There are three main views of the development of Plato’s distinction between being and becoming which have been defended in recent times. Most scholars have thought that Plato always held the same version of the distinction despite appearances to the contrary. But some who have taken this position have thought that Plato took the realm of being to consist of things which never change in any way, and the realm of becoming to consist of things which are never stable in (...) any way. Others have thought that Plato’s account of things in the realm of becoming was not so extreme. They have maintained that the realm of being is made up of things which never change in any way, but that the realm of becoming consists of things which constantly change while they exist in many ways. The third view belongs to those who have held that Plato did in his middle dialogues take the extreme view of becoming and the extreme version of the distinction which that entails. But later, they claim, he discovered that the distinction was incoherent. He therefore abandoned it, and the metaphysical doctrine of degrees of reality which he had based on it, altogether. (shrink)

Theaetetus, asked what knowledge is, replies that geometry and the other mathematical disciplines are knowledge, and so are crafts like cobbling. Socrates points out that it does not help him to be told how many kinds of knowledge there are when his problem is to know what knowledge itself is, what it means to call geometry or a craft knowledge in the first place—he insists on the generality of his question in the way he often does when his interlocutor, asked (...) for a definition, cites instead cases of the concept to be defined. (shrink)

The question contrasts two ways of expressing the role of the sense organ in perception. In one the expression referring to the sense organ is put into the dative case ; the other is a construction with the preposition δiá governing the genitive case of the word for the sense organ.

Im vorliegenden Buch stellt Klaus Oehler die Lehre vom noetischen und dianoetischen Denken bei Platon und Aristoteles dar und begründet damit erstmals die These, dass das für die neuzeitliche Philosophie zentrale Problem der Reflexion und des Selbstbewusstseins schon, wenn auch nicht in gleicher Weise, in der antiken Philosophie eine Rolle gespielt hat.

It is the object of the present paper to undertake a logical inquiry into one particular kind of evidence that has been taken to be capable of furnishing a rational warrant for doubt. The line of thought at issue finds its classic expression in the case for doubt argued by Descartes in the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes' argument is as follows.

In L. Frank Baum's story, Ozma of Oz, which is a sequel to Baum's much more famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companion come upon a wound-down mechanical man bearing a label on which are printed the following words: Smith and Tinker's Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live As Dorothy and her companion are made to discover when they wind up this (...) man, he is indeed capable of doing all the things of which his label boasts—acting, speaking and even thinking. But as Tik-Tok himself insists, and no one in the story casts doubt on the matter, he is not alive. (shrink)

Comme Descartes, Carnéade professe le doute universel et le fonde sur l’existence de l’erreur. Ce doute est de même nature que celui de Descartes : c’est une décision de suspendre l’assentiment sur tout ce qui n’est pas certain ; il postule une conception volontariste de l’assentiment, ce qui le distingue de l’indifférence pyrrhonienne. C’est un doute méthodique et, de même, le doute cartésien est réel et sincère. Il existe aussi un « cogito carnéadien » ; mais, tandis que Descartes tire (...) la certitude du fait même du doute, Carnéade, qui analyse le sentiment de l’évidence, n’aboutit qu’à un haut degré de croyance, jamais à la certitude. Carnéade ne fonde donc pas la science. S’il a pressenti des formes très modernes de la pensée, il a trop cédé à son amour de la discussion et n’a pas dépassé le stade critique. Ainsi son ébauche d’une théorie de la vérification n’a pas fructifié. (shrink)