“The wind blew a leaf off of the tree.”
1.
Plato’s metaphysical position is the wind, a leaf, and the tree are mere copies of a perfect form of wind, leaf, and tree. There is in reality only one leaf -- leafness, one tree -- treeness -- on wind -- windness, and so on and so forth. What I see in the world is multiplicity but what holds the diversity of all that I see into a single unified world is made possible by a transcendent world of forms that is more perfect and real than this world. This world changes, which accounts for the wind blowing, and the trees falling, while the world of the eternal form is just that -- eternal and unchanging. Plato’s epistemological position is that while I see in this world the wind blowing through the trees and the leaf, it is a lesser form of knowledge. Through my senses what I perceive a lower form of knowledge on the divided line than the truth that comes through contemplation of a higher form of mathematics. Aristotle’s metaphysical position is that the wind and the tree are particular things that contain within themselves the form of “leafness,” “windness” and “treeness.” From an epistemological point of view when I perceive the wind blowing through the trees, the image imprints itself on my mind and forms a picture of what is actually happening in reality. In sum, Plato needs a separate “world of forms” to make sense of reality and truth while Aristotle brings both worlds and combines them into one.
2.
There is a form for the leaf and for the tree. Forms can work together to create even more complex wholes from their distinctive forms. For example, a book is made up of distinctive parts that give it the form book. The leaf is made up of green, water, et cetera which also have their form. I can make sense of the disparate parts not through the objects themselves, but through the knowledge I have gained through my soul, my mind, which is connected to the world of the form. So, the material parts of the tree, and so forth, are not as real as the immaterial nature of the form.
3.
Aristotle does not completely dismiss the knowledge of the forms. However, Aristotle privileges material reality over immaterial reality. He does not discount abstract thinking, but rather, he makes his physical view of the world reliant on inductive reasoning into how the world works. Aristotle simply takes the forms from their lofty metaphysical place above, and sandwiches them in this word that we see. So, for example, the form of leaf is inherent in a particular leaf. The forms inhere in the particles that give them their unity. So, real knowledge is still construed through the forms, it’s just that Aristotle rethinks the metaphysical nature of how the forms operate.
4.
I agree with Aristotle. We learn of the world through our senses. Also, it seems like too much work to posit, like Plato does, a completely separate world of forms. Aristotle’s theory, to defend his position further, maps well onto modern science. When we study wind velocity on a tree to see if the leaf falls off or not, we do not investigate an unknown formal reality. Instead, we investigate the empirical reality we can construe though our powers of observations. And since the mathematics we can construct to formulate the velocity of the wind blowing on a tree, it would seem to suggest that Aristotle's work better than Plato.
