OK, so one difference is that Shaquille O'Neal once called himself "The Big Aristotle." I'm not aware of any "Big Socrates" or "Big Plato." (Shaq was riffing on the fact that Aristotle was unusually tall for his time period. Which means he was probably, oh, 5'10.")
Anyway, post HW responses here.
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Plato vs. Aristotle.
To be honest I had a difficult time understanding what Aristotle is trying to say.
Plato describes desire as a wanting of something you don't have. If you seek beauty that means you dont have beauty. Even if you have something, you desire to keep it and have it in the future when you may not have it. I THINK Aristotle says that desire is apart of your soul in which your body knows when you need something and desires it to feel pleausure. He says, "For where there is sense-perception, there is also both pain and pleasure, and where these, there is of necessit also wanting" (168). Our body can sense when we are lacking something or when we may want to stay away from pain or fear, so if we need what we lack we desire to go get it and feel that pleasure.
That's good, Jessica.
Don't be scared of the Big Aristotle, peoples. We'll figure it out.
Plato and Socrates (Diotima) seem to believe that finding "the good" would have to be reached through loving someone's (preferably someone hot's) soul and not their body because if it was a physical love, it would be with a woman. Aristotle, however, argues that the soul and body are inseperable. He argues that the soul, if it can be removed or divided from anything it is from itself and not from the body.
I'm sure there is a better way to explain this but am I on the right track?? Not at all?
Aristotle questions Empedocles and his thoughts on plants. Drawing from the idea that roots grow downward based on the movement of the earth and the remainder of the plant grows upward in the same way fire would move, Aristotle asks what holds these two OPPOSITES together. His answer: the soul. To Plato/ Eryximachus, the answer is love, the union/ harmony of opposites. Therefore the Soul IS Love? (too far of a reach?) I guess this isn't really a discrepancy more so than they are differing viewpoints.
This is great, I'm really impressed with these responses.
Plato vs. Aristotle
From what I could understand from the book, I came to a contradiction of how both think about finding/understanding concepts. While reading, I noticed that Aristotle is big on using the senses to understand truth; basically touching, seeing, and feeling will give one the concept to comprehend what that thing really is. Plato on the other hand only sees that one can only understand the truth with abstract concepts. For example, there is no tree, only "treeness" from class discussion.
Aristotle says " we must take care not to overlook the question whther there is one definition of the soul." (402b, line 4-5)He brings up many ideas of the soul and its ability to not exist without the body for a person needs it to feel many things- love, hate, fear, or pity. Aristotle says that "desire comprises wanting, passion, and wishing" (414b, line 2-3) while Plato (Diotima) believes in mundane love.
I am having a hard time understanding Aristotle's ideas, but here is my attempt. Aristotle presents his idea of the soul as a matter of substance, physically relating it to the actuality of the body. The body and its senses are used as a model of how life is an extension of the soul. Plato/Socrates deal with love only as an abstract concept. Even as Diotima, Socrates' only model of love is an in-between state between the gods and man.
I also had a hard time understanding Aristotle, but I think when he says "it seems that all the affections of the soul involve the body" contradicts what Plato says about love. Plato says that love is not of the body but of the mind. While it Aristotle says that the affections of the soul involve the body.
I thought Aristotle would make more sense if I reread it at 2 in the morning, as confusing things often do. It didn't. However, here's my attempt at a response:
I think that Aristotle and Socrates differ in their idea of desire. For Socrates, desire is something you want, and you want to keep having it in the future to reach "the Good." Aristotle makes it sound like desire is just basted on touch and things we want or need, such as desire for things that are pleasant when there is pain and hunger and thirst (170). Socrates never stated that desire includes our basic needs, and therefore contradicts Aristotle.
Aristotle seems to imply that the soul is an extension of bodily senses-touching, seeing, feeling. This directly opposes Plato's notion that love and soul are products of thought. However, I have to admit that Aristotle is much harder to understand than Plato is.
So what I got from Aristotle is that the soul is given to us by god. The soul controls the body and it's actions. Plato believes the soul is in between. It's not a tangible object.
I am having a harder time understanding Aristotle than I did Plato....
Plato vs. Aristotle
I am not sure if this is extremely different, but in my mind these thoughts seemed to contradict.
Plato thought that everything that existed was NOT REAL, but merely a copy of a greater idea, like "treeness", even in its fully functional form. But Aristotle leans more into (or at least I think he does) the fact that objects CAN be real, when they have a soul (or do their job), but when they stop working for what they are made for (example, page 166 near the bottom when he talks about an eye and how it is no longer an eye once it stops working). So, does the function relate to whether or not it is really “real”? I would assume that Plato thinks no, since its just an idea that can be modified since nothing is perfect, but Aristotle, I think, would assume that it is true, since it would have no purpose if it didn’t do anything.
Aristotle states that the soul rules over the body. "The soul does not exist without a body and yet is not iself a kind of body" (169 line 20). Everything that has life, has a soul. In contrast, Plato says that everything in the universe is controlled by love;anything and anyone can love. We cannot survive without love, just as we cannot survive without a soul. I believe that both Aristotle and Plato would think that if the soul is removed from any object, then that object is dead and has no purpose. Just as without love, we are dead. Like in Aristophane's speech, where the two halves kept on dying because they were incomplete. We are incomplete without a soul and love.
I don't even know if I'm really getting what Aristotle is trying to say... Many times I found myself zoned out, reading nothing more than just words...
Instead of talking about just abstract things as Plato does (like the whole concept of Love) Aristotle concentrates more on how emotion and physicality relate to one another. What I understood from Aristotle was that the soul and body work as one. As one experiences different emotions, the soul and body are both affected... not just one or the other.
Yeah...Aristotle's writing is pretty dense. But from what I picked up, Aristotle feels that emotions are a state of the soul, therefore love is a condition that the soul can be in. The soul controls the body, so when a soul is experiencing love, the body acts accordingly (i.e. flirting, kissing, etc.). Plato, on the other hand, explains love as a multi-step process towards achieving the ultimate bliss, via proceeding from lesser quality loves to ultimate happiness. So, Aristotle's view is more of an explanation of how it affects the individual, while Plato attempts to explain to us how we ought to go about loving.
I didn't really get what Aristotle was saying but here is my shot at how Aristotle might have contradicted Plato:
Aristotle says that the soul and the body are inseparable and that the soul is the form that makes living things become what they are: alive. Since the soul and the body are inseparable, it appears that the soul is just an extension of our original senses since it is apart of our emotions or something like that.
In my opinion Aristotle really is talking about love, I can't really grasp that he is. It seems he really is just talking about the soul. I mean you could relate love to the soul if you wanted but it just doesn't seem the same. Aristotle is teaching a lesson about the soul and the body I don't think he is giving even half as much recognition to love as Plato is.
I kind of see where Shae's coming from. I mean, the Symposium is a dialogue about love, whereas De Anima is not.
At the same time, I think we can relate Plato's love as a dynamic principle, a principle of motion by which we attempt to improve and perfect ourselves, to the Aristotlean idea of soul, the dynamic principle that makes the life of every creature seek to fulfill its purpose. In the end the Symposium turns out to be about more than just love in the sense of a romance between two people. Love almost becomes a principle of physics for the entire universe. But Plato isn't quite sure. I think one thing Aristotle is doing in De Anima is developing this idea further.
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