Aristotelian Epistemology Compare And Contrast

Platonic and Aristotelian Epistemology: Comparison and Contrast

As teacher and student, both Plato and Aristotle believed that knowledge is

possible and therefore attainable. They agreed that the mind connects the soul and the

body, containing within it the key to understanding what it means to exist in this world

and how our existences are interrelated. In other words, what is a man and what does it

mean to know? For Plato, knowledge must consist of what is genuinely real and not

appearance only; it must be acquired through thoughts and ideas. If something is real, it

means that it must be fixed and unchanging. He believed that truth is form separated from

matter. Aristotle, however, believed that knowledge is perception; it is acquired through

the senses.

In the Divided Line and Myth of the Cave, Plato touches upon what

he believes knowledge is. The “divided line” corresponds to the two main divisions of

worlds: the visible world and the intelligible world, each with their own subdivisions.

The visible world contains images and material objects; the intelligible world contains

Mathematical objects and the forms. In the Divided Line, Socrates asks, “Would you not

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admit that both the sections [=subdivisions] of this division have different degrees of

truth, and that the copy is to the original as the sphere of opinion is to the sphere of

knowledge?” He later goes on to say that “corresponding to these four [sub-] divisions [of

objects], let there be four faculties in the soul: reason answering to the highest,

understanding to the second, faith (or conviction or belief) to the third, and perception

(picture-thinking or conjecture) to the last; and let us suppose that the several faculties

have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth.” [The Republic, Bk. VI

(507-513), 74-77 in