Aristotle's Ideas about Reality Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Aristotle's Ideas about Reality - Article Example This fundamental difference between the thinking patterns of the two Greeks resulted in a dualistic approach to comprehend Reality, each with its own arguments and counter-arguments. Plato believed that the world is a timeless, ordered cosmos whose reality transcends the temporal and empirical manifestation of the concrete surroundings on Earth. He hypothesized the existence of Forms, or Ideas, which represent the true Reality of the universe, and which are found in the world which we perceive in a combination of various degrees at various instances. Each manifestation in the world has an Idea which transcends it. For example, a chair gets its property of being a chair through the transcendent Form of Chair, which represents the common quality among all chairs in the world. As we break the chair to make a stool, the degree of Chair in that element decreases, and the degree of Stool (the transcendent Idea of Stool) in the element increases, till a point, is reached when the ‘Sto ol’ property (rather, Stooges) of that element overcomes the ‘Chair’ property (or rather, Chairness). At this point, the element transforms from a chair into a stool, and this is all due to the ‘Ideas’ which manifest themselves in that element. In such a way, Plato perceived, there were ideas for everything evident in the world, which was the pure representation of that quality. The Form of Beauty was pure beauty which manifested itself in various elements on the Earth to a varying degree.