School Of Athens Essay

Within Raphael’s masterpiece The School of Athens Aristotle is depicted with his hand flat out towards the horizon while Plato is pointing up towards the sky, but had Raphael added Stephen Wolfram to the painting, where would his hand be pointing? Although Wolfram does have some ideas that do align with Plato’s beliefs, his hand, like Aristotle’s, would be pointing out.
It is necessary to understand why each of the two natural philosophers are pointing in the direction they are. Due to the fact Plato was so devoted to the idea of forms, and even spent the majority of his life attempting to find a universal form that could not be corrupted, he was portrayed with his finger pointing towards the heavens in order to demonstrate his concern towards …show more content…
and be able to type into Wolfram Alpha, ‘the theory of the universe,’ and have it tell us. (Wolfram)
While although Wolfram is seemingly giving Plato’s case about a “base knowledge” he is in fact more on Aristotle’s belief of the use of deduction to find out certain knowledge. In a sense, Wolfram’s ultimate goal is to discover the rules of our universe through his use of deduction to create plausible universes with the effects of physics. Wolfram, rather than focusing his attention inwards similar to what Plato did with his forms, he chose to direct his attention outwards to the universe and the temporal world.
Wolfram’s excitement towards trying to find a set of rules that match up with our current universe, he is almost exclusively on Aristotle’s side of philosophy. While Wolfram, like Plato, looks to an ideal base to build the rest of his knowledge of computation on the vast majority of Wolfram’s ideas, beliefs, and writings follow having a demonstrative type knowledge. We can learn what we do not already know through demonstrating other knowledge until we come up with the truth, precisely like Wolfram