Comrades

Aristotle

This guy was my student for 20 years. Pretty much the best student you could possibly ask for. Not only did he go on to take his place beside me in the Canon of All Time Great Thinkers; he very much followed in my philosophical footsteps. Like me, he adopts a teleological view, trying to explain phenomena in terms of their endpoint or goal. And in ethics in particular he does me proud, focusing on the question of happiness and the best sort of human life, rather than on the attempt to justify ethical principles (the approach taken by so many of these other youngsters).

Now I recognize that in many areas he has his own distinctive viewpoint (yes, Aristotle, I know you're your own person and not just my student). But still I can see that he got there by asking all my questions: the nature of rhetoric, the relationship of form and matter, what it means for something to truly exist, and all the rest of my goodies.

There's good reason that people so often talk about "Plato and Aristotle" in one breath.

Plotinus

Mr. Plotinus wasn't actually my student (he lived 500 years after me, so that would have been difficult), but he may as well have been. People refer to him as a "neoplatonist," but he always thought of himself simply as a Platonist, as someone who was expounding my views. I'm down with that.

He emphasized that the Good is the basis of reality, the cause of everything that exists. And hey—that's exactly what I said in the Republic. He also followed me, more or less, in positing the theory of forms and the notion that there are various levels of being—definitely not the view of most folks. Now it's true that the Plotster was much more dogmatic than I ever was; he never quite got that open-ended, dialogue-y part of my perspective. But hey, he did his best to emulate me and I appreciate that.

Augustine

This guy was in certain ways like Plotinus, picking up on my central idea that there is a single unchanging source at the center of reality, from which everything else emanates more or less imperfectly. But unlike Plotinus, he shares with me the view that the highest truths cannot be straightforwardly stated, and that philosophy at its best teaches indirectly (source).

Unlike Plotinus or me, however, he takes all these ideas in a specifically Christian direction. This is Saint Augustine we're talking about, one of the most important Church Fathers. You dig?

Immanuel Kant

Manny tries very hard to be different. The rest of my comrades so far wisely follow me in having a stylish one name moniker, but I guess that's asking too much of Immanuel Kant. Plus, he has this crazy duty-based ethical system instead of my virtue-based approach. (He claims happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics! I'm like, ooooookay.) Then there are all sorts of other non-Platonic ideas in there as well.

But when it comes to the core of his theoretical philosophy, he really gets it. He knows that the world we perceive through the senses—what he calls the world of appearance—is somehow unreal, a construction. He sees the true world, the "thing-in-itself," as something which is inaccessible to the intellect. Okay, he doesn't have my idea of the true realm as constituted by eternal forms, but I'm just happy to find anyone who shares my two-world thesis.

Rudolph Carnap

I'm sure ol' Carnap would be turning over in his grave at the suggestion that he is a Platonist. For him, talk of unchanging forms or of an immortal soul is pure woo-woo. Heck, Rudolph thinks that anything that can't be explained in strictly scientific terms is woo-woo.

Still, in his own Carnap-y sort of way, he ends up assuming something like a transcendent dimension. How? Well, he's an empiricist and insists that all meaningful sentences must be capable of being empirically verified. But since he can't account for the claims of logic and mathematics in that way, he assumes that all such assertions are true simply by virtue of the meaning of the terms involved. Yes, it's linguistic, but this whole notion of a self-contained realm of meanings existing apart from the empirical domain? Sounds just a little reminiscent of Plato.

The harder they try to get away from the father, the closer to me they end up. It wasn't for nothing that Whitehead said that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.

Rivals

Aristotle

You know how a minute ago I said he was my comrade? Well, I was just trying to be nice. The fact is, that from the moment he came into my Academy, Aristotle was nothing but trouble. "But what about this problem, Plato?" And, "Have you considered this objection to your argument?" On the outside, I was always polite—"Very good point, Aristotle"—but inside I was seething.

And it only got worse the longer he stayed around (and he stayed around for a very long time). He started getting more confident of his own views, and by the end, he was totally rejecting all my main ideas. He trashed my theory of forms, going so far as to hold that particular concrete entities are more real than ideal immaterial entities (can you imagine?). He rejected my theory of recollection. He harshed on my idea that there is a single Good toward which everything aims, claiming that goodness has to be defined separately for each category of thing.

And most fundamentally and maybe worst of all, he rejected the whole notion of a transcendent domain. Instead, he assumes an overarching "naturalism," the view that nothing at all exists outside of the natural world.

Boo!

John Locke

I'm not saying that Johnny didn't have a few good ideas. But he rejects altogether the existence of innate ideas. It's true that he's directing a lot of his attack against Descartes which I'm cool with, since I don't like the guy either. But it ends up also being an attack on my theory of recollection, my claim that the most important kinds of knowledge are contained in us innately.

More generally, his overriding empiricism—the view that all knowledge comes through experience—definitely rubs me the wrong way. So he thinks we arrive at ideal notions like perfect equality or infinity by abstracting away the imperfections in the ideas gained through sense experience. Come on, man, how would we know what the "imperfections" were unless we already had a standard to guide us? That standard is supplied by the forms, and they definitely are not arrived at through the senses.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Just as with Locke, the man says some good stuff. I like his appeal to mathematics as the paradigm of knowledge and the way he attempts to arrive at truth through reliance on reason alone. But he makes something like the opposite mistake of old Locke: where Locke is too stuck in experience, Leibniz is too up-in-the-clouds speculative. The world is composed of tiny little monads, substances that contain all the properties that they ever have had or ever will have…? (Source) I hate to tell you, bro, but that's not only incomprehensible—it also sounds kind of nuts.

What I learned from my teacher Socrates is that you have to take ideas, even your own pet ideas, with several heaping tablespoons of salt. So, Leibniz, look at my Parmenides. You'll see that I apply that same sort of healthy skepticism to my theory of forms, the view that is the bedrock of my whole philosophical outlook. Read it and learn.

Hegel

My student Aristotle said that truth is like the proverbial barn door which no one can entirely fail to hit. In Hegel's case, the truth in his approach has to do with dialectic, his basic method of doing philosophy. Of course, this approach of bringing different ideas or points of view together and using them to refute each other, begins, like most good ideas, pretty much with me. And Hegel, with his notion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis made it more formal than I ever did. But still, I give him props for this aspect of his thought.

The rest of his philosophy I can do without. Part of the problem is the same issue we find in Leibniz: too much wild speculation and not enough skepticism. His attempt to put forward a philosophical system that contains absolute knowledge is just the kind of move I most oppose.

Plus, he holds the view that truth is immanent, that there is nothing outside of the sphere of concepts. But (and you may join me in nobly looking up and off into the distance as I say this) what about that which is higher, that which is beyond language and concepts altogether? Are you not as repulsed as I am by this man's rejection of the realm of the transcendent? Why, if I just squint my eyes a little bit and lift my chin a tad more I can almost see it!

W. V. Quine

You know what I just said (quoting Aristotle) about truth and the barn door? Well, I take it back. This guy Quine manages to miss the barn altogether; his attempt to hit the truth is about as good as 50 Cents' attempt to throw the first pitch of the baseball game.

Like Hegel, he rejects the notion of the transcendent, but he doesn't stop at that. Instead, he goes so far as to dismiss absolute knowledge altogether, even the very possibility of that notion. In this guy's tiny world, there is no knowledge beyond what we find in the empirical sciences.

And it gets still worse: Quine rejects the very existence of the notion of the mind. He claims to be a "physicalist," who insists that only material things exist. In fact, he says explicitly that he himself is just a physical object (source)! What were they smoking in the 20th century anyway?