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In philosophy, Plato's epistemology is a theory of knowledge developed by the Greek philosopher Plato and his followers. Platonic epistemology holds that knowledge of Platonic Ideas is innate, so that learning is the development of ideas buried deep in the soul, often under the midwife-like guidance of an interrogator.
Aristotle's teacher Plato considered geometry to be a condition of his idealist philosophy concerned with universal truth. [clarification needed] In Plato's Republic, Socrates opposes the sophist Thrasymachus's relativistic account of justice, and argues that justice is mathematical in its conceptual structure, and that ethics was therefore a precise and objective enterprise with impartial ...
While in fact Plato seems to disavow justified true belief as constituting knowledge at the end of Theaetetus, the claim that Plato unquestioningly accepted this view of knowledge stuck until the proposal of the Gettier problem. [4] The subject of justification has played a major role in the value of knowledge as "justified true belief".
In Plato's early dialogues, the elenchus is the technique Socrates uses to investigate, for example, the nature or definition of ethical concepts such as justice or virtue. According to Gregory Vlastos, it has the following steps: [7] Socrates' interlocutor asserts a thesis, for example "Courage is endurance of the soul".
Plato suggests, in his Theaetetus (210a) and Meno (97a–98b), that "knowledge" may be defined as justified true belief. For over two millennia, this definition of knowledge was accepted by subsequent philosophers. An item of information's justifiability, truth, and belief were seen as the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge.
After discarding the bird-cage analogy, Socrates and Theaetetus return to the definition of knowledge as 'true judgement' [l]. This, Theaetetus argues, is true because it is 'free from mistakes.' [m] However Socrates introduces an example of a jury in the law-courts, being persuaded of an opinion by a lawyer. This persuasion is not the same as ...
For example, understanding how geometrical axioms lead to a theorem about properties of triangles counts as understanding the cause of the proven property of the right triangle. As a result, episteme is a virtue of thought that deals with what cannot be otherwise, while techne and phronesis deal with what is contingent.
Knowledge and true opinion often have a similar usefulness since both are accurate representations of reality. For example, if a person wants to go to Larissa, a true opinion about how to get there may help them in the same way as knowledge does. [62] Considering this problem, Plato proposed that knowledge is better because it is more stable. [63]