A More Lasting Contributor to Philosophy: Comparing Aristotle to Plato

A More Lasting Contributor to Philosophy: Comparing Aristotle to Plato

Contribution of philosophers to modern ideas and thoughts is a matter of great historical discourse. Presented in this essay is such a debate - about who between Aristotle and Plato made the most contribution to the field of philosophy. The question about who is the greatest contributor to philosophy and therefore better a philosopher than the other, according to Matthew E. Kenney, may not assume a clear-cut argument. This is essentially, because the determination of a person's worth to the course of history may not be easy unless it is based on a single yardstick, criteria or a value-based scale. Regardless of the scale, however, the two philosophers remain very influential in modern philosophical thought. On a plain comparison of whose philosophy contributed the most to modern philosophical discourse, a number of distinctions arise. Based on what I value as a human being, I grade the two on their meticulousness in defining the human life and needs and consider Aristotle the better of the two.

First, Plato may be considered as the greater philosopher based on his pioneering of modern philosophy. It is true that Plato preceded Aristotle not only in birth, but also in exploring the human intellectual domain. According to Matthew E. Kenney, Plato was the first to create a discipline distinct from sophistry, rhetoric, and poetry. Plato is also credited for the first comprehensive metaphysical scheme; an idea that continues to footnote modern Western philosophy. He is the father of modern realism, epistemology, militarism and the first to voyage into the concepts of virtue, and justice. Moreover, if one counts the entire Socratic corpus as the works of Plato, then Plato not only becomes the author of Western civilization but also the first Greek philosopher from whom ideas on authoritarian and scientific strains of thought arise. Finally, Plato may be credited for the mode of consciousness upon which Aristotle's future works were based. He was particularly able to crystallize and fashion the idea of human consciousness-epistemology, nature, religion, reality, and the self, etcetera- for the first time.

Having spoken so favorably about Plato, however, I wish to observe that Plato's numerous inadequacies of thought were filled up by Aristotle, a fact that makes the latter a better philosopher than Plato. According to Chad Wiener, Plato and Aristotle both worked within the same paradigm- that in which the fundamental purpose of philosophy was to question the basic truths of reality, the worth of human actions and the best form of life to live as humans. Based on this observation, then, Aristotle must have contributed more in his works than Plato must have to answer these questions. According to Chad Wiener, Aristotle's conception of life is much more coherent as compared to Plato's concept. His philosophical