Philosophy

Trajectory of thought : Plato , Aristotle and Descartes

Introduction

Man is , arguably , a creature bound to penetrate below the facts of everyday life ' so as to think about what is real , true , valuable and meaningful in human life (Lavine , 1982 ,

.2 . The desire to know - or to seek the truth - about his humanity , the world and even the Infinite reality has indeed pushed man to engage in the admirable art of deep thinking , i .e , philosophy . Hundred after hundreds of schools of thoughts , as indeed thousand after thousands of learned men and

women have emerged in history bringing their own suggestions to answer the many puzzling questions in life . This trend eventually came to be known as the history of philosophy Rationale and Methodology

This attempts to present the thoughts of three philosophers who - more or less - all had the same aim : provide a philosophy in search for the truth . In the course of this work , the theories that were submitted by Plato , Aristotle and Rene Descartes shall be presented . These philosophers are just three from among the long list of thinkers who had something to say about the world (and how one ought to properly understand it . What this study attempts to specifically achieve though is to present their respective teachings , draw a line between what makes them different from one another , and establish their contributions in the larger context philosophical discourses

This study is both expository and analytical in approach and content . A used to substantiate the points that would be shortly developed

Plato 's myth and the divided line

The first thinkers who - perhaps officially - identified themselves as philosophers came from the place of Ionia , then part of the larger Grecian province along the sea of Mediterranean (Marias , 1967 ,

. 11 Now called as Pre-Socratics , i .e , philosophers who came before Socrates , these thinkers were said to have engaged in thoughtful quest to understand the nature of the world . From them later emerged Socrates and his erstwhile pupil Plato - the man who would put philosophy at another level of maturity . Using the Pre-Socratics and most of Socrates ideas as basis for the construction of his own philosophy , Plato too had wrestled with the problem of explaining physical nature by asking what is the one basic material out of which the world is made (Lavine 1982 ,

. 23 . Still , Plato had all his fascination directed towards a philosophy that seeks to unravel that eternal ' being , out from which emanated the world of things that neither had perfection nor eternality In the process , what Plato created was a metaphysics marked by stark dualism - a dualism which distinguishes what is real and what merely derives existence from something (Lavine , 1982 ,

. 26

Plato 's infamous divided line ' theory of knowledge stems from a peculiar way of understanding the world . Simply put , Plato 's epistemology derives from his metaphysics or , more specifically , from his cosmology . One can glimpse at how Plato understands the basic formation of reality by looking at...