ABSTRACT
Aristotle was a practical man. Though taught by Plato, he rejected his teacher’s idea that reality lay beyond the everyday world in the realm of the Forms. He did not believe in Plato’s myth of the Cave. In Raphael’s painting The School of Athens (1511), Plato points skywards to the Forms; Aristotle, in contrast, reaches forward into the world. His studies went far beyond what we now think of as philosophy: he was, for example, one of the first great biologists. In philosophy his interests were wide-ranging, taking in metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics.
