A Critic against Plato : What is Aristotle’s Philosophy?
To cut it short, for Aristotle, the truth of all things exists within the world itself. Meaning, the existence of another world is not needed — this is a clear deviation from what Plato suggests.
Aristotle was a mentee to Plato. However, post Plato’s death, he was not chosen as his successor. But even before that, Plato and Aristotle had differences in opinions — with mutual respect, of course.
Aristotle was more methodical & analytic as compared to Plato’s imaginative & metaphorical explanations, and the major argument Aristotle used against Plato was the Third Man Argument. By this argument, if there exists an Ideal Form of man from which the earthly Form arises, then this form must have another form of man, and this too must be based on a higher form. This circle would go on ad-infinitum.
Instead of accepting Plato’s theory of knowledge, Aristotle says that when we are born we are like ‘unscribed tablets’ , and any kind of understanding is gained from sense experiences.
Aristotle was so convinced that the senses are the doorway to knowledge that he began collecting specimens of flora and fauna and classified them according to their characteristics — giving rise to the modern taxonomy.
It is to be noted, that Aristotle does not disagree with the universality of things and objects. The essential difference between Plato and Aristotle is the means by which the Universal Qualities can be known. For Aristotle, it is from sense experience, and for Plato it is from pure reason.
This debate between Plato and Aristotle influenced the modern day Rationalists (Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Gottfried Leibniz) and Empiricists (John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume). St Aquinas integrated Aristotle’s work into his Christian philosophy and St Augustine used Plato’s for his.
Other than Forms, Aristotle also talks about the nature of reality — Metaphysics. He does by explaining the universe in a teleological fashion and this is known as Aristotle’s Causation Theory.
