China Social Science Review

No.1, 2022

In-Depth Research on Western Philosophy in the Light of the Question of Forms

(Abstract)

Zhuang Zhenhua

Western philosophy, as the heart of Western civilization, stems from a series of major forms that are both comprehensible and foundational to the immediate realities of different periods. An examination of the first Western work on the history of philosophy, the first volume of Aristotle’s Metaphysics shows that the question of forms was clearly already a crucial nexus in Greek philosophy. The cumulative effect of history means that five levels of forms are generally perceptible to the modern mind. Through exploring the narrative limits of historicism’s history of philosophy and a number of pre-modern and modern ideas, we can find the significance of the question of forms by relaunching the in-depth study of Western philosophy and altering the previous inflexible stance arising from the standpoint of different schools.