steppe raiders more or less ended that, and for centuries China became increasingly dependent on the classics for both their understanding of the world and their literature.

The great natural philosophers of any classic age inevitably produce a wide array of procrustean beds in the arts and humanities. In the case of Chinese scholarship, they produced stuff like the spider essay as the prerequisite for public service; these octopartite (thus 'spider') essays served little purpose but to show the writer's clear understanding of the rigid expository format and archaic language of the classics.

This continued well into the modern day; I'm not entirely sure who did away with them, but it's either Sun Yat-Sen or the Communists - if anyone did at all, that is. (I'd have to look them up more closely to be entirely sure; I've never studied Chinese literature at great length.) Similarly, the Church did not clear Gallileo of heresy until John Paul II.

Even though in and of themselves SPA were fairly admirable for their devotion to human understanding, their legacy is worthy of execration far outweighing their original intent.

And yes, we must consider that legacy - after all, there is little exonerating the romantic Volkisch movement for what it produced. Just because the intellectual stagnation of the Dark Ages didn't cause anyone swift death doesn't mean it isn't bad too.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
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You just said that Plato was not known for unconventional thinking. Your ignorance astounds me.

If your problem with Plato and Aristotle is that they claimed that their answers were perfect and handed down from on high, then I claim that your reading of them is inadequate, as I suggested above. Their answers are less definitive than you think, and their questions more important than you admit.

If your problem with Plato and Aristotle is that people later tried to fossilize education so that it was based solely on learning what people in the past had said, your problem is with the Dark Ages, not with Plato and Aristotle. Do you blame FDR for Lyndon LaRouche?

[ Wednesday, April 11, 2007 06:08: Message edited by: Kelandon ]

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Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens.
Smoo: Get ready to face the walls!
Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr.

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The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever
Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
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Picking up on this thought, we really ought to distinguish Platonism and Aristotelianism from Plato and Aristotle. Assessing Plato's blame for Platonism is a mug's game, but deciding which of the two is more important is probably not.

Of course Platonism and Aristotelianism only existed as monolithic entities to a certain level of approximation. Past this point, pushing to finer levels of detail is a slippery slope towards having to mind meld with everyone who lived before 1700 CE.
If the limitations of the concepts are recognized, they may be useful.

About blueprints as formal causes: I think this is a common example. I don't know how accurate it is as a rendering of Aristotle, but I accept it. To me the key point in it is that a blueprint is an idealization that suppresses fine detail, and in that sense a sort of opposite to material cause.

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So Aristotle's formal and material causes are more or less parallel to Plato's form and substance?

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quote:
Originally written by Student of Trinity:

we really ought to distinguish Platonism and Aristotelianism
For the visual learners:

IMAGE(http://www.artchive.com/artchive/r/raphael/thumb/raphael_athens_plato.jpg)

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