Plato and Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle possessed two very different concepts of what is ultimately real. Reality for Plato was thought and for Aristotle it was found more within what is physically real, although he also emphasised the thought process. Their understanding of what is ultimately real directly affects how they perceive the world and significantly their conception of science this has impacted thought in science ever since.

Plato's concept of reality was to be attained through understanding the order and natural process through which thought and ideas were perceived .The understanding of this concept of reality, comes from his work entitled Ð''Republic'. Two examples of his thought process are the analogy of the cave and the analogy of the three beds. In these we can see the development of his concept of reality and his approach to science.

For Plato reality can be broken down into four separate fields or concepts - one good (possibly defined as God); ideas; physical reality; and lastly imagery. Plato perceived that all ideas, physical reality and images were a copy or reflection of the creations of the one good. In regards to these copies and reflections, Plato surmises that (Bowett, Section X) "No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth". So that absolute truth is found in the over-arching concept or the one good.

The one good, or God as referred to by Plato is the absolute one the level of perfect truth and his comprehension of perfect truth is that all things should come from it and be reflections of it. For Plato in his analogy of the cave, this one truth was represented by the sun. The level of ideas in Plato's view was close to this one truth, as it is from here ideas physical reality and imagery flows. From this one good flows the second level, the notion or idea of every thing within physical and imagined reality exists. The third level of reality is physical reality, which is the sensuous experiences, and these, according to Plato cannot be trusted as absolute reality because they are limited to the experience of the world causing it to be subjective, and merely a copy of an idea. For an example of this, we can see in the analogy of the cave that shadow puppets and voices are experienced by prisoners within the cave, who being chained there Ð'- held by their ignorance perhaps Ð'- had only seen the shadow accompanied by a voice and thereby assumed that the voice and the shadow were from the same source and were real. When in fact the voice came from the man who walked past and the shadow from a different source that of a puppet.

Imagery is on the bottom of Plato's view of reality. To Plato images Ð'- painting, poetry and so forth, were merely copies of physical realities, which in turn were copies of the thought or ideas which in turn flow from the one good. To some degree this breakdown creates a sense of disdain for imagery which is seen as a mere replica of an idea and physical representation of the idea; removed significantly from truth. This is seen in the words of Plato from the Ð''Republic' (Bowett, Section X) "Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image."

For Plato then, with his framework of reality and his higher emphasis on thought and ideas over the physical reality science was the attempt to uncover ideas or concepts behind the physical reality, so that science became a means to that end.

Aristotle as a student of Plato held the same idealistic search for reality, and to some degree the same sense of order. Unlike Plato however, Aristotle held that substance