The Eleatic Visitor speaks forcefully when he insists, ‘Necessarily, whenever there is speech, it is speech of something; it is impossible for it not to be of something’. For ‘if it were not of anything, it would not be speech at all; for we showed that it is impossible for there to be speech that is speech of nothing’. Presumably, at 263c10, when he claims to have ‘shown’ that it is impossible for speech to be of nothing, the Visitor is (...) referring back to the Parmenidean puzzles at Sophist 237ff. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the origins of Gettier-style epistemology, highlighting the philosophical and methodological debates that led to its development in the 1960s. Though present-day epistemologists assume that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge began with Gettier’s 1963 argument against the JTB-definition, I show that this research program can be traced back to British discussions about knowledge and analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss work of, among others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Norman (...) Malcom, and A. D. Woozley, showing how exchanges between different schools of analytic philosophy gave rise to new ideas about the nature of knowledge and analysis. Finally, I turn to Gettier's intellectual development and argue that his paper was influenced by some of these debates, suggesting that even his interpretation of Plato’s definition of knowledge can be traced back to discussions in this period. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the implications of Plato’s use of the term stoicheion, since his awareness of stoicheion’s polysemy reveals his view of the origin, the complexity and, at the same time, the order of reality. Moreover, his use of stoicheion allowed him both to inherit and to detach himself from his predecessors. I begin by presenting the history of the notion of stoicheion; then, since one of the meanings of stoicheion is ‘letter of the alphabet’, (...) I focus on the Cratylus, which contains the first of several passages where Plato employs the alphabet as a paradigm for the structure of a complex system. Finally, I turn to the Theaetetus, where Plato, for the first time, uses stoicheion in the sense of ‘element’ and where, through the relation letters/syllables, Plato clarifies that enumeration and juxtaposition are not sufficient to attain the real knowledge. I will argue that only thanks to these steps can we understand the occurrences of stoicheion in the Timaeus, where Plato first states that air, earth, fire and water are not stoicheia tou pantos, and then reveals that, instead, the basic triangles are ‘the elements of the universe’. (shrink)

Section 1 contrasts the approaches to Plato of F.M.Cornford and Gilbert Ryle, two of the early twentieth century’s leading Plato interpreters. Then I trace and evaluate attempts to discern in Plato’s Theaetetus a recognition of the role of the proposition. Section 2 focuses on the hunting of the proposition in Socrates’ Dream in the Theaetetus. Ryle, inspired by Logical Atomism, argued that Plato there anticipated an insight about the difference between names and propositions that Russell credited to Wittgenstein. I rehearse (...) difficulties for understanding the logos of the Dream as a proposition, preferring a reading of logos there as something like definition: a reading Wittgenstein also adumbrated. Section 3 examines attempts by writers such as Burnyeat and Kahn to find Plato allocating a starring role to the proposition in the argument at Theaetetus 185–6: perception, since it cannot grasp being, cannot grasp truth and hence cannot be knowledge. On their reading a grasp of being is understood as a grasp of something propositional. Problems for the propositional reading include Socrates’ talk of grasping ‘the truth of something’ (alētheia tinos), and the way the dialogue develops after 186. (shrink)

I consider Plato’s argument, in the dialogue Cratylus, against both of two opposed views of the “correctness of names.” The first is a conventionalist view, according to which this relationship is arbitrary, the product of a free inaugural decision made at the moment of the first institution of names. The second is a naturalist view, according to which the correctness of names is initially fixed and subsequently maintained by some kind of natural assignment, rooted in the things themselves. I argue (...) that: 1) Plato’s critical challenge to both views anticipates considerations introduced by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations ’ consideration of rules and rule-following; 2) Understanding Plato’s appeal to the “form” [ eidos ] of a thing in resolving the problems of both views helps to explicate Wittgenstein’s own appeal to “forms of life” as the “given” ground of linguistic practice; and 3) We should not understand the grounding of language in form-of-life either as a basis in the plural practices of different communities, or as a biological/anthropological basis in the specific nature of the human organism. Rather, it points to an autonomous dimension of form, which articulates the relationship between language and life as it relates to the possibility of truth. (shrink)

Most scholars agree that Plato’s concept of freedom, to the extent he has one, is ‘intellectualist’: true freedom is submission to the rule of reason through philosophical knowledge of rational order. Surprisingly, though, there are few explicit linkages of philosophy and freedom in Plato. Socrates is called many things in the dialogues, but not ‘free’. I aim to understand why by studying the Theaetetus, heretofore ignored in discussions of Platonic freedom. By examining the Digression and Socrates’ ‘dream’ about wholes and (...) parts, I show that describing freedom as ‘rule of reason’ simplifies what, for Plato, is a more tangled skein. In the Digression, philosophers are free in occupying a comprehensive standpoint transcending all limited and partial perspectives. Socrates’ dream, however, shows that logos cannot completely account for the knowledge of complex wholes or for itself as such a whole. Philosophical freedom cannot mean comprehensive discursive knowledge, then, since reason lacks a comprehensive grasp of itself. Socrates dreams of the rational whole, but is aware of why it remains only a dream, rather than wakeful knowledge. This awareness constitutes a freedom attained, not in total liberation from the confines of the partial human perspective, but within those confines. (shrink)

In this second installment on the Theaetetus, I discuss Theaetetus' second and third definitions of knowledge, namely, ‘true judgment’ and then ‘true judgment with the addition of an account’. I offer a brief description of Socrates' intricate examination of these suggestions, concentrating especially on the discussion of false judgment and that of the so-called ‘Dream Theory’. I then proceed to map different lines of interpretation for these passages that have been offered by scholars writing in the last 40 years.

No Teeteto, em uma tentativa de denir o conhecimento, Platão trata da unidade e da complexidade segundo um modelo de análise dos complexos em elementos simples não analisáveis. Wittgenstein, no parágrafo 46 das Investigações Filosócas, cita esse argumento do Teeteto, introduzindo uma crítica à sua própria noção de objeto, no Tractatus. Nosso tema será um exame das noções de elemento e composto, apresentadas no Teeteto e retomadas no Sosta, tendo como horizonte a aproximação, feita por Wittgenstein, entre o objeto do (...) Tractatus e o elemento do Teeteto. (shrink)