Aristotle and Plato both believed that there were forces at work in nature that were beyond sight and not of the physical world and eternally present. What we call philosophy is actually a second philosophy, due to these invisible forces. Plato, one of the world's greatest philosophers, once had a revolutionary idea. He came up with the idea of Shapes. These Forms were perfect and immutable. All the rest of existence took various qualities from the Forms and used them to create their own forms and purposes. There was one Shape, however, that stood out from all the others. The form of good. It is here that Aristotle, a kindred student of Plato, related his idea of God. Through reason, facts and many similarities, it is proven in great detail that these two ideas are the same thing. In addition to Plato and Aristotle, Istvan Bodnar makes this statement: if there were no separate forms – entities such as the unmoving mover at the top of the cosmos – that are devoid of matter and do not belong to the physical world, physics would be what Aristotle calls the first philosophy. Since there are separate entities, physics depends on them and is only a second philosophy. To begin with, Plato's Form of the Good was essentially the giver of life. It was often linked to the sun in the sense that they both gave life and allowed all life to grow. So, if the Sun is the giver of light, being the creator, then Aristotle's God bears a striking resemblance to this idea. Aristotle realized that for all science and nature to make sense, there must be a beginning. Science states that energy cannot be created or destroyed and nature is observed to be cyclical in the way it destroys and creates life. Every river has a beginning, but even so the water must come out... from the center of the paper... finally look at the light. In conclusion, Plato's idea found a new purpose with Aristotle's God. They have similarities ranging from their eternal existence and how they function and cause movement in the world. The Form of Good does this through its light and heat, while the prime mover does this by causing the movement from which all other matter, organic or otherwise, can exist and change along with time. The Prime Mover and the Form of Good are solely responsible for movement in our world. Both the Prime Mover and the Form of Good are eternal and immutable by another force. Therefore they must, by logic, be the same entity. Works Cited Bodnar, Istvan, “Aristotle's Natural Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/aristotle -natphil/.
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