Editing Idea (section)

==History==
The argument over the underlying nature of ideas was opened by [[Plato]], whose exposition of his [[theory of forms]]—which recurs and accumulates over the course of his many dialogs—appropriates and adds a new sense to the Greek word for things that are "seen" (re. εἶδος) that highlights those elements of perception which are encountered without material or objective reference available to the eyes (re. [[wikt:ἰδέα|ἰδέα]]). As this argument was disseminated the word "idea" began to take on connotations that would be more familiarly associated with the term today. In the fifth book of his ''Republic'', Plato defines philosophy as the love of this formal (as opposed to visual) way of seeing.

Plato advanced the theory that perceived but immaterial objects of awareness constitute a realm of deathless forms or ideas from which the material world emanates. Aristotle challenged Plato in this area, positing that the [[Phenomenon|phenomenal]] world of ideas arises as mental composites of remembered observations. Though it is anachronistic to apply these terms to thinkers from antiquity, it clarifies the argument between Plato and Aristotle if we call Plato an [[Idealism|idealist]] thinker and Aristotle an [[Empiricism|empiricist]] thinker.

This antagonism between [[empiricism]] and [[idealism]] generally characterizes the dynamism of the argument over the theory of ideas up to the present. This schism in theory has never been resolved to the satisfaction of thinkers from both sides of the disagreement and is represented today in the split between [[Analytic philosophy|analytic]] and [[Continental philosophy|continental]] schools of philosophy. Persistent contradictions between [[classical physics]] and [[quantum mechanics]] may be pointed to as a rough analogy for the gap between the two schools of thought.