Comparing Plato And Aristotle's Ideas

Plato and Aristotle Plato (c.428-347) was born in Athens. He was the student of Socrates. The basis of Plato’s Philosophy is his theory of ideas. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was born in Macedon in northern Greece. He was a student at “The Academy” where was taught Plato’s ideas in Athens. Later Aristotle opened his own school called “The Lyceum”. Aristotle and Plato were great philosophers and still they have tremendous impact on thinkers. Even though Aristotle was a student of Plato’s school , his ideas about theory of forms and poems were different from Plato and he criticized Plato’s ideas. In the paper, I will show the different points that they have the ideas of forms, poetry and the methods they used while arguing their ideas. Plato looked for the answer of the question “What is the real world?” He believed that the world which we live in is full of shadows of the real ones. People thinks that the world is the real one because they see, touch, smell, taste and hear just the world they live. However, Plato approached the reality from different aspect. He believed that there is a

The reason why poets shouldn’t take part his “The Republic” is that poets gave information about copy world and their words were just reflection of the copy world. Therefore, it means that poems were copies of the copy and the result of it is not valuable. For Plato, poets were just madness and their poems were not truth. On the contrary, Aristotle’s idea on poetry was more positive than Plato. As I mentioned above, Aristotle believed that everything has its own essence and soul. So, even if Aristotle like Plato thought that poetry is an imitation, his ideas were separated from Plato about giving value to poets. To illustrate, music has rhythm and harmony and dance imitates with using the harmony. In this case, poetry imitates with language and has own essence and