"The school of Athens", by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino ( commonly known as Raphael ), is a fresco that resides in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican. It was commissioned alongside three other paintings depicting Theology, Law and Literature. Perhaps symbolically painted across from the Theology fresco, "The school of Athens" is of great significance of us, philosophy enthusiasts, because it depicts many of the great thinkers from western history. Most prominently, it features Plato and Aristotle, engaged in conversation, as its centerpiece.
Plato was a philosopher in Athens. He was a pupil of Socrates; and after Socrates was executed, he founded his own school, called the Academia. Aristotle joined the Academia when he was seventeen years old and Plato was sixty. Aristotle became Plato's star student, and after the latter's death, he founded his own school, the Lyceum ( for which the french word for a secondary school, lycée, comes from ). Aristotle went on to become one of the biggest icons of western thought; just as Plato had done before him, and just as Socrates had done before Plato.
If you look closely at the fresco, you will notice that Plato is gesturing his hands upwards, as if pointing towards the heavens. In contrast, Aristotle is holding his hands outwards, gesturing down towards the earth. This is a literal graphic representation of the famed disagreement between the two famed.
Plato attempted to explain the world around him with abstract rules and ideas; he was fond of concepts that are detached from the physical world, such as mathematics and especially, geometry. He used his reason to make a model of reality and then fitted the data into it. This model he called the "theory of forms" ( which I will talk about on a following post, "Plato and Aristotle, part II" ). Plato was a rationalist. He was a skeptic when it came to his physical senses, and believed that the authentic nature of reality could only be grasped through reason. Thus, his hand is pointed skyward, towards his world of ideas.
Aristotle had a different approach towards discovering the world around him. He was what we call an empiricist. Instead of working with abstract concepts such as geometry ( like Plato who fitted his data into a larger cosmological model ), Aristotle derives model of reality from the data he can observe, through deduction. Aristotle is what we would call now a Scientist; arguably, he was the first great biologist, as he had a passion to distinguish wildlife into numerous classes and categories.
"The school of Athens" is an artistic masterpiece that is representative of the ideology of the renaissance. I liked it so much that it is the background of the homepage of The New Athens post.
On the next post, "Plato and Aristotle, part II", we will be getting to know Plato and his world of ideas.
Amor Fati,
Atlas.
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