Title: Understanding Plato and Aristotle
Understanding Plato and Aristotle

To better understand the difference between Plato and Aristotle, this is a useful video:

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The wider picture, where did it all start? - summary of chapter 1 of Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition)

The wider picture, where did it all start? - summary of chapter 1 of Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition)

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Foundation of Psychology
Chapter 1
The wider picture, where did it all start?

Introduction

This book describes the growth of psychology as an independent branch of learning and tries to comprehend the essence of the discipline.


The invention of writing

The introduction of written records represents one of the most important moments in the development of science.

The preliterate culture

Preliterate civilisation: civilisation before writing was invented.
Though these civilisations have not left us with written testimonies, it is possible to discern several important features of them by studying existing cultures that do not use writing.
This research revealed three important characteristics of knowledge in these kinds of cultures:

  • Although cultures without literacy know how to make tools, start fires, obtain shelter, hunt, fish, and gather fruit and vegetables, their skills are not based on an understanding of how things work, but rather on practical rules of thumb of what do do when.
    • There knowledge is confided to ‘know-how’ without theoretical understanding of the underlying principles
  • The fluidity of knowledge
    Knowledge of the actual history of the tribe is limited to two generations and the function of the oral tradition is mainly the transmission of practical skills
  • The existence of a collection of myths and stories about the beginning of the universe, life and natural phenomena, in which human traits are projected onto objects and events.
    • Animism: explanation of the workings of the world and the universe by means of spirits with human-like characteristics.

The first writing systems

Written language appeard separately in at least four cultures:

  • China (around 6000 BCE)
  • Egypt (around 3200 BCE)
  • Sumer (around 3200 BCE)
  • America (around 300 BCE)

These four written languages were preceded by protowriting, the use of symbols to represent entities without linguistic information lining to them.

Characteristics of writing systems

From an early stage, writing systems were a combination of pictograms and phonograms.
Pictogram: an information-conveying sign that consists of a picture resembling the person, animal or object it represents.
Phonogram: a sign that represents a sound or a syllable of spoken language.
Phonograms were gradually replaced by simpler signs symbolizing meaningful sounds in language, (phonemes or syllables).
The use of phonograms to represent phonemes led to the alphabetic writing systems.

Logograph: a sign representing a spoken word, which no longer has a physical resemblance to the word’s meaning.

Written documents form an external memory

Writing and the accumulation of knowledge

The importance of writing lies in the external memory written reports provide about the knowledge available at a certain point in time.
This is important because it allows an accumulation of knowledge.

  • New thinkers do not have to rediscover what was previously thought, they could just read it.
    This does not mean that insights are never overlooked.
    • But, insights can be retrieved if one is motivated to look for them.

Written records not only made more information available, they also subtly changed the way in which knowledge was preserved.

  • Before the advent of writing, important legends were memorised as verses
    • The rhythm and rhyme of the poem helped the narrator remember the correct phrases, so that the contents did not change too dramatically from one storyteller to another
  • Written texts allowed cultures to relax on the formal constraints and concentrate on the content

The reader

Who can read?

Written records only have impact if somebody can read them.
For most of history, the number of people who could read was relatively small.
In addition, the early scripts lacked an important characteristic that makes alphabetic languages easier to read: spaces between words.
Only in the eight century did writers start to put spaces between words.

  • Before this, nearly all readers read aloud or at least had to mumble while reading.

The influence of orthography

Reading acquisition is easiest in languages which a transparent relationship between spelling and sound.

Reading without critical thinking

For a long time students were taught to read and understand texts exactly as they were.
They were in no way encouraged (and were often discouraged) to question the writings or to compare them to other writings).

Scholastic method: study method in which students unquestioningly memorise and recite texts that are thought to convey unchanging truths.
The scholastic method was prevalent in schools up to the twentieth century.

Interim summary

  • Features of the preliterate civilisation:
    • Knowledge confined to know-how without theoretical knowledge of the underlying principles
    • Fluidity of knowledge
    • Collection of myths and stories about the beginning of the universe (animism)
  • Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures, in each case it was preceded by proto-writing
  • Writing consists of a combination of pictograms and phonograms
  • Written records form an external memory, which allows an accumulation of knowledge
  • For a long time the number of readers was limited. In addition, they were not encouraged to think critically about what they were reading (scholastic method)

The discovery of numbers

Another development that has been crucial for the growth of knowledge is the discovery of numbers.

The limits of visual perception and the special status of the number five

The ease of understanding the numbers one to three

The possession of goods required to ability of count them.
It is reasonable to assume that quite early in their evolution humans could make distinctions up to three, which were represented by one, two, and three makings.
Newborn babies and all kinds of animals can distinguish between one, two and three entities: subitising.

Larger numbers and the need for grouping the tallies

A problem with tallies to represent numbers is that they rapidly exceed the limits of perception.

  • Analogue codes start to fall apart for larger quantities (like IIII or IIIIII)
    A first solution was a grouping of the tallies, IIII I.
    This method was used independently in several cultures.
    The most popular grouping has a base five.
  • The number five is the first entity that really exceeds the perceptual limits
  • The number five coincides with the number of fingers on a hand.
    • Gradually, the base number five started to get a different symbol.

Giving numbers names and symbols

The names one to ten

Humans had a struggle before they could come up with a handy numerical system.
Names for numbers existed before languages began to split up.

The problem of naming the teens

11-19

Due to groupings of the tallies, at some point it was realised that large numbers were best represented as multiples of smaller numbers, so-called base-numbers.
The most frequently chosen base number was 10 (double five).

Representing numbers by symbols

Once the different numbers had their names, it was a small step to represent them by different symbols.

The discovery of place coding

Although the Greek and the Roman number notation was a major achievement, it was not the most parsimonious or transparent system. The length of the symbol series was not systematically related to the base 10 structure of the numbers.
A much better system was developed in India.
Here, people started to work with nine different symbols to represent the numbers one to nine.
In addition, they used the place of the symbols in the digit string to represent powers of 10.

Place coding system: system in which the meaning of a sign not only depends on its form but also on its position in a string.
Works only if there is a symbol for the absence of a quantity at a certain slot (zero).
In the beginning, this was solved by inserting spaces between symbols.

Interim summary

  • Knowledge depends on counting and measuring. The first written forms of counting consisted of lines (tallies) in the bones and stones
  • Because it is difficult to discern more than four lines in a glance, the tallies were grouped. The grouping usually occurred in fives
  • Gradually a separate symbol was used for five and multiples of five
  • Later numbers systems were based on multiples of 10
  • Number names indicate that the intention of numbers was a slow process; it took quite some time before a useful system was discovered
  • The Greek and Roman number systems were suboptimal because their notation did not assign a meaning to the place of digits. Such a place coding system was developed in India. This required the symbol for 0.

The fertile crescent

The presence of written records marks the distinction between prehistory and history.

Fertile crescent: region in the Middle East with a high level of civilisation around 3000 BCE; included the Ancient Mesopotamian and the Ancient Egyptian civilisations.
Mesopotamia and Egypt started keeping written records and developed a number system.
Whether the inventions in both regions occurred independently, or they influenced each other, is still a matter of debate.

Ancient Egypt

Two main contributions from the Egyptians

  • Geometrical knowledge
  • The devising of a calendar consisting of 12 months of 30 days and and extra 5 days at the end of the year

Ancient Mesopotamia

Mathematical knowledge was more sophisticated in Mesopotamia.

Conditions for growth of knowledge

  • Political stability
  • Urbanisation
  • Patronage
  • The availability of a writing system that was easy enough to be learned by enough people so that a critical mass could be reached.

Interim summary

Civilisations in the Fertile crescent:

  • Ancient Mesopotamia: mathematics (algebra, astronomy, calendar)
  • Ancient Egypt: geometrical knowledge, calendar, hieroglyphs

The Greeks

In the beginning, the Ancient Greeks borrowed heavily from Egypt and Mesopotamia.
But they soon added their own knowledge.

The start of philosophy

Ancient Greece was probably the first culture that started to ask serious questions about the nature of the world they lived in.
Philosophy: critical reflection on the universe and human functioning: started in Ancient Greece.

Plato

Plato was the first thinker to call philosophy a distinct approach with its own subject and method.
He wrote his philosophy in dialogues.

The realm of ideal forms

Plato made a distinction between:

  • The realm of eternal, never-changing ideal forms
  • The realm of ever-changing material reality in which the forms or ideas are imperfectly realised and which we perceive.

We perceive nothing but the shadows of the objects.

Plato considered the soul and the body as two distinct and radically different kinds of entity.
The soul defined the person.
The soul was immortal, made of the leftovers of the cosmos-soul.
It travelled between the stars and the human body was temporarily inhabited.

  • Because human souls were part of the cosmos-soul, they had knowledge of the perfect realm.
    • Therefore, humans could access to the true ideas, by focusing on the innate knowledge brought by the immortal soul.
  • For Plato, the true path to knowledge was the inward path of reasoning rather than the outward path of perception.

For Plato, the most prestigious knowledge was mathematical and geometrical knowledge.
In these disciplines new information derived from a set of principles by means of reasoning.

The three parts of the soul

Plato defended the idea that the soul was divided into three parts

  • Comprised reason
    This allowed humans to get access to the realm of ideal forms
    Guided humans to a virtuous life in search of abstract, non-worldly perfection. This was the ideal fulfilment of human nature
    Reason was situated in the brain
  • Sensation and emotions (like anger, fear, pride and courage)
    Mortal and situated in the heart
    To avoid it polluting the divine soul, a neck separated the two
  • Lower part of the soul.
    Appetite and lower passions (lust, greed, desire)
    Localised in the liver

Aristotle

Aristotle was a student of Plato, but deviated in important ways of his mentor.
He wrote about a great variety of topics.

Three types of knowledge

Aristotle divided knowledge into three kinds:

  • Productive
    Concerned with making things
  • Practical
    How men ought to act in various circumstances, both in private and in public
  • Theoretical
    Truth
    Further divided into three classes
    • Mathematics
    • Natural science
    • Theology

Theoretical knowledge starts with axioms

According to Aristotle, theoretical knowledge consisted of a series of axioms from which the remaining knowledge was derived by means of logic.
The axioms were self-evident truths about nature, which were acquired through observation and intuition, and of which the final cause could be discerned.
Final causes: the purpose of things in the universe.

Aristotle’s universe consisted of

  • The earth in the centre, surrounded by the moon
  • Mercury
  • Venus
  • The sun
  • Mars
  • Jupiter
  • Saturn
  • The fixed stars

Two region were distinguished in the universe:

  • Sub-lunar region
    From the earth to the moon
    Everything here was a mixture of four elements
    • Air
    • Earth
    • Fire
    • Water
      Everything here showed constant change
      Each of the four elements had a natural place and all objects had a propensity to travel in a straight line to their natural place. No other motions were possible unless they had an external cause.
  • Super-lunar region
    From the moon to the end of the universe
    • Filled with aether, a divine and incorruptible element
    • Contained stars moving in perfect harmony

Knowledge of the organisation of the universe and the propensities in it, together with perceptual information, provided humans with the axioms from which all other knowledge could be derived via logic.
Aristotle developed a system of how to thing logically, to decide what reasoning resulted in true knowledge.

Logic

Aristotle called elementary statements ‘propositions’.
They consisted of two terms related to each other, either in an affirmative way or in a negative way.
Syllogism: argument consisting of three propositions; the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion. The goal of logic is to determine which syllogisms lead to valid conclusions and which do not.

In his writings Aristotle set out to enumerate which syllogisms invariably led to true conclusions and which led to false ones, thereby defining ways of reasoning that are valid and others that are not.

The role of observation

Aristotle struggled with the role of observation in the generation of knowledge.

  • On the one hand, Aristotle attached much importance to careful observation and documentation.
  • On the other hand, Aristotle was clear that observation alone was not enough for true knowledge.

Theoretical knowledge for Aristotle first consisted of knowledge derived from axioms by means of logic.
Observations helped to formulate the axioms.
The axioms were more fundamental that observations, they defined the essence of things, what is was to be that thing within the universe.

Perception was the source of knowledge, but was not knowledge itself.

On the soul

The psyche discriminated living from non-living things.
It consisted in three kinds:

  • Vegetative soul
    Present in all living things, including plants.
    Enabled organisms to nourish themselves and reproduce
  • Animal souls (or sensitive souls)
    Provided the owners with locomotion, sensation, memory and imagination
  • Rational souls
    Only humans
    Enables them to reason consciously and lead to virtuous lives

The foundation of schools

Something the Greek society introduced was a class of literate individuals who hired themselves out for teaching and who transferred the culture.
As a result, reading and writing were quite widespread in Ancient Greece.
It resulted in creation of four prestigious schools.

The shift to Alexandria

The Greek culture underwent a big expansion under Alexander the Great.
The Greek culture was propagated over a much wider area, expanding from Egypt to India and including the whole Fertile Crescent.
This created a new dynamic of interactions, the Hellenistic culture, and which continuous after Alexander the Great’s death when the empire fell apart.

Much of the new dynamic took place in Alexandria.
Here thinking was more influenced b y mathematics and became much more specialised than the grand, universal philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

Interim summary

  • Ancient Greece was the birthplace of philosophy and saw major advances in medicine.
  • Two great philosophers were Plato and Aristotle.
  • Plato and Aristotle founded
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Historical Psychology
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