QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

own quality. 105
Plato's influence on the formation of European culture has probably been as great as that of the
Atomists. Even though his influence on the explanation of phenomena that belong within the
realm of the natural sciences cannot be taken as being small, Plato above all proclaimed the
eternal nature of the spirit and its uniqueness in comparison to perishable materials. 106 To Plato,
the essential nature characterising beings was their soul and aliveness. When creating the world,
Demiurgi located understanding in the soul and located the soul in the body. According to his
providence, the universe came equipped with life, soul and intellect. The corporal body of the
universe could be seen, but its soul was invisible and consisted of three parts: the same, the
different, and the existing. The soul's notice of the same and the different was true, since it was
born out of its own movements around itself without either speech or sound. When the soul is
dealing with something that is born and perceivable with the senses, only opinions and beliefs
can be born which however at their best may be reliable and veracious. 107
Aristotle
While Plato attempted to use the intellect to go beyond the sense-world and discover a
transcendental order that lay behind it, his student Aristotle represented pure naturalism. To
Aristotle, the changing sense-world perceived by humans was as primary and fundamental part
of reality as it was to the Atomists. Based on an immense store of empirical perceptions and its
classification, Aristotle targeted an all-embracing and systematic total view of the basic structure
of living and non-living nature. By analysing conformity to laws and possibilities in the real
world, Aristotle began, step by step, to view the Idea-world postulated by his teacher Plato as an
unnecessary duplication of the real world.
Aristotle noticed that the division of reality into two parts resulted in logical difficulties, and that
the existence of the Idea-world could never actually be verified. In fact, unchanging Ideas could
not be properly used to explain either change or even the existence of objects in the sense-world,
because their origins were completely separate from one another. Aristotle stated that even
105 Platon 1982, 203-204, 211. (57e-58c, 63e)
106 Compare Ketonen 1989, 22, 24, 40
107 Platon 1982, 171-172, 179-179. (28b, 36c-37c)
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