Aristotle On Happiness In Plato’s State

Aristotle

 

The following is a guest post from Toby Coe.

In Book Two of The Politics we witness the exciting clash of two conflicting political ideologies, Aristotle’s politics being primarily based on pragmatic concerns; whilst Plato’s state is founded on more idealised principles. In this essay we shall examine Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s utopia and whether these criticisms are valid, concluding that Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato are broadly successful, because they expose Plato’s conception of happiness as false.

Aristotle has two main complaints concerning Plato’s state:

1) The practice of wives and children being held in common is both impractical and wrong.

2) Communism among the guardians will be inimical to their happiness and bad for the state.

Plato On Immortality

The following is another essay I wrote back in 2008.

Does Plato Provide A Good Argument For the Immortality of the Soul?

Plato (423 – 347 BC) provides several arguments for his claim that the soul is immortal, and for various reasons none of these are convincing. Their fundamental flaw is that the existence of a kind of soul to which the arguments apply is presupposed. Most of the arguments are found in his Socratic dialogue Phaedo (of which the Recollection Argument is also found in the Meno, but I do not cover that version here) and a further important one is found in the last book of The Republic (another Socratic dialogue).