Plato’s Theory of Forms and How Does It Differ With Aristotle’s, Essay Example

The theory of forms or “doctrine of Ideas” (Bowery 113) is one of well-known and famous philosophical theories which is associated with one of outstanding philosophers of all time – Plato. Plato was interested in investigating metaphysical ideas. His philosophy included a “serious engagement with the forms” (121) and he was not just a “logical metaphysician” (Bowery 121), but an “educator, a cultural critic” (121).

In his theory Plato shown that the forms were the only right objects of learning that could supply people with real attainments. Bowery underlines that “the idea of Plato’s ideas maintains a tenacious grip on Platonic scholarship” (111). Plato believed that all the philosophers and thinkers must stop paying attention to the perception, but center “instead upon the abstracted object per se” (Havelock 254) which was single appropriate object of intellectual, that Plato sometimes recognized as a “form” or “forms”. The philosopher used the word “form” professionally as well as non-professionally. Havelock emphasizes that if one supposes that Plato’s doctrine was methodical in the present-day meaning of that term, and as well methodically represented, one sets apart sharply between the accidental use of the word “form” and its “professional application as ‘Form’” (255) and one attribute the case that selfsame term does “double duty simply to an inadequacy of the Greek vocabulary” (255). This means that Plato used the word “form” in two different concepts: material “form” or appearance of somewhat and “Form” in a modern especial meaning.

Famous Plato’s Republic is the work where he “first introduced the objects which ‘are’” (Havelock 254). In Republic “the ‘method’ of the Forms is explicitly avowed and used” (255). Republic shown that the things people usually realized and apprehended in the world described as a shade or the actual things which people did not apprehend directly. In this dialogues the problem and question of the form and its attitude to particulars was seriously investigated.

Plato believed that the form was “an object of discourse in the first place” (Havelock 255). What the theory of forms was duly conceived and assert was the presence of “abstract properties and relations of physical objects and so forth” (270). There were no artificer attempts for creating “‘dimension’ or ‘justice’ or ‘equality’” (270). These abstractions distinguished as linguistic features and the whole of adjectival sources Havelock supposed. Plato believed that the object was essence or actually the Form and that these Forms were the subsistence of different objects without which the thing was not able to be the sort it was (270).

By arrangement the implementation of the theory of forms amongst the “refutational arguments recapitulated above and recognizable myth” (Bowery 120), Plato might be proposing that the theory of forms “itself lies somewhere in between the logos of argument and the myth” (120) on the time to come of the mind. It had emotional challenge that “argumentative logoi often lack” (120). In contrast to myth, it stayed attached to a “standard of logical analysis” (120).

Modern elaborations of Plato’s theory ordinarily stick to various variants of the following opinion. The first is that for each special thing that we are feeling in mental and spiritual world, there is an appropriate “form or idea of that thing that exists in an eternal, immaterial, conceptual realm” (111). The next is that there is some sort of casual connection amongst the “metaphysical form and the particular physical instantiation of it” (111) though the precise nature of this connection is the centre of lots of scientific discussions. The last option of Plato’s theory of forms is that the forms are “apprehended by the intellect” (111) and considered the objects of information for the mind.

Aristotle was the philosopher who did not just censure and criticize Plato but his theory of forms as well. Aristotle undoubtedly considered that Plato’s forms corresponded to “potentialities in his own system and one of his main criticisms of Plato’s theory stems” (Bechler 23-24) from the authentication of Plato’s forms with simple consecution potentiality. Consequently, if Plato’s purpose was to posit forms as a clarification of the “career of things” (24), he certainly miscarried here, for simple consecution potentialities were not “archai of motion” (24). The forms, in the way they were determined and postulated by Plato, “enforcing capacity that could account either for the initiation of motion” (24) or for its particular instruction and route. The forms, as Bechler underlines, could not action “in the causal explanation of why the seed grows” (24). Consequently, the forms like potentials were not able to invent to be causative always. In other words the forms as they were postulated by Plato were unsuitable for causative of “physical motions” (24).

Aristotle could censure and criticize Plato’s forms as consecution potentiality, nevertheless “since causal efficacy is indeed their specific role” (Bechler 24). Aristotle’s consecution potentialities were indefinably “nonactive, and their kind of possibility entails nonactualization” (25). That implied that if consecution potentiality was logically preceding to the real it was not able to be “ontologically prior and its real cause, for in and by itself it will never actualize” (25). Therefore Plato’s forms, being merely such consecution potentialities, were not able to be true reasons of mental word.

Such attack on Plato was certainly appropriate to Aristotle’s personal theory, which said that if the potential was to “serve as a real cause” (Bechler, 25), as Aristotle was nearly to do it, than it logically was preceding to the “actual, but then it would not be able to cause anything” (25). This is obvious in the considerable and important ontological feature which differ Aristotle’s from Plato’s “potentials, namely separateness” (25). This is just the cause of why Aristotle did his “acting potentials inseparable from the substance in which they inhere” (25).

Aristotle’s forms were “non-separable from the object or the matter either physically or in thought (logically)” (Bechler 2). However what was considerable here it was not that the form was located in the object “but rather that form is merely and strictly the object viewed in a certain manner” (2). Aristotle’s forms were no being the piece or constituent part in the context the object in view of being aspects, they were not the sort of thing that was able to arrange the object. Aristotle’s assault on Plato’s ideas was not an operation to “transfer and install them intact … but rather to eliminate them altogether as self sufficient entities” (3), and this involved obliteration and liquidation them as well as parts and components which were in any meaning separable.

Freudenthal believes that the theory of “vital heat” (1) is the basic part of the Aristotle’s “account of the organization of matter into the structured” (1) organized substance. In the Aristotle’s theory of substance, the substance didn’t create itself in an unorganized manner into structured matter like living being. Aristotle’s forms were really “in re, his universals are rather “post rem”, contrary to convention reading” (Bechler 96) and also opposite of Plato’s theory, that resembling recognize forms and universals.

The demonstrations of the forms has a great educational or “psychagogic function that extends to the bounds” (Bowery 119) of which everyone should take up as a mental, religious or spiritual implementation. Nowadays there is a variety of scientific and scholarly points of view on Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of forms and their philosophy itself. For even if, from 21-st century point of view, people should decide that the theory of forms is not a scholarship in any contemporary meaning, however it is still important and have a value as a mental teaching to arouse us to the enigma and secret of actuality.

Works Cited

Bechler, Zev. Aristotle’s theory of actuality. New York, USA: State University of New York, 1995.

Bowery, Anna-Marie. Plato’s forms: varieties of interpretation. Ed. Welton, William A. Oxford, USA: Lexington Books, 2002. 111 – 127.

Freudenthal, Gad. Aristotle’s theory of material substance: heat and pneuma, form and soul. Oxford, USA: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Havelock, Erik A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.