Plato, Aristotle and Formality

Plato’s Forms

World of the Forms (Universals)(beyond the senses, but real;

known through the mind / reason; unchanging)

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World of Matter (Particulars)(world of experience; known through the senses; flux)

• Body/Soul dichotomy• Neoplatonism (Plotinus, AD 205-270): Movement toward the One; Intellectual mysticism (the individual’s direct apprehension of the deity)

Aristotle and Forms

• Emphasis on empiricism, looking at the particulars of the natural world.

• “Empirical” = based on observation.• Sense perception is important. • The form (universal) exists in the individual object

(i.e., no separation)• Reason from particulars to the general principle.

Understanding various causes

The efficient cause (the labor that produced something)

The final cause (the reason something was produced)

The formal cause (the pattern for what was produced)

The material cause (that from which something was produced)

The instrumental cause (the instruments or occasion that were used to produce something)