Page 18 - GALIET FORMS AND UNFORMS: Aristotle´s Refutation to Plato IV

“we must first of all supervise the storytellers. We’ll select their stories whenever they are fine or beautiful and reject them when they aren’t” (Rep II, 377b). Although there are many sciences whose intentions are good, not all of them participate in Goodness. If knowledge of the Form of Good is not taught and present, these very sciences are detrimental to humankind’s wellbeing by encountering the very opposite.
Further, Aristotle disputes the notion of the Platonists that “all goods, and that the goods that are pursued and loved for themselves are called good by reference to a single form” (1097a, 10-12) 3⁄4 such form Socrates calls Justice. Following Glaucon’s line of argument in Book II of Plato’s Republic, Aristotle affirms that the good cannot answer to one idea because there are two groups of things: things that are “good in themselves” and things that are “useful”. Aristotle, like Glaucon, does not agree that for something to be truly Good it has to be Just while for Socrates justice is indeed intrinsic and beneficial since for him Justice is the “finest good” and “something to be valued by anyone who is going to be blessed with happiness, both because of itself and because of what comes from it” (Rep II, 357-359). While Aristotle insists that things such as intelligence or sight are still good even though they might be pursued for the sake of something else, Socrates would persist that they can’t be good unless one benefits from them for that which benefits participates in the greater form of Good: Justice. Precisely because the “idea of good is good in itself”, Plato would assert that the Form could never be empty
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