Plato: Plato is one of the world’s best known and most widely read and studied philosophers. Known as the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, he wrote in the middle of the fourth century B.C.E. His earliest works are regarded as the most reliable of the ancient sources on Socrates. His later works, including his most famous work, the Republic, blend ethics, political philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics into an interconnected and systematic philosophy. It is most of all from Plato that we get the theory of Forms, according to which the world we know through the senses is only an imitation of the pure, eternal, and unchanging world of the Forms. Plato’s works also contain the origins of the familiar complaint that the arts work by inflaming the passions, the ideal of ”Platonic love,” and the myth of Atlantis.
Aristotle: Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece in 384 B.C. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician, under whose influence Aristotle developed his great observational talents. For twenty years he was a member of Plato’s Academy as a student and teacher. The early writings of Aristotle were intended for the general public, some written in dialogue form, with a largely Platonic outlook. His approach to philosophy is systematic yet not dogmatic; he constantly questioned his conclusions and found difficulties, and it is in this constant analysis and acute argument that he gained his reputation as one of the most influential philosophers in Western thought.
The Pastoral: Pastoral refers to the lifestyle of shepherds and pastoralists, moving livestock around larger areas of land according to seasons and availability of water and feed. The pastoral genre was invented in the Hellenistic era by the Sicilian poet Theocritus, who may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. The Roman poet Virgil adopted the invention and wrote eclogues, which are poems on rustic and bucolic subjects that set an example for the pastoral mood in literature. Later pastoral poets, such as Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pope, typically looked to the classical pastoral poets for inspiration.
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