Abstract
The article compares the views of Plato and Aristotle in terms of their relation to the problem of rationality. In fact, Plato and Aristotle have absolutely opposite positions on the question of the essence of philosophy, its subject, its methods; they call for a completely incompatible with each other interpretations of the basis of the life. For Plato, true being is spiritual, transcendental that does not fit into any rational-logical framework. For Aristotle true being is subject-sensual, quite rationally knowable within the boundaries of logical thinking. For Plato, the subject-sensual - is illusory "shadow" of the spirit; for Aristotle absolute spirit is a theoretical assumption, assumption forced, as a kind of methodological assumption to justify the reality of the subject-sensual, "flesh" world. Aristotle most clearly formulated the idea of the rational-logical totality, as a whole it is quite popular for the ancient metaphysics, with which the natural philosophers, and Eleatics, and sophists were largely agreed. Plato, "Opened" transcendence, outlined ways to super-rational, and in many respects to the irrational and mystical understanding of the philosophical problems. And in this sense, as well as Orphics and the Pythagoreans, he left some opposition to the rational-logical tradition of ancient Greece. Plato argued that the truth - it is itself a spiritual reality, which is originally opened to man: it is beyond controversy, representing the true being. From this he concluded that the forms of life and forms of logical thinking differ from each other. For Aristotle, on the contrary, the truth is the correspondence of the forms of thinking to the forms of being; it is not a reality, but it is a reflection of the reality in the structures of human consciousness. And we need to dad that just such interpretation of truth firmly established in Western philosophy and science. These two tendencies, aimed at forming rational and irrational models of the world, were further developed in the Christian tradition, constantly "surfacing" in the form of discussions about the relationship between faith and knowledge about the different ways of knowing God.