Plato believed our souls are permanent and before we were born into this existence, our mind experienced the perfect forms of objects in the “World of Forms” and thus we could identify and classify things according to this imprinting. However, Aristotle insisted that we learn from observation and our minds automatically form general concepts. There is a famous question which can show the different ideas between Aristotelianism and Platonism. That is - what is the standard of a table since there are so many kinds of tables? Aristotle would say that you have to see fifty different tables and then you will form a concept of “tableness”, while Plato believed that we had experience the perfect form of a table in the World of Forms and therefore being able to classify tables.
Personally, I agree with Aristotle’s theory that we learn from observation and our minds automatically form general concepts. If you give a sponge ball to a newborn baby, he may grab it, punch it or even have a taste of it. All these actions seem very funny to us, because we know that this sponge ball is only for playing, not eating! But the newborn baby has never seen this before. Therefore he does not know what it is. However, after seeing several different sponge balls, he will learn that, despite different colours and sizes, they are all not edible food, but attractive toys. This is a good proof that shows how babies, who have never experienced this world, form general concepts of a new item.
As for more general questions, such as what is handsome or beautiful, there are more things that Plato’s theory of Forms cannot explain. If we look back into the history of China in Tang Dynasty, Chinese people thought plump – in today’s people’s eyes, fat – were beautiful. But nowadays, we seldom connect fat, but slim with beauty. With many other similar examples, it is very easy to see that people’s values have been changing over the ages. If there is a “World of Forms” existing, how could Plato explain the change in values?
However, there are things that Aristotle’s theory will not be able to explain – when we see some tools that we have never seen before, we are still able to ‘guess’ what are their uses. Is it just by intuition?
In conclusion, I would believe in Aristotle’s theory rather than Plato’s theory of Forms, though it is still not perfect.
