The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas

Abstract

The objection with which in the Metaphysics ¹ Aristotle introduces his criticism of the theory of Ideas expresses a difficulty which has tended to alienate the sympathy of most students who approach the study of Plato. The hypothesis, Aristotle says, is a superfluous duplication of the phenomenal world; it is as if one should think it impossible to count a number of objects until that number had first been multiplied. This objection, even tacitly entertained, distorts the motivation of the hypothesis; that it misrepresents Plato’s express attitude towards scientific problems, the well-known statement of Eudemus quoted by Simplicius on the authority of Sosigenes amply proves.² The complications of the planetary movements had to be explained, Plato asserted, by working out an hypothesis of a definite number of fixed and regular motions which would ‘save the phenomena’. This same attitude is expressed in the Phaedo where Socrates explains the method of ‘hypothesis’ which he used to account for the apparently disordered world of phenomena;³ the result of this method, he says, was the Theory of Ideas.⁴