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The Legacy of Plato and Aristotle
Condensing their philosophies to their most influential ideas.
Note: I used to begin my university courses with a week each on Plato and Aristotle, but after contemplating the Heretical Idea of Teaching Philosophy while Skipping Plato, I am going to go for it, give my students this as a video lecture, and begin with the medieval philosophers.
Philosophy deals with the biggest and most complex issues facing humanity and philosophical insights underpin all human endeavors. Because the questions considered by philosophy are so large and complicated, philosophy itself is a long conversation about those issues among many people across many years. To compare past perspectives with our own today helps us better understand the questions we consider.
That said, because ancient Greek philosophers are so far removed from our time and social milieu, they are less relevant and influential to us than many other philosophers nearer to us in time. We know of several dozen philosophers from ancient Greece and covering them all can easily fill whole books and university courses, but because we have so many philosophers to cover, we will only briefly discuss the two ancient Greeks who stand out as significantly more influential than the others: Plato and Aristotle. These two giants of ancient philosophy were most influential in the conversation about how we understand the objects in the world that we experience.
Understanding the World Around Us
Plato’s most significant influence was his theory of dividing reality and our knowledge of it between two realms of existence. He developed the concepts of particulars and universals. Particulars are individual objects — a tree or a human — and universals…
