Plato's Rouge And Aristotle Comparison

Aristotle’s God and Plato’s Demiurge share many similarities and differences. Aristotle’s God (also referred to as The Good) is understanding, everlasting, and the actuality that causes the universe. Plato’s Demiurge, or the Craftsman, is described as good, everlasting and also the cause of the universe. Plato’s description of the Demiurge is not as specific as Aristotle’s description of God, so to compare and contrast the two is left partly to interpretation. There a few insights in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Plato’s Timaeus that allows us to come to a basic understanding of what they thought.

Aristotle writes that God had to have caused the universe. He explains that something had to have initiated motion, without being initiated into motion itself . This First motion is what caused the universe into being . This first motion he later calls God. God was the first cause that caused everything into being out of necessity. Plato agrees that the demiurge was the cause of the cosmos . They both believe that something needed to cause the cosmos. Aristotle says that God’s existence is necessary to cause everything to be and continue to exist. He says that God’s existence must “always actually operate” because it is God’s existing essence that keeps the universe in existence. Plato’s Demiurge differs because it constructed

We know the demiurge is good, because the cosmos is good. The greatest good that the demiurge constructed is the intellect, because it is “most beautiful and best in accordance with nature.” This is similar to Aristotle’s writings about understanding . God’s actuality (its being) is the “actuality of understanding” . God is good because the greatest good is understanding, and he must understand understanding in order to understand himself. Understanding is the greatest good, therefore the source of all understanding, God, must be