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7 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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contrast between Plato
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Plato believed that empirical knowledge is merely opinion and that it is unreliable since the world is in a contast state of flux. He also believed that the soul was separate to the body and could accesss the forms to gain true knowledge.
However Aristotle rejected this view as he did not believe that there were 2 different realms and refused to accept that true knowledge does not belong in the empirical world. Aristotle believed that ‘form’ was not an ideal, but found within the item itself. The form is its structure and characteristics and can be perceived using the senses. |
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The Four Causes
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Efficient Cause; what it was produced by.
Material Cause; What material is consists of. Formal Cause; its form, the arrangement. The structure. Final Cause; The purpose. |
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The Soul
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, for Aristotle, is the ‘principle of living things’- but it is not separate substance as Plato considered it to be. Soul is the ‘form’ of matter which means that it is what moulds or crafts matter. It also gives the body it's form, its characteristics. Form and Matter are not two separate things which mixed together make a living organism.
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The Prime Mover
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Aristotle considered that all powers, even basic ones like eating and reproduction, are signs of the divine. The universe is not the work of a divine craftsman. Nevertheless, the universe is ordered and full of purpose- but this order does not come from a designer. God may, in some uncertain and unclear sense, be the cause of all things and all basic principles. In coming to know things in the created world, we come to understand God.
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The Demiurge
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God, for Aristotle, is the PRIME MOVER. Needed above all to create movement in the heavenly spheres (these circled the earth which was at the centre of the universe). Aristotle’s God is not personal (hence a demiurge) and is beyond the world. God does not DO anything- Aristotle’s god neither creates nor sustains. However, God is a cause, acting as the great attractor God Attracts all things and thus has a causal influence- albeit without doing anything!
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Strengths
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Aristotle’s theory can be defended because it is derived from reflection on his studies of the natural world. This could be seen as a strength of Aristotle’s Four Causes compared with Plato’s Forms, which are not observable in the physical world.
The Four Causes can be readily applied to things that exist within the world as a way of explaining them. |
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Criticisms
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-Aristotle criticises Plato for having no concrete evidence to back up his theories. Aristotle, however, has no concrete evidence that the material world is the source of knowledge. Some might claim that religion and faith are the source of truth.
-Perhaps things don’t exist for a reason, some things happen by chance. - It is very difficult to see how reason could exist post mortem if the body and soul no longer exist. -causal relationship between the Prime Mover and the world is unclear. -If the Prime Mover cannot interact with the world, then it is very different from the Judeao-Christian understanding of God |
