1001Philosophers

Aristotle vs Plato on Knowledge

Plato and Aristotle disagree about where genuine knowledge resides and how it is reached. For Plato, the objects of knowledge are the eternal Forms, and the soul recovers them by ascent from sensible particulars; for Aristotle, the universal exists in the particular, and knowledge proceeds from sense experience through induction to grasp of essence. The Platonic knower returns to what the soul once saw; the Aristotelian knower abstracts what is intelligible from what is given.

About this topic

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. Philosophers have asked what distinguishes knowledge from mere opinion, whether it requires certainty or can be probabilistic, and how perception, reason, memory, and testimony each contribute. Ancient skeptics challenged the possibility of knowledge altogether, while rationalists located its source in reason and empiricists in experience. Contemporary epistemology investigates justification, reliability, and the social conditions under which beliefs count as knowing.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full Aristotle vs Plato comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the Knowledge quotes hub.

Representative quotes on knowledge

Aristotle on knowledge

  • “All men by nature desire to know.”

    Metaphysics Book I, 980a.21 : Opening paragraph of Metaphysics | Variant: All men by nature desire knowledge. | The first sentence is in the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:10

  • “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

    Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

  • “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history, for poetry expresses the universal and history only the particular.”

    διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει.

  • “My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.”

    Letter to Alexander the Great as quoted by William Whewell , History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), Ch. 2, Sect. 2

  • “Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being affected . To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned.”

    1b25-2a10; J. L. Ackrill (tr.), 1984-1995

All 10 Aristotle quotes on knowledge →

Plato on knowledge

  • “Philosophy begins in wonder.”

    155d, The Dialogues of Plato , Volume 3, 1871, p. 377

  • “I shall assume that your silence gives consent .”

    435b

  • “If the very essence of knowledge changes, at the moment of the change to another essence of knowledge there would be no knowledge, and if it is always changing, there will always be no knowledge, and by this reasoning there will be neither anyone to know nor anything to be known. But if there is always that which knows and that which is known —if the beautiful, the good, and all the other verities exist— I do not see how there is any likeness between these conditions of which I am now speaking and flux or motion.”

    440a–b

  • “155d, The Dialogues of Plato , Volume 3, 1871, p. 377”

    Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

  • “Perception and knowledge could never be the same.”

    186e

All 12 Plato quotes on knowledge →

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