Plato & Aristotle Dialogue

Dialogue on the Theory of Forms

Aristotle: ….but how can form and things exist apart from each other?

Plato: Things owe their reality to the existence of Forms. Forms are the ageless, unchanging, unmoving and indivisible perception of an ideal thing. Form does not exist in the real world; it is only an awareness of what something is. For example, you cannot reach out and touch beauty but yet it exists in the sense that we can see a beautiful house, or a beautiful flower or that a person possesses beauty. The thing then, is dependent on the Form in order to exist.

A: But without the individual thing existing there would be no Form by which to describe the thing in the first place. Your idea of participating in a Form is meaningless. You can’t have the Form of circularity without a thing that is circular.

P: But Form is a higher sense of reality. It is perfect and flawless thus it cannot exist alongside of things. Before there were people to think about such things there were things that existed but only because the Form was present first.

A: Ok, but if things existed before people did in order to have thoughts about the things then how could the Forms be present without the thing to begin with. Form is a universal which is something that more than one individual thing can be. Individual things can be beautiful, large, blue, orange or circular. However, only I can be me. No one else or no other thing can be me so that makes me a particular. The particular has to exist in order for the Form to exist. For example, a house is a house and beauty is a Form in which the house can exist but without the house then how can there be a beautiful house.

P: Well my dear student, in order for the thing to exist at all it would have to have some Form in order to associate with. Therefore Forms are the source of all reality and true knowledge and things are less than the Form in which the thing participates. The things that we can touch and see are...