This paper takes a detailed look at the Republic’s Divided Line analogy and considers how we should respond to its most contentious implication: that pistis and dianoia have the same degree of ‘clarity’ (σαφήνεια). It argues that we must take this implication at face value and that doing so allows us to better understand both the analogy and the nature of dianoia.

In Aristotle's views on cognition a series of terms – hupolêpsis, doxa, and epistêmê – play key roles. But it has not been noticed that each of these comes in two kinds – one unqualified and the other qualified. When these and their interrelations are properly explored, a deeply systematic picture of cognition emerges, in which doxa is best understood as ‘belief’, hupolêpsis as ‘supposition’, and epistêmê as a sort of belief, so that – contrary to orthodoxy – we can (...) have belief and knowledge of the same things at the same time. Many of these conclusions are shown to mark a continuity with Plato, in that neither thinker, it is argued, holds a so-called ‘two-worlds’ picture of cognition. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Socrates’ argument that presupposes an audience familiar with Forms and explains why the sight-lovers are not philosophers. It is divided into three parts: the first part (476a1–6) shows why each Form is one in number; the second part (476a6–9) distinguishes Forms from their sensible appearances; and the third part (476a10–d6) draws an analogy between philosophers – people being awake and sight-lovers – people being asleep. Remarkably, the argument works only for opposites, which are mistakenly identified (...) by the sight-lovers with sensible things. Also in this paper I suggest an alternative interpretation of the so-called ‘Two Worlds Theory’ which is based on the distinction between the objects of knowledge and opinion. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine what is for Plato and all those who follow in his footsteps the ne plus ultra of cognition, namely, intuition (nous or noēsis). This is the paradigm of cognition, meaning that all forms of human (and even animal) cognition are inferior manifestations of this. Intuition is mental seeing, analogous to physical seeing. Among embodied souls, it is seeing a unity of some sort manifested in some diversity or plurality. Thus, someone who sees that the Morning (...) Star is the Evening Star, or that S at t1 is identical with S at t2, or that f = ma, etc., sees the unity ‘behind’ the diversity. The disembodied intellect that is the Demiurge (or, for Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover) sees paradigmatically the diversity of all intelligible being as a unity. Because mental seeing or intuition is paradigmatic for all cognition, cognition is essentially a unificatory process. Plato's method of collection and division displays both this process and its reverse. In the light of this core doctrine, I examine some of the insights that Platonists, especially Plotinus and Proclus, arrived at regarding a host of issues, including the nature of the first principle of all and the nature of normativity. (shrink)

Against prevailing interpretations, this article contends that Plato's Sophist and Statesman accord the sophist a kind of ‘knowing-how’ (epistêmê). In Soph. 233c10‒d2, the Visitor and Theaetetus agree that the sophist has not truth but a δοξαστικὴ ἐπιστήμη. This phrase cannot mean ‘a seeming knowledge’, for –ικός adjectives formed from verbs express the ability to perform the action denoted by the verb—here, δοξάζω. Although not a first-order, subject-area knowledge, sophistry is a second-order knowledge of how to form and use judgements (doxai). (...) Other acknowledgements of the sophist's epistêmê and the ascription to him of τέχνη, ‘craft/expertise’, confirm that the Visitor's conclusion is not to be dismissed as irony. To critics who argue from the Gorgias and from other works that Plato must consider the Visitor's conclusion an error, the author replies: 1) other dialogues do not control the Visitor dialogues; 2) the Visitor does not validly demonstrate that the sophist lacks all knowledge; 3) by admitting sensibles into Being, the Visitor and Theaetetus allow the objects of epistêmê to include things in the embodied world, even likenesses. Non-philosophers’ epistêmê in the Visitor dialogues is not implicated in the difficulties that critics have raised about epistemology in the so-called Two Worlds dialogues. On this new ontology, even the sophist, if guided by philosophical rulers, can benefit citizens by employing his elenctic expertise as Socrates did, aiding their growth toward virtue. (shrink)

In the Parmenides Plato claims that by relinquishing Forms one would entirely destroy tên tou dialegesthai dunamin. I argue that this peculiar phrase does not indicate, as often suggested, the power or possibility of all discourse or thought, but the power of dialectic, i. e. the highest science; and that its preservation is, for Plato, a decisive reason for the necessity of the Forms.