OCR ↗︎
Philosophy ↗︎
Question preparation ↓

Intro:

Heraclitus was an ancient greek philosopher who cast doubt on the possibility of gaining knowledge. He famously said “a man never steps into the same river twice”.
This is because both the man and the river change. The world is in a state of ‘flux’ (change). So the moment we know something, it has changed. So how do we get knowledge?
Both Plato and Aristotle are trying to answer this challenge.

AO1: Plato’s rationalism: theory of forms & Allegory of cave

Rationalism is the epistemological theory that knowledge is gained from pure reason a priori, not from experience.
Plato’s cave illustrates his rationalism and theory of forms.
Prisoners represent us, shackled in ignorance inside the cave of appearances.
They think the shadows on the wall are reality because that is all they have known, just as we assume the experienced world is real.
A prisoner, representing the philosopher, escapes through a priori reason and sees the real world of forms.
Forms are abstract objects: perfect, eternal and immutable versions of the everyday things we experience.
Particular objects are imperfect representations of the forms they partake in.
For example, a beautiful sunset is not beauty itself, but an imperfect changing instance of the Form of Beauty.
Plato accepts Heraclitus’ problem that experience cannot give knowledge, but proposes pure reason as the solution.

AO2: Plato’s cave as an argument for rationalism

Plato’s cave is a form of the veil of perception, extended by Descartes’ evil demon and Bostrom’s simulation argument.
Empiricism seems to require perceptions to give epistemic access to reality, either directly or through representation.
Yet empiricism cannot justify that experience relates to reality in either way.
Any evidence that we are not in the cave or a simulation could itself be a shadow or simulation-artifice.
Empiricism therefore seems to lead to philosophical scepticism, which Plato thinks justifies the alternative epistemology of rationalism.

Counter

A common reaction is pointing to the lack of evidence for the forms, but this misses Plato’s point.
He argues we should not rely on evidence that could be shadows on the cave wall.
Criticising Plato requires showing he is wrong to discount evidence.
Aristotle attempts this, claiming that studying the causal processes behind change yields knowledge.
This makes forms an unnecessary hypothesis, because experience can be explained without them.

Evaluation

Aristotle’s approach is partly successful, but it needs developing through the modern scientific method.
Aristotle’s method relied mainly on observation, which is vulnerable to Plato’s cave critique that we could be observing illusions.
Modern science combines observation with experiment.
This lets us control, transform and predict the world far beyond ancient Greece.
It gives us an active relationship with experience, not merely passive observation of shadows.
So, modern science escapes Plato’s cave critique and shows Plato is wrong to disregard evidence.

AO1: The hierarchy of forms & form of the good

Plato’s ontology is set out in the ‘divided line’.
This presents hierarchical degrees of reality, each with a corresponding level of cognition needed for epistemic access.
The highest reality is the Form of the Good, symbolised in the cave by the sun, which the escaped prisoner sees first.
The sun illuminates and nourishes the world, just as the Good enables understanding and grounds the existence of the other forms.
Anyone who understands the Good becomes morally perfected, making wrongdoing impossible.
Knowing the Good reveals what is truly desirable, so addictive, tyrannical, prideful or greedy desires lose their power, since they conflict with genuine goodness.
This philosopher should become a ‘philosopher king’.
Below the Good are higher forms like justice, beauty and truth, known through understanding, or Noēsis.
Below these are mathematical forms, known through reasoning, or Dianoia.
Below these are forms of experienced things, such as tableness, accessed by belief.
Finally, images, shadows, reflections and art are the lowest level, accessed by imagination.

AO2: Plato vs Aristotle on the the form of goodness

Plato’s highest good is transcendent and perfects the soul which knows it, freeing reason from appetites and making wrongdoing impossible.
However, this morally perfected rationality seems utopian, since such a person has never existed.
Reason appears inevitably influenced by desire.
Aristotle’s immanent realism rejects goodness as a separate transcendent Form.
His highest reality is the Prime Mover, whose influence is indirect.
As final cause, it grounds the teleological order by which each thing seeks the good proper to its form.
Human goodness becomes eudaimonia: aligning reason and emotion through virtuous habit.
Immorality is practical reason misdirected by bodily drives.

Counter

Hume went further than Aristotle, arguing reason helps us justify and obtain what we desire; a “slave of the passions”.
Reason is more like a lawyer than a Platonic philosopher or Aristotelian scientist.
Nietzsche diagnosed Plato’s Form of the Good as a ‘dangerous error’ caused by a philosopher’s desire for power.

Evaluation

However, Jonathan Haidt shows Hume and Nietzsche go too far, leaving Aristotle’s model as the ideal middle ground.
Reason is like a rider guiding an elephant through learning, training and redirection.
Reason cannot directly control emotion, but can gradually align it through habituation.
For example, a student can use breaks and rewards to align desire with revision.
Plato rejected empiricism because senses mislead us, but reason can also be misled by emotion.
This cannot be transcended through Plato’s fantasy of escaping bodily desire, but nor are we enslaved by it as Hume thought.
Desire can be trained into harmony with reason.

AO2: Plato’s argument from recollection

Plato justifies an immaterial soul and world of forms through recollection.
We possess ideas of perfect things, such as perfectly equal sticks, a perfect circle or perfect justice.
Yet we never experience perfect things in the world of appearances.
So, Plato argues we must have apprehended these ideas in a realm of perfect forms, where such forms really exist.
Our imperfect body could not belong to that perfect realm.
His likeness principle says the part of us knowing immaterial forms must also be immaterial.
Therefore, we have an immaterial soul which knew the forms before birth.
Knowledge is now anamnesis: experience of particulars triggers recollection of the perfect forms they partake in.

Counter

Hume counters that justice and beauty are subjective, though Plato’s argument could still work for geometry, since maths is not subjective.
However, Hume claims we can create perfection ourselves.
Through abstract negation we imagine imperfect circles as ‘not imperfect’, creating perfection.
So, perfect concepts can be explained without a soul or realm of forms.

Evaluation

Plato’s argument fails at two points.
Hume’s proposal shows perfect concepts could come from a priori reasoning alone, without being innate.
But even if we were born with perfect concepts, it is a leap to think a soul and forms must explain them.
Evolution may have programmed us with geometric awareness for survival.
So, Plato is wrong to think a soul and realm of forms must exist.

AO1: Aristotle’s four causes

Aristotle’s empiricism claims we can gain knowledge from experience.
He thinks universals, such as form, are not abstract entities but aspects of observed things: immanent realism.
Material objects are therefore hylomorphic: combinations of matter and form.
Aristotle argues that knowledge of a thing requires understanding why it exists.
We can identify the causal processes operating in its being, which explain the change we experience.
This lets us understand what we observe and why it exists.
This is Aristotle’s response to Heraclitus: knowledge is possible despite flux.
Aristotle thinks change involves four causes.
The material cause is what something is made of, e.g. the wood of a chair.
The formal cause is its essence or defining characteristic, e.g. the chair’s shape as something for sitting.
The efficient cause is what brings it into being, e.g. the carpenter.
The final cause is the end built into its nature, its telos, e.g. being sat on.
This is an early version of the scientific method.
A scientist could explain that if fire is applied to a wooden chair, its material structure produces ashes.
Science similarly looks for patterns in the world and gains general knowledge from them.

AO2: the modern scientific critique of telos

Since Francis Bacon in the early Enlightenment, telos has been rejected as metaphysical and unempirical.
Modern science explains the universe through atoms, energy and forces, not purpose.
There is no space in scientific understanding for purpose to exist as part of nature.
Sean Carroll argues purpose is not built into the universe’s “architecture”.
Changes Aristotle explained through telos can be explained non-teleologically.
For example, an acorn becoming an oak tree is explained through DNA and environment.
So telos appears obsolete.

Counter

However, Polkinghorne defends the empiricism of telos.
He argues science investigates the “what”, such as which laws of physics exist, but not why there are laws at all, especially fine-tuned ones.
On this view, science points to the need for an ultimate explanation of purpose beyond empiricism.
This shifts telos towards Christian theology rather than Aristotelian philosophy.

Evaluation

However, even this contemporary version of purpose cannot survive modern empirical critique.
Max Tegmark argues science may one day explain why the universe exists, reducing the “why” to non-teleological concepts.
Alternatively, Russell may be right that there is no “why”: the universe could be a brute fact.
So, final causation is an unnecessary unscientific concept.
The laws of nature are mysterious, but Polkinghorne risks a God of the gaps fallacy by assuming the explanation must be teleological.
Until we observe change which requires telos, the Enlightenment rejection of Aristotelian final causation is justified.
Aristotle was right about empirical method, but not final causation.

AO1: Aristotle’s prime mover

To explain the ultimate source of change, Aristotle argued there must be a prime mover.
For Aristotle, motion means all change we experience.
He thought the universe had always existed, but its continual motion still needed explanation.
Observation suggests this: if you roll a ball, it eventually stops.
Yet the stars and planets have not stopped moving.
So, there must be a prime mover eternally sustaining celestial motion, as well as terrestrial change.
This source of motion cannot receive motion from something else.
It must therefore be unmoved, with no potentiality to change: pure actuality.
It cannot be physical, since material beings change and decay.
It is an eternal immaterial mind.
If it thought about anything changeable, it would itself change.
So, it must engage in pure contemplation, thinking only of itself.
Aristotle thought immaterial beings could not directly push or pull physical beings.
So, the prime mover is not the efficient cause of the universe or its motion.
It is the final cause.
It causes motion through attraction to its perfection.
Imperfect things seek their good end and are thereby attracted to the prime mover’s pure actuality.
This explains observed motion: things move from potentiality to actuality through the four causes, ultimately because of the prime mover as final cause.

AO2: evaluation of the prime mover

Modern science since Newton has rejected Aristotle’s views on motion.
Newtonian inertia says a moving thing continues unless met by an opposing force.
A rolling ball stops because kinetic energy transfers into friction, not because motion “runs out”.
In space, little friction explains the continued motion of stars and planets.
Continuous motion therefore needs no sustaining prime mover.
Kenny concludes Newton’s law “wrecks” Aristotle’s argument.

Counter

However, Aquinas refocused Aristotle’s argument on the universe’s efficient cause.
This use of Aristotle’s concepts avoids Newton’s critique.
We still need an ultimate explanation of causation in the universe.
Even if cause and effect go back forever, that infinite series still needs explaining.
As Aristotle said, we can ask why an infinite series exists.
Aquinas believed this was the Christian God, but natural theology only proves a generic “uncaused cause”.
So Aristotle’s ideas may still imply a special origin of motion.

Evaluation

However, Hume shows even this upgraded form of Aristotle’s argument fails.
Hume illustrates with a collection of 20 particles.
Explaining each particle explains the collection, so it is absurd to demand a further explanation for the whole.
An infinite series works similarly:
If all its parts have explanations, then the whole series does too.
So Aquinas commits the reification fallacy: mistaking an abstract entity for a concrete thing.
A series is nothing over and above its parts, so it is not a thing needing explanation.
Aristotle’s premise is misapplied: an infinite series may need explanation, but that is found in its parts.
So science and philosophy show neither Aristotle nor Aquinas prove a prime mover.

AO1: Aristotle’s materialist view of the soul

Aristotle thought Plato was wrong that form existed in another realm.
Form is instead an inseparable part of objects, their essence or formal cause.
This view is called hylomorphism.
The formal cause of living things is the soul, giving them vital characteristics.
Plants have a vegetative soul enabling nutrition.
Animals also have locomotion.
Humans also have rational thought.
So, the soul is the body’s formal cause, giving humans their defining characteristic.
Aristotle illustrates this with wax and a stamp.
The soul is like the imprint, while the body is like the wax.
The imprint is not separate, but gives the wax its character.
Similarly, the soul is not distinct from the body, but gives rational thought.

AO2: Critique of formal causation by modern materialism

Modern science rejects formal causation.
A scholastic example is that snow’s whiteness is explained by its form.
But we now know colour results from material structure interacting with light.
After Bacon, science sidelined purely metaphysical concepts with no explanatory necessity.
Aristotle says rational thought is the activity of the soul, the form of the body.
Modern science treats mind as brain structures and processes.
As with snow, what is attributed to formal causation can in principle be explained by material and efficient causation alone instead.

Counter

Contemporary hylomorphists reply that this is not justified.
Material explanation has not succeeded in explaining consciousness or rational thought.
So, we cannot legitimately claim to have eliminated formal causation.

Evaluation

However, something being unexplained does not justify a special metaphysical cause.
Science has many cases once thought to require special categories, like life-force or phlogiston, later eliminated by material explanations.
The whiteness of snow illustrates this pattern.
This does not disprove formal causation, but it undermines its credibility.
Consciousness and thought are mysteries, but the issue is how to approach mystery scientifically.
Mysteries like dark matter and black holes could require new metaphysical categories, but may not.
The same applies to consciousness.
Unless we have clear evidence for formal causation’s necessity, it is unnecessary.
We have vast evidence for material and efficient causation, but none for formal causation.
Therefore, we should investigate consciousness materially rather than formally.

Question preparation

Revision paragraphs:

AO1: Plato’s rationalism: theory of forms & Allegory of cave
AO2: Plato’s cave as an argument for rationalism
AO1: The hierarchy of forms & form of the good
AO2: Plato vs Aristotle on the the form of goodness
AO2: Plato’s argument from recollection
AO1: Aristotle’s four causes
AO2: the modern scientific critique of telos
AO1: Aristotle’s prime mover
AO2: evaluation of the prime mover
AO1: Aristotle’s materialist view of the soul
AO2: Critique of formal causation by modern materialism

Question types:

Questions on, or critically comparing, any of the following:

Rationalism
World of forms
The cave
The hierarchy of forms
The Form of the Good
Empiricism
Teleology
The Four causes
The Prime mover

We have three evaluation paragraphs for Plato, and 3 for Aristotle. So for easy questions focused straightforwardly on Plato or Aristotle in general, we have three for each.

Questions which focus on one part of Plato or Aristotle can be answered the same way, but you need to bring out the relationship between their parts to make the parts not mentioned by the question relevant to the part that is:

The form of the good depends on and is an outworking of Plato’s rationalism and theory of forms in general, and features in the cave as the sun.

Likewise, Aristotle’s prime mover depends on and is an outworking of his theory of the four causes.

Questions which require critical comparison are best answered with AO2 sections where plato and aristotle are put against each other:

AO2: Plato’s cave as an argument for rationalism
AO2: Plato vs Aristotle on the the form of goodness
You could also include an AO2 on Aristotle – either on telos, of formal causation, or the prime mover – which all show modern science disproves Aristotle’s beliefs (though not his underlying method). Showing that while both Plato and Aristotle’s beliefs about reality are unconvincing, Aristotle is ultimately more convincing in his underlying method, in fact its contemporary developments of that method which have shown his particular beliefs to be unconvincing.

Assess Plato’s hierarchy of the forms [40]

AO1: The hierarchy of forms & form of the good
AO2: Plato vs Aristotle on the the form of goodness
AO2: Plato’s cave as an argument for rationalism
- Linking sentence: Plato justified his hierarchy of the forms on this basis of his rationalist epistemology, which he illustrated with his allegory of the cave.

AO2: Plato’s argument from recollection
- Linking sentence: Plato justified his belief in a hierarchy of forms with his argument from recollection.

Analyse Aristotle’s four causes. [40]

AO1: Aristotle’s four causes
AO2: the modern scientific critique of telos
AO2: evaluation of the prime mover
- Intro sentence: Aristotle argued his theory of the four causes allowed us to infer the existence of a final cause of all the motion in the world.
- Outro sentence: So, the four causes are undermined because they lead to a concept of the prime mover which Newton showed to fail. However, Aristotle’s underling method of gaining knowledge through experience is still valid, in fact that’s the method Newton himself used.
AO1: Aristotle’s materialist view of the soul
AO2: Critique of formal causation by modern materialism

Critically compare Plato’s Form of the good with Aristotle’s prime mover [40]

AO1: The hierarchy of forms & form of the good
AO2: Plato vs Aristotle on the the form of goodness
AO1: Aristotle’s prime mover
AO2: evaluation of the prime mover
AO2: Plato’s cave as an argument for rationalism
- Linking sentence: Plato’s form of the good and Aristotle’s Prime mover are products of divergent theories of how we gain knowledge. Plato thought his grounding was justified by his allegory of the Cave, which is an argument for rationalism and critique of the empirical grounding for Aristotle’s Prime mover.

Weirdly worded questions:

Assess Aristotle’s teleology OR: Assess the role of telos in Aristotle’s understanding of reality [40]

For Aristotle – teleology just means his empiricism – his four causes & the prime mover – since they involve teleological (telos) elements.
This is just asking you to assess Aristotle’s theory and its use of telos – in the four causes (final causation) & regarding the prime mover (as the final cause of the universe).