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Tag: epistemology

Pages tagged with epistemology.

42 pages

• Alcibiades I (First Alcibiades) Plato (disputed; possibly an Academic philosopher, 350s BCE or soon after), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (disputed) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. D. S. Hutchinson, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Anamnesis (Recollection)

  Plato's doctrine that learning is recollection — the recovery of knowledge the immortal soul already possesses, not the reception of wholly new content. Introduced in the Meno to dissolve the paradox of inquiry, it is re-grounded in the Ph…

• Apology Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Aporia (Productive Impasse)

  Aporia (ἀπορία — literally "no way through," hence impasse, perplexity) is the state of acknowledged not-knowing in which Plato's "Socratic" dialogues characteristically end and the later dialogues repeatedly turn. Its distinctively Platon…

• Charmides Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought

  Bergson's name (Chapter IV of Creative Evolution) for the structural way the human intellect falsifies movement and becoming: it extracts immobile snapshots ("views," vues) from the moving real and then recomposes movement by running the s…

• Clitophon Plato (disputed — an enigma; authorship genuinely open, per Hutchinson 'Might the author even be Plato himself?'), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (disputed) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Francisco J. Gonzalez, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Creative Evolution (true vs. false evolutionism)

  Beyond the title of Bergson's book and the doctrine of the élan vital, "creative evolution" names a method and a thesis about reality: that evolution is a genuine creation of the unforeseeable, and that grasping it requires pursuing the th…

• Elenchus (Socratic Refutation)

  The elenchus (ἔλεγχος — "cross-examination," "testing," "refutation") is the question-and-answer procedure that gives Plato's early dialogues their shared form: Socrates elicits a confident definition from an interlocutor, draws out its co…

• Eristic (the Art of Contention)

  Eristic (eristikē) is the combative question-and-answer art whose end is victory, indifferent to truth — the power "to refute whatever may be said, no matter whether it is true or false" (Euthydemus 272b). The Euthydemus is the corpus's fu…

• Euthydemus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Fetishistic Theory of Care (Nihilism)

  Chouraqui's redescription of nihilism (in "Europe as the Crisis of Play", 2025) as, "at heart, a fetishistic theory of care." On this reading, nihilism is not first a doctrine about value's absence but a doctrine about care's grounds: to c…

• Genealogy

  The method Nietzsche names and practices in On the Genealogy of Morality — a critical history of the descent (Herkunft) of moral values that asks not "are they true?" but "where did they come from, and what are they worth for life?" Its wa…

• Hipparchus (On the Love of Gain) Plato (disputed — a dubium; probably by the same author as the Minos, writing soon after the middle of the 4th c. BCE), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Hippias Major (Greater Hippias) Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Hippias Minor (Lesser Hippias) Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Homoiōsis Theōi (Becoming Like God)

  Homoiōsis theōi — "becoming like god so far as possible" (176b) — is the ethical telos Plato lodges, surprisingly, inside the epistemology of the Theaetetus. In the Digression (172c–177c) Socrates sets two lives against each other: the phi…

• Intellect, Instinct, Intuition

  In Creative Evolution Bergson treats intellect, instinct, and intuition not as three rungs of one ladder but as divergent directions of a single consciousness, differing in kind not in degree — "the major error, the one that has been passe…

• Letter VII Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (authenticity debated) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Glenn R. Morrow, Hackett 1997) · Type: letter (catalogued as sourcetype: fragment)

• Maieutics (Socratic Midwifery)

  Socrates' image of his own philosophical method, given its one explicit statement in the Theaetetus (148e–151d): the art of the midwife (technē maieutikē). Socrates is himself "barren of wisdom" and "God forbids me to procreate"; his art i…

• Meno Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Nothingness as a Pseudo-Idea (Bergson)

  Bergson's sustained critique of the negative (Creative Evolution Chapters III–IV): the ideas of absolute Nothingness, of disorder, and of the unrealized possible are pseudo-ideas — they appear to have content but, examined, "destroy themse…

• Pensée de Survol (Philosophy of Survey)

  The negative pole of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology: the failed philosophical posture of viewing the world from above (the "Sirius perspective," the "God-like survey," the position of the observateur absolu, the Kosmotheoros of Philosophie…

• Perspectivism

  Nietzsche's thesis that all knowing and valuing is perspectival, interpretive, and falsifying — there is no view from nowhere, no "facts" that are not already interpretations, and the value of truth is itself a perspectival valuation rathe…

• Protagoras Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Republic Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Rival Lovers (Lovers / Amatores) Plato (disputed — a dubium; an intra-Academy work, possibly a post-Plato pro-Plato / anti-Aristotle contribution from the last third of the 4th c. BCE), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Jeffrey Mitscherling, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Schematisieren eines Chaos

  Nietzsche's account of knowledge, as read by Heidegger in Der Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis (1939, heidegger-1961-nietzsche-i Part III): knowing is the schematizing of a chaos according to practical need. Knowledge is not correspondence t…

• Second Alcibiades (Alcibiades II) Plato (disputed — a dubium; almost certainly not Plato, a late-4th/3rd-c. BCE Academy product from Northern Greece), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: [Plato] (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Anthony Kenny, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Self-Knowledge and Care of the Self

  The Delphic command "know thyself" (gnōthi seauton) and its practical correlate "care for / cultivate oneself" (epimeleia heautou) form a single Socratic-Platonic imperative whose burden is to ask what the self is before it can be known or…

• Socratic Definition (the 'What Is X?' Question)

  The demand, made canonical in the Euthyphro, for a definition by essence: not examples of X but "that form itself (eidos) by which all X-things are X," a single account usable "as a model" (paradeigma) to sort any case (6d–e). This ti esti…

• Socratic Ignorance (Human Wisdom)

  Socratic ignorance is the second-order knowledge of one's own non-knowledge — the "human wisdom" (anthrōpinē sophia) the Apology makes Socrates' signature: the wisest person is the one who, "like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is wo…

• Socratic Intellectualism (Virtue Is Knowledge)

  The thesis, sharpest in the Protagoras, that virtue is knowledge — and its two corollaries: the unity of the virtues (courage, justice, temperance, piety, wisdom are one knowledge, not separable dispositions) and the denial of akrasia ("no…

• Spuria (Pseudo-Platonic Works) Pseudo-Plato (spurious — Old-Academy and Hellenistic imitations and doxography; NOT by Plato), c. 4th–1st c. BCE

  Author: Pseudo-Plato (spurious — agreed not by Plato) · Year: c. 4th–1st c. BCE · Type: other (survey of nine works in the Spuria appendix)

• Temperance (Sōphrosynē)

  Sōphrosynē — self-command, a developed consciousness of oneself and one's due place — is the virtue the Charmides tries and fails to define. The editor stresses it "has no adequate translation": not abstemiousness but dignity, self-restrai…

• The Allegory of the Cave

  The third and most famous of the Republic's images of the Good (514a–521b): prisoners chained since childhood face a wall on which shadows of carried artifacts are cast by a fire behind them; they take "the shadows of those artifacts" for…

• The Divided Line

  The second of the Republic's three images of the Good (509d–511e): a line cut into two unequal parts (visible / intelligible), each cut again "in the same ratio," yielding four segments that track degrees of truth and being matched to four…

• The Form of the Good

  The capstone of Plato's metaphysics in the Republic (504a–509c): the Form of the Good (to agathon) is "the most important thing to learn" (megiston mathēma, 505a), the source of both the being and the intelligibility of the Forms — and yet…

• The Will to Truth

  Nietzsche's name for the unconditional drive to truth "at any price" — and, in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the unexpected core of the very ascetic-ideal that modern science and atheism imagine themselves to oppose. Bey…

• Theaetetus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE — datable unusually precisely to just after Theaetetus' death (~369 BCE), Plato then ~60 (Cooper, intro) — (trans. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Theages (On Wisdom) Plato (disputed — a dubium; near-unanimous modern rejection of Platonic authorship; likely an Academy figure after 350 BCE), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith [inferred], Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Theory of Forms

  Plato's thesis that the truly real beings are Forms (eidē) — self-identical, invisible, unchanging realities such as "the Equal itself," "the Beautiful itself," "the Just itself" — of which sensible particulars are deficient, transient cop…