Platonic vs. Aristotelian Concepts

 A lot of people have been focused in the powerscaling community on the idea of Platonic Forms and what that means. When comparing a verse that uses Platonic, Neo-Platonic, or more commonly Platonic-ISH ideas with ones that use something like Aristotelian cosmology there can be some confusion. I wanted to give a very quick primer on the differences between these philosophers ideas in a powerscaling sense. 

Plato and Aristotle were two of the most influence philosophers of all time, Aristotle was Plato's student though disagreed with him on a lot and the two form of a sort of duality not just of philosophy but of temperament. There is a famous painting that shows the two philosophers and characterizes their differences in a painting called "The School of Athens." The Part depicting Plato and Aristotle is this:

Plato on the left points upwards. He' was an Idealist who believed in deduction from pure reason, who contemplated and focused on abstract ideas and on the eternal. 

Aristotle on the right gestures around, indicating to the world. He was an Empiricist who focused on learning from the physical world of concrete, physical, and natural processes around them. 

When they come up in powerscaling it's usually in the context of a character who is meant to represent an abstract concept, or just "abstracta" which is the more formal term for it, and people wondering what that means. Both Plato and Aristotle were philosophical realists about these things. That is to say they both believed they existed and weren't just names or categories humans had that made thinking about things easier. However they differed in ways that matched their approaches.

Plato's idea was that there was a world called the world of the forms, and that everything that we perceived physically was an imperfect version of that. Any chair was something that participated in the form of the chair, anything that was red participated in the form of the red, and anything that was in a group of two participated in the form of two-ness. However, these concepts were superior to any instance of them similar to a shadow of a person. This is most intuitive when thinking about mathematical ideas like numbers or geometric shapes. An example in fiction is DC Comics which works by very Platonic rules. There is a conceptual world called the Godsphere where the concepts of everything exist and emanate into the physical world. So Ares in DC is the God of War and is present in every war in every universe, but his true self is in the godsphere. 

Aristotle's ideas are used a lot less often currently. However to sum up Aristotle's understanding of concepts specifically, Aristotle believed that everything was a combination of its matter, the physical part of it that changed, and its essence or identity, the part that didn't change and was definitional to what it was. In this conception things have concepts but instead of being far away, they're more inside you, like you might imagine a soul would be, represent what is the definition of you, etc. Aristotle was still a realist here and believed that essences existed but they were inseparable from the thing so if you took every single chair in existence and destroyed them, you would have, at least temporarily, destroyed chairness. An example of this in modern fiction would be something like a Star Seed from Sailor Moon. Star Seeds represent a person's identity. You can remove them and if you do the things they represent don't exist because they no longer have a thing making them them, and you can control them to change the identity or essence of a person. 

Personally, I think it's pretty fair to say that if you can resist the manipulation of platonic form, you should be able to resist the manipulation of Aristotelian essence as both of them are an attempt to understand the same phenomena and answer the same question of what makes a thing what it is. The only real differences would be:

1: If you had Aristotelian essence manipulation (like say Galaxia's star seed removal) and you were fighting a platonic concept, you might not have the RANGE to reach their true self because, in Aristotle's philosophy, the identity of things is only substantiated in the thing itself where in Platonic philosophy it's in a conceptual space outside space and time detached from any individual instance. 

2: An Aristotelian concept is essentially just the substantial of every instance of the concept, while the Platonic concept emanates them as shadows. If you destroy every human on Earth an Aristotelian concept of humanity would stop existing because it is literally made of every human on Earth. Meanwhile, a Platonic concept would be unaffected because it would be equivalent to destroying your shadow to you. 

It does get a lot more involved but this is a quick explanation of the difference.