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A SOURCB-BOOK IN JAINA PHILOSOPHY
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was a simple man. He did not write any book but he discussed philosophy with the intellectual of his time sitting in the market of the Athens. He had many great disciples and one of them was Plato.
Plato was an aristocrat. He hated democracy. The ideal state is the 'Republic' in which the philosophers should be the king. The philosopher-king should have very simple and virtuous life and guide the destinies of the nation entirely for the good of the people. He made a distinction between the different classes on the basis of the function, like the guardian class, the soldier class and those whose function was to obey i. e., the workers class.
Plato's political and social philosophy was based on metaphysical structure of the decrease of reality. The idea is real. It is perfect, it is eternal and it is simple. The things of the world are the imitations of the objects in the physical world. Ideas participate in the physical object and to the extent to which ideas participate, they are real.
Aristotle was Plato's disciple. It can be said that Aristotle gave the first lessons of rationalistic philosophy which synthesise the idealism and rationalism to some extent. Aristotle said that there are two fundamental principles of the universe : 1. form and 2. matter. Both of them are abstract principles. The phenomenal world is the expression of form and matter. Form is potentiality and matter is actuality.
Aristotle was a genius and he wrote books on many subjects like Philosophy, Mathematics, Astronomy, etc. It is said all the later philosophies are nothing but footnotes to the philosophy of Aristotle.
After Aristotle, pbilosophy in the west declined. The authority of Aristotle was so great that he was referred to as the only greatest authority and no development in philosophy took place till the end of the middle age. The middle ages were the dark ages.
Revival of philosophical speculation was to be found in the rationalist and empiricist schools in modern philosophy beginning with Descartes as a great rationalist and Locke as a great empiricist. In Kant, we get a synthesis again. Kant is considered to have brought a
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