I guess one could say that while Plato wanted to close his eyes and see the immutable world of ideas and escape from his cave, Aristotle was the one that wanted to stay in the cave and analyze the things he found there. Plato wanted to rely on reason alone, whilst Aristotle wanted to rely on his senses. It was therefore Aristotle that brought the world the idea of modern science, he was the one that categorized things and devised the terminology that many scientists still use today. Aristotle, whilst studying the natural processes of the world also worked on his own philosophy to reject that of Plato’s and the forms.

Aristotle argued that Plato was wrong, that there were no innate, immutable ideas. If you remember, for Plato, ideas were something that existed independently and immutably outside of the natural world. For Plato the ‘idea’ of chicken came before both the chicken and the egg. Aristotle argued against this. He said that whilst the form of say, a dog, is in someway immutable, the idea of dog is merely a concept; a concept that is based squarely on a number of experiences in which one has seen a dog. Thus the idea or form of dog had no existence independent and its own for Aristotle. It was something that existed as the result of experience. The form was in someway immutable in that it defined certain characteristics that we say a dog has.

This is essentially Aristotle's argument against Plato’s theory of ideas . Aristotle did not believe that there was, somewhere, an immutable mold for the dog. He believed that the form was within the dog in its features, and also in all things. He argued that Plato was trapped in the world of the mind. Aristotle argued that nothing could exist in consciousness without first being experienced by the sense. In comparison, Plato would have said that there is nothing in the natural world that has not first existed in the world of ideas.

So Aristotle argued that we have no innate ideas. That we start blank and fill up with ideas as we experience the world. He did however say that we have innate reason. That is, we have the innate capacity to think and categorize the phenomena in the natural world that we see. For example: ‘stone’, ‘plant’, ‘human’. But our reason is completely empty until we have actually experienced something.

From this standpoint of refuting Plato, Aristotle was able to develop his own philosophy and theory of the world. For Aristotle the world was made up of two things, ‘substance’ and ‘form’. Substance being what things are made of, and form being that things characteristics. So a dog say has the characteristic of wagging its tale, and therefore that is part of its form, whilst once it dies, its form no longer exists and all that is its substance.

As I said before, Aristotle was also concerned with how the world changed. Aristotle believed that everything that is substance has the potentiality to be a specific form. Thus every change in nature, Aristotle said, was the transformation of substance from its potential to its actual.

An example of this can be seen in the chicken and the egg. Every chicken’s egg has the potential to become a chicken. Now, it’s true to say that not all eggs actually achieve that potential, as they end up in a frying pan, etc. However, it is true to say that a chicken’s egg cannot ever become a goose. It can only ever achieve its potential. This potential and actual does not apply to living things for Aristotle. It can also apply to things like rocks. If you throw a rock high into the air, its potential is that it will, and does fall to the ground. This potential is what Aristotle saw as immutable. An acorn would always grow into an oak tree and never into, say, a Ferrari. This is what is known as the telos of a substance. The potentiality is the telos, or the end of goal-making process. This argument of teleogy also held throughout much of Greek society at the time. If you were born to a father that was a cobbler then you would also be a cobbler. Nothing can exceed, or deviate from its potential.

Whilst Aristotle dealt with the reality of things as he perceived them, there was also the matter of dealing with the question of why. Aristotle approached this question by looking at causality. He argued that there were four causes of things, and that the most important was what he called the ‘final cause’. If we take the example of rain we can see these four causes. First there is the ‘material’ cause of rain, in that there was moisture in the air. Next there is the ‘efficient cause’ which is the action of that moisture cooling. The third cause is the ‘formal cause’, this being that the nature or form of water is to fall to the ground. Finally, Aristotle added the ‘final cause’, which was essentially a thing's purpose. In the case of rain it would be that plants and animal and living things need the rain to survive.

It is arguable to say that this is one place where Aristotle differs from today’s world when looking at nature. For Aristotle water, and in the case of the example rain, has a purpose. That purpose is to sustain life. For Aristotle all natural things had a purpose. Today, however, we would probably say that water is a necessity for life, rather than saying that water's purpose is to provide us with life.

If you remember, I mentioned that Aristotle categorized things. This stemmed from Aristotle’s view of logic. By this I mean that he studied things and placed them all within a framework of categories and sub-categories, particular things related to biology. It is in this that we see one of Aristotle’s great achievements left to science, and still used today. Aristotle argued that each and every thing has a logical place within a category. Animal, vegetable or mineral is a prime example of this. All things fall into a category, or at least a sub-category of something else. We put books on bookshelves; we put underwear in one drawer, shirts in another, and so on and so forth. Aristotle saw that this logical methodology was a key to understanding nature and all things around us.

Finally, I think it’s important to look at Aristotle’s view of politics (after all, a column from sp00ky would not be complete without politics would it?). Aristotle famously stated that man is by his nature a ‘political animal’. Political in the sense that he will play and dabble with power each and every day in his life during his interactions with people, be they in responsible office or simply the political relationship between a father and son. For Aristotle, man is nothing without a society around him, for that is what makes him what he is. Therefore the highest form of human fellowship can be found in the form of the state. The question for Aristotle was what form that state would take, or what characteristics it would have. Aristotle described three very brief types of constitution that were good, but Aristotle also warned that each of these had negative aspects which ought to be avoided.

The first was monarchy or kingship, a system in which there is only one head of state. In order for this form of constitution to remain good, Aristotle argued, it must avoid falling into tyranny. The second form was aristocracy, similarly to monarchy, it was important for this form to avoid becoming oligarchy in order to remain a good form of state. A good example of oligarchy can be seen in the likes of the former ‘junta’ in Argentina. The final and third form of state for Aristotle was polity, or what we might call democracy. The negative aspect to be avoided here for Aristotle was that of ‘mob rule’, or what one later philosopher would call the ‘tyranny of the majority’. For Aristotle, all this form of constitution had their advantages, and he did not directly express any as being preferable to the other.

And thus we come to the end of the Greeks and their contributions to the ideas and philosophy of the world. Of course there were many other Greeks we could have looked at, but the three ‘big hitters’ in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the seminal thinkers of the period. I want to jump forward next to the Middle Ages and look at the transition period before modernity as we have come to know it. The time in which Christendom was the driving force in Europe, because, whether one believes in God or not, the period of Middle Ages was a time when thought and philosophy still went on, and it's interesting to see how the ideas of Plato, et al, were able to be snuggly fit into what the they would have probably seen as a regression in ideas back to the mythical world that they wanted to escape from.