Raphael's School Of Athens Analysis

Plato influenced Aristotle, just as Socrates influenced Plato; however, each of these philosophers moved in a different direction than their influencer as time advanced. In Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens,” Plato can be seen pointing toward the sky as Aristotle contrastingly points toward the ground. Raphael’s painting captures Plato and Aristotle’s differing beliefs regarding form and matter. For Plato, form exists outside of and separate from matter; in Raphael’s painting, Plato’s point toward the sky acknowledges this as he held forms to be unchanging ideas and saw matter as particulars which are finite and subject to change. Conversely, Aristotle held form to be inside and inseparable from matter; in Raphael’s painting, Aristotle’s

For Aristotelian students of nature, teleological explanations of natural phenomena are indispensable to studying nature because Aristotle sees natural phenomena to all contain a teleological end. According to Aristotle, “…the same discipline studies both what something is for- i.e., the end- and whatever is for the end. Nature is an end and what something is for; for whenever a continuous motion has some end this sort of terminus is also what the motion is for” (Physics, 194a30). Therefore, Aristotle sees every biological organism as trying to reach a certain end. For plants and animals, they are simply trying to reproduce, whereas human beings have a much more complex end due to their capacity for reason and rationality:

If we advance little by little along the same lines, it is evident that even in plants things come to be that promote the end- leaves, for instance, grow for the protection of the fruit… it evidently follows that this sort of cause is among things that come to be and are by nature. And since nature is of two sorts, nature as matter and nature as form, and the form is the end, and since everything else is for the end, the form must be what things are for. (Physics,

The end, however, does not exist because of these things, except insofar as they are the material cause, not will it come about because of them; still, in general, the end (the house or the saw) requires them (the stones or the iron)… The student of nature should mention both causes, but more especially what something is for, since this is the cause of the matter, whereas the matter is not the cause of the end. (Physics,