Plato 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC

Aristotle 384–322 BC

• Classic period in Ancient Greece

• Victory in the Greco-Persian Wars

• Athens Democracy

• Peloponnesian wars (Sparta vs. Athens)

• Alexander the Great conquests

Is reality a mathematical structure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTF-hHGbQ6s
 Plato’s theories
• Theory of Forms, Ideas, Archetypes or Paradigms (Eidos)
• The real existence of universals as fundamental realities beyond the material world of appearances
• The Supreme Good (Justice), Truth, Beauty.
• Identity and Difference
• Theory of the Soul
• The soul is the fundamental reality of human existence
• Immaterial, Simple, Immortal
• Pre-exists in the world of Ideas
•Theory of Knowledge
• Sensory perception does not offer knowledge
• To know is to remember the original relation of the soul with the Ideas
• Maieutic method and Dialectics (Allegory of the Cavern)
• Ethico-Political Theory
• The ethical formation of individual virtues (disposition induced by our habits) as a citizen is fundamental for the
development of a fair state.
• Justice is the higher virtue of the soul and the state
Aristotle’s theories
• Logics and Ontology
• Everything that exists can be unequivocally defined in its particularity
• Substance and Accidents
• Forms and Matter (Hylomorphism)
• Act and Potency
• Experience and sensory perception is the origin of knowledge. We can arrive to general conclusions by induction and achieve
necessary knowledge by deduction

• Theory of the Soul

• The actuality of a body that has life
• Nutritive, Appetitive, Rational

• Ethics
•The natural lives of the rational soul: Life of pleasure, political life, contemplative life
•Happiness as the end of human existence (teleology)
•A money-making life is unnatural (means to and end)
•Virtue consists in the appropriate middle ground between the vicious extremes of excess and deficiency
• Aristotle rejects Plato’s belief on the real existence of universal ideas. For
him, there are only substances and their accidents, and each particular
substance has its nature defined by its form and inherent ends.

• For Aristotle, the ideas are the abstractions that our mind produces to
represent as images and concepts the forms of particular substances.

• Aristotle rejects Plato’s ideal models of ethical-political formation, and

instead proposes to judge virtue in each situation finding the middle
ground between two vicious extremes, according to the ends of the
natural human lives.
• Plato´s main sources to study his notions of human soul and human
behavior: Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic.

• Aristotle’s main sources to study his notions of human soul and human
behavior: On the soul, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics.