Neo-Confucianism Is a Philosophy Which Was Born TEST1

Aristotle began as the student of Plato, but a reader is hard pressed to find any particular similarities between the worldviews of the two. In fact, if we have studied Platonic Dualism and Plato's accompanying Theory of Forms, it starts to look like Aristotle's philosophy is based upon the attempt to be as un-Platonic as possible. Plato believed in a double nature of reality -- the real physical world that we can perceive, and a separate (but overlapping) world of "ideas" or "forms" which somehow comprise the eternal essence of those things in the real physical world. But Plato's conception of those forms is in itself vaguely defined, despite the central role they play in his philosophical world system. If Aristotle learned from his old teacher, it was a lesson in how not to approach the practice of philosophy.

In the place of Platonic Dualism, Aristotle propounds a worldview which is termed Aristotelian Naturalism. The first difficulty in explaining Aristotelian Naturalism to a contemporary reader is the fact that, in many ways, it is so close to many of our own basic assumptions about the world that we take it for granted: elements of Aristotelian thought strike us as mere common sense. Soccio notes that Aristotle's father was a court physician and Aristotle most likely learned the basics of human anatomy, and had dissected bodies, with his father before becoming the student of Plato. Although this is not necessarily a proven fact, it certainly makes sense, particularly when we consider Aristotle in light of the honorific title given to him by later eras, including our own: the "father of science." This is clearly the biggest way in which Aristotle seems to have been assimilated completely into our own automatic assumptions -- it is easy for us to take the scientific method and scientific research and discovery for granted, but there was no established institution of science in Aristotle's Macedon. But a large part of Aristotle's philosophy was the belief that reality is to be located in the natural world and observes consistent rules -- he saw no need for the second part of Plato's Dualism. Aristotle thought the distinction Plato made was a form of intellectual analysis which did not imply "ontological status" (i.e., the actually existence of the Forms).