What is real?

What is real?

1. Plato

   • Forms or ideas as the "really real"
   • Thoughts
     • The best we can do in this world is to imitate or mimic the perfect Forms. "as they actually exist in a perfection we can never replicate"
     • The forms have a real existence outside our minds.
     • Forms and ideas are the most real things that exist.
     • Idealism
       • The belief that the most real entities are ideas and other immaterial entities.
     • "Really real" is what we grasp through our minds rather than through physical experience.
     • Our senses show us beautiful objects, but only our reason can reveal the Form, or Idea, of Beauty.
     • Plato was not willing to trust what the senses offered as information about reality.
     • Our bodies are inferior to our minds and not really to be trusted, that our emotions can get us into trouble, that only reason and logic can lead us to truth.

2. Aristotle

   • The Forms may appear to serve no purpose in sense objects. They give the object its form or identity.
   • entelechy
     • "inner purpose" or "end"
   • There is no matter without Form and no Form without matter.
   • We could learn the Forms of things only by studying and examining the things themselves.
   • Aristotle believed the sense world was a great laboratory and a source of endless learning.

3. Both believe in the division of the world into Form + Matter

4. Epistemology (theory of knowdledge) and Axiology (theory of values)

5. Aristotle disagree with Plato on the question of a separate world of perfect forms.