The concept of the good in Plato and Aristotle

Running Head : THE GOOD LIFE

The Good Life (Name (University (Professor (Course The Good Life

The good life has always been a subject of different philosophies . For according to most philosophers , human ultimately live towards or is searching for the way to have a good life . According to them , the good life ' is the goal of every human being , a pursuit that every man would want to attain

As far as reality is concerned , this line of thinking indeed has its practical roots . Ask every man , they would all agree that

indeed it is a human purpose to achieve a good life , unless of course the man is a simpleton or plainly insane . It is no doubt therefore that men of great minds would succumb to this kind of conclusion , among them was Plato and Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle

Both of these men were sons of Athens , in the years of its glory and when philosophy as a discipline and a way of life is still in its infancy . They were some of the few great minds that have shaped and written the basic concepts that has serve as the starting point of the Greek philosophy

According to these two great thinkers , a good life denotes happiness to those who find it . It is in this state of life that men have been able to exhibit of these philosophers have agreed to what a good life shall be . They do not posses the same idea concerning the entirety of virtue or of the most important virtues

While Plato believes that the way to achieve the good life ' life is through the lack of want and through realization of real love , Aristotle argues that the good life ' could only be achieved through the means of the development of a perfect state ' which would create virtuous citizens . It would therefore the task of this to show how these two philosophers differ and who among them shall be credited as right and whose philosophy shall be dismissed as wrong . In to do so , it would be best to take a look at the point in which the two philosophers started to differ , the notion of good

Plato : On the Definition of Good

Plato defined good ' as the end in which the person have succeeded in fulfilling his being . It was also described by Plato as an attribute of perfection and self-sufficiency which is sought for by all rational beings

In Plato 's philosophy there are two worlds , the world of ideas and the physical world . According to him , the world of ideas consists of everything that is perfect while the physical world is comprised of imperfect copies of the world of ideas

Goodness is not an attribute that could be found in the end of a spectrum , for it does not have an end . Rather what that is seldom called as bad is merely an absence of goodness and not a perversion of it

In the Platonic view , in between the...