Does anyone know the difference in how Aristotle and Plato viewed the Theory of the Forms?

Answer 1

I. Theory of Forms

"All western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato," Alfred North Whitehead once said famously. And with much justification, if indeed philosophers can be judged as much by the influence they have wielded as by anything they wrote or taught. Plato cast the widest philosophical net and ensnared many minds of varying temperaments and proclivities: among them, Aristotle, Plotinus, Philo, St. Augustine, Avicenna, St. Bonaventure, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Emerson, Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, and Santayana. Platonism inspired and informed the earliest teachings of the Christian Church; crept into the thinking of various medieval scholastics; figured mightily in the doctrines of certain Renaissance thinkers; invigorated a sect of influential philosophers in Britain in the late seventeeth century (known as the "Cambridge Platonists"); elicited the hatred of Nietzsche and his many nihilistic followers in Europe; and affected innumerable artists, mystics, poets, and prophets over the ages.

The linchpin of Platonism is the theory of forms, a doctrine which receives surprisingly scant treatment in the dialogues but which nevertheless undergirds Plato's approach to ethics and metaphysics, aesthetics and epistemology. The theory is taken up in Book X of The Republic, is discussed in the Phaedo, taken apart in the Parmenides, and revisited in two later dialogues, the Timaeus and Laws. Below is an excellent adumbration of the theory.

Aristotle held the view that form was one of the physical world's four causes. The four causes were listed as(1) Material, which is the matter an object is made of, (2)Formal, which is the driving force which makes an object act the way it does. The third (3) is the Efficient, which is the external effect on an object (ex. sunlight for plants) and the fourth (4) is the Final cause , which is the purpose an object serves. This fourth cause is determined by the Formal cause.

Aristotle claimed that the human mind naturally thought in the abstract and that the fact that a person could separate forms from objects in their own mind didn't necessarily mean that forms existed separately from objects. Aristotle calls the theory of forms "idle chatter" in Posterior Analytics.