This book is an attempt "to give a systematic account of the development of plato's theory of knowledge" (page vii). thus it focuses on the dialogues in which epistemological issues come to the fore. these dialogues are "meno", "phaedo", "symposium", "republic", "cratylus", "theastetus", "phaedrus", "timaeus", "sophist", "politicus", "philebus", and "laws". issues discusssed include the theory of recollection, perception, the difference between belief and knowledge, and mathematical knowledge. (staff).

In this paper I wish to examine the meaning of the doctrine of anamnesis, with particular regard to the role assigned in it to sense-experience. I shall argue that an empirical interpretation of the doctrine as it is presented in the Meno is false, and that Plato is not concerned at all in the Meno with the question of the role of sense-experience in recollection; that the doctrine of the Phaedo shows an inadequate appreciation of the problems involved in assigning (...) a role to sense-experience, and is seriously inconsistent with what Plato says elsewhere, in the Phaedo and in other dialogues, about the senses and sensible images; that the revised and more responsible presentation of this doctrine in the Phaedrus is self-contradictory; that misinterpretations of the theory of anamnesis are due principally to either misinterpretation or neglect of what is said about it in the Meno, the custom of taking Phaedo 73 c ff. as specially representative of Plato's doctrine. (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.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.