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Comparing Plato And Aristotle's View Of Changelessness In Different Cultures

995 Words4 Pages

Leyu Zhang
February 22, 2015
Change in Changelessness
Change is a difference over time that one can observe in all things in this material world. Throughout history, philosophers and civilizations have pondered the role and importance of change, and came to different conclusions. Plato and Aristotle had different views on change and what it meant, while the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mayan cultures viewed change on a much bigger scale. Their understanding of change and how they evaluated it ultimately had a big impact on how they lived their lives.
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Born into an influential and wealthy family, Plato devoted his life to philosophy and the path to enlightenment. Plato believed in the rule by the few best, elitism, and in the superiority of philosophers. In order to illustrate the difference between the enlightened philosophers and the unenlightened wanderers, Plato devised the allegory of the cave. In this allegory, people are chained in a cave, forced to see only the shadow of objects passing by a flame. These unenlightened people actually believe that the shadows they see are the real objects.
The analogy, then, is that the things we perceive are also shadows of “The Object”, and that we fail to grasp this perfect Object …show more content…

Take, for example, his friend and colleague, Aristotle. A similarly famous philosopher, Aristotle developed his own ideas on time and change. While he did acknowledge Plato’s theories, Aristotle focused instead on the physics in the world of change. Change in anything was interrelated with time; change cannot exist without time, and yet time does not exist by itself. Aristotle defines time as “the number of movement in respect of before and after.” The focus here is on the fact that time is a number, and given that, that it needs something to count. Here, change is useful, even necessary because without change, there would not be time. Hence, change is positive to Aristotle, due to the utility that it

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