Since the Renaissance it has been traditional to regard the Academy and
the Lyceum as two opposite poles of philosophy. Plato is idealistic, utopian,
otherworldly; Aristotle is realistic, utilitarian, commonsensical. (This
viewpoint is reflected in the famous depiction of Plato and Aristotle in
Raphael’s Vatican fresco The School of Athens.) In fact, however, the doctrines
that Plato and Aristotle share are more important than those that divide them.
Many post-Renaissance historians of ideas have been less perceptive than the commentators
of late antiquity, who saw it as their duty to construct a harmonious concord
between the two greatest philosophers of the known world.
By any reckoning, Aristotle’s intellectual achievement is stupendous. He
was the first genuine scientist in history. He was the first author whose
surviving works contain detailed and extensive observations of natural
phenomena, and he was the first philosopher to achieve a sound grasp of the
relationship between observation and theory in scientific method. He identified
the various scientific disciplines and explored their relationships to each
other. He was the first professor to organize his lectures into courses and to
assign them a place in a syllabus. His Lyceum was the first research institute
in which a number of scholars and investigators joined in collaborative inquiry
and documentation. Finally, and not least important, he was the first person in
history to build up a research library, a systematic collection of works to be
used by his colleagues and to be handed on to posterity.
Millennia later, Plato and Aristotle still have a strong claim to being
the greatest philosophers who have ever lived. But if their contribution to
philosophy is equal, it was Aristotle who made the greater contribution to the
intellectual patrimony of the world. Not only every philosopher but also every
scientist is in his debt. He deserves the title Dante gave him: “the master of
those who know.”
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