Paste your essay in here…Weston Kirby
Dr. Doolan
Philosophy 353
19 November 2018
Formal Causality for Plato and Aristotle
By his middle dialogues, Plato provided philosophy with an account of a particular theory of causality, namely the Platonic Forms. Some philosophers prior to Socrates had written of a formal causality, but Plato began by exploring how he could be certain of things, introducing a comprehensive system of Forms. Prior to Plato, Pythagoras had claimed that beings owed their being to their imitation of numbers, while Socrates examined forms as they could provide explanation of universals as definitions or ideas. Aristotle gives insight into the inception of Plato’s theory, claiming that he was inspired by his teacher, Socrates. Plato took his teacher’s work on definition and applied it not to the sensible things, “but beings of this other sort, ‘Ideas’” These ideas would come to form the Forms, but Plato’s system was limited. It primarily accounted for the causes of things only formally, lacking Aristotle’s material, efficient, and final means of causality. In Book I, chapter 9 of the Metaphysics, Aristotle lists reasons to refute Plato’s Theory of Forms as sufficient causes of sensible things. Naomi Reshotko and Pieter d’Hoine both have opposing views on how to interpret the Forms. Reshotko claims that Plato’s Forms govern the individual person and allows his mind to function — whether he is aware of his relationship with the forms or not — while Pieter d’Hoine submits that Aristotle’s critique in the Metaphysics demonstrates that without other manners of causality, the Forms are insufficient to be these formal intelligible concepts that cause being.
It is in Plato’s Republic — his work on justice and politics — he gives insight into the Forms through examining the philosopher and truth. Socrates’s interlocutor in Book V of Republic, Glaucon, asks Socrates what traits constitute the true philosopher. Plato answers through Socrates that the philosophers are the “lovers of seeing the truth.” Plato’s truth amounts to the Platonic Forms, but he explains them by examining a particular trait, beauty. Socrates tells Glaucon that “since beautiful is opposite of ugly, they are two things…and since they are two things, each of them is also one.” Plato can claim that the beautiful and the ugly are two things insofar as they are not the same (i.e., separate), but each is one as it is one in itself. Plato draws this conclusion about beauty to apply to what is just and unjust — what is good and not the good. From these particulars, Plato asserts that this his argument applies more generally to all the Forms. He explains that of the Forms, “each of them is itself one thing, but because they appear all over the place in partnership with actions and bodies, and with one another, each of them appears to be in many things.” From this brief description of Book V, Plato concisely reveals many truths about the Forms. The many Forms act not solely on physical things, but also on other Forms. This is illustrated when considering the hierarchy of Forms that Plato sets out, that is, the Form of the Good is the highest Form — that their knowledge as well as their “existence and being are also due to it; although the good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power.” So, the Good informs the other Forms, and the Forms are good inasmuch as they participate in the Form of the Good, but Plato’s more immediate point is in claiming that the Forms cause the sensible things that participate in them just as the Forms participate in the Good. The Forms’ “partnership with actions and bodies,” then, is in a formal way, providing the sensible things with their essence, namely what makes the sensible thing what it is. Thus, the Forms act as an archetype for any given body. For example, multiple humans have an immaterial Form that they correspond to. But because the Forms are immaterial, they cannot be perceived through the senses, so the Forms can only be known in relation to the sensory object that corresponds to them since “thought is unable to see the nature of the beautiful itself or to be passionately devoted to it.” It is the mind, then, that is able to grasp the Forms since they are intelligible and the sensible objects participate in the Forms.
The relationship of how the individual person interacts with the Forms is considered in Naomi Reshotko’s examination of “Plato on the Ordinary Person and the Forms.” Reshotko not only defends the forms, but sh4 explains in more detail how an ordinary person can be in touch with the Forms through what Plato had labelled as a sort of particiaption. Plato has argued, though, that only the philosopher can know the truth, while the lovers of sights and sounds “mistake beautiful things for beauty itself thinking they are referent to the term ‘beauty itself.’” Reshotko claims, however, that when a person mistakes the perceptible beauty (or any physical object) for the Form of beauty (or any Form), that is, to “think that this governing principle can simply be further perceptible objects.” Reshotko asserts that without the Forms, Plato or any lover of sights and sound would not be able to distinguish between the attributes of perceptible objects. Without a Form to correspond to, a believer in only the perceptible objects “cannot maintain his views while distinguishing beauty from ugliness.” That is, he would not be able to tell the beautiful from the ugly without some standard of objective beauty on which to place a judgment. Moreover, Reshotko claims that empirical knowledge cannot even tell the difference of large and small without reference to the Forms. Reshotko thinks it is clear that no lover of sights and sounds would be able to see chairness, for example, and that the true philosopher can only understand the perceptible with reference to the Forms.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics provide a significant refutation to Plato’s Theory of Forms in Book I, but Aristotle does not discount a system of formal causality altogether. Of Aristotle’s many complaints, it is clear that Plato’s Forms are not sufficient. Aristotle asserts that “they are not the cause of movement or of any change whatsoever.” Since Plato states the Forms are immaterial, the immaterial could not cause motion in the material; thus, there is a lack of a material cause. Neither can the Platonic Forms cause knowledge of sensible things “since they are not their substance,” and knowledge enters the mind through the sensible, and Form must be present in the perceptible thing — for if the Form is separate from the object then the object cannot be known. That is, Plato’s system works whereby someone knows an object that allows him to perceive of the Form intelligibly, but Aristotle is claiming that if this is true, no one could ever judge the perceptible world immediately but only attempt to understand the Form. Further, Plato’s Forms lack an efficient causality — for “to say that they are paradigms and that the other things participate in them is utter empty words and poetic metaphors.” Aristotle is asserting that an object cannot just participate in a Form without efficient causality since there is no way that the object could have come from the Form, so Plato’s model Forms are not sufficient to cause the sensible realm — not if they are separate nor aspects of the objects.
Pieter d’Hoine takes Aristotle’s refutations of the Forms further, explaining that there is disagreement in the justification of the Forms themselves. Thus, for the grounds Aristotle had set forth as well as Plato’s individual and internal contradictions, the Forms should be rejected. D’hoine takes particular issue with Plato’s claim that there are Forms of non-substances, which implicitly arise as Plato allows negations to exemplify the Forms. He claims that in book I of the Metaphysics, “Aristotle’s way of proceeding is to show that, even on the assumption that the Platonic arguments for the existence of separate Forms were valid, they would introduce certain types of Form which the Platonists do not actually accept.” Aristotle generally has an opposing view of the Forms, introducing substance in book IV of the Metaphysics. Aristotle asserts that logically, substances are that which are not predicable of another since the predicate of a subject must be said of that subject and Aristotle also states that substances cannot be present in a subject (so substances must exist in their own right), because then it would be an accident term, that is, one that is said of another subject (and accidents are only what can be said to exist in another). D’Hoine cites numerous examples where Plato’s arguments are not sufficient, most noticeably in the “‘one-over-many’ argument [that] implies Forms of negation.” D’Hoine paraphrases the one-over-many argument by claiming “that for every multiplicity of sensible particulars to which we apply the same name, there exists a Form apart from these particulars.” If this is true, then all tables correspond to one Form of table that the sensible objects (tables) participate in. Arguing from Aristotle’s definition of substance and accidents, however, namely that “all Forms are substances,” then it follows that “all participants in Forms are necessarily substances, too.” This marks the internal mistake that d’Hoine claims Plato submitted in relation to non-substances following Aristotle’s logic. That is, “as a consequence of the doctrine of participation, there can only be Forms of substances” If there can only be Forms of sensible objects that are of substance, then there is no doubt that non-substance Forms cannot exist. Anything not of substance is considered accidental for Aristotle, and accidental things cannot exist in their own right.
Thus, the competing arguments in regard to the Platonic Forms explain that the Forms are what make every object known to an ordinary person, or that Plato simply misunderstood substance, confusing it with accidental attributes. While Reshotko and d’Hoine examine the Forms in different manners, it is unique that one attributes the Forms to everything that a person can know by participation in them, while the latter claims that Plato’s argument was doomed at the very beginning.
Bibliography
Aristotle, Metaphysics. In Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, edited by Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, C.D.C. Reeve, 540-550. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1995.
D'Hoine, Pieter. "Aristotle's Criticism of Non-Substance Forms and Its Interpretation by the Neoplatonic Commentators." Phronesis 56, no. 3 (2011): 262-307. Accessed November 19th, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23056295.
Plato. Republic. In Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, edited by Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, C.D.C. Reeve, 330-350. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1995.
Reshotko, Naomi. “Plato on the Ordinary Person and the Forms.” Apeiron 47, no. 2 (2014): 266-292. Accessed November 19th, 2018. https://doi-org.proxycu.wrlc.org/10.1515/apeiron-2013-0004.