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And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her - neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure, - when she has as little as possible to do with the body, and has no bodily sense or feeling, but is aspiring after being?

That is true.

PHAEDO, by Plato.

Socrates - Plato - Aristotle.

Socrates, using the method of his invention, discovered the treachery of senses and that the self-evident truths people so dearly hold are just a little bit more than a hodgepodge of conventions. The more experience we acquire, the less trust we can put into our ability to judge the world's phenomena for what they are. Eclectic accumulation of facts and believes doesn't scale, i.e. there's no manageable structure to control the flow of information; experience is a huge swamp, where each new instance of perception may turn into a death trap.

Plato solved this problem, by discovering a whole new world of abstract immutable ideas that keep our mind's reality together. He, like the Creator, separated light from darkness, i.e. knowledge from opinion, thus giving us, utterly confused by perception, an opportunity to navigate the space of complex phenomena.

Then came Aristotle, who systematically explored this new world and gave it its laws. He developed a reasoning method, which connected the present of senses to the past of accumulated knowledge. With incredible results, he applied his method to all kinds of areas of human endeavour: from biology to poetics. From an Explorer of information Aristotle turned into its Master, a feat that very few scientists managed to achieve after him. And after two thousand years we still speak his beautiful language: logic, substance, essence, category, science.

Chaos - Navigation - Control