Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Knowledge and Truth in Plato
ISBN: 9780199693658
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Philosophy History of Philosophy Metaphysics/ Epistemology;

Several myths about Plato's work are decisively challenged by Catherine Rowett: the idea that Plato agreed with Socrates about the need for a definition of what we know; the idea that he set out to define justice in the Republic; the idea that knowledge is a kind of true belief, or that Plato ever thought that it might be something like that; the idea that "knowledge proper" is propositional, and that the Theaetetus was Plato's best attempt todefine knowledge as a species of belief, and that it only failed due to his incompetence. Instead Rowett argues that Plato was replacing the failed methods of Socrates, including his attempt to find a definition orsingle common factor, and that he replaced those methods with methods derived from geometry, including methods that involve inference from shadows to their originals (a method which Rowett calls "the iconic method"). The book includes detailed studies of the Meno, Republic and Theaetetus, and argues that the insights that Plato brings about the nature of conceptual knowledge, its importance in underpinning all other activities, and about the notion of truth as it applies toconceptual competence, are significant and should be taken seriously as a corrective to areas in which current analytic philosophy has lost its way.