Thinking, Believing, and the Realm of Appearances

Plato's Epistemology of Perceptibles in the Later Dialogues
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-7965-5284-7
Verlag: Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG Schwabe Verlag

Buch, Englisch, 253 Seiten

Reihe: Philosophical Studies in Ancient Thought

This book investigates Plato’s later theory of knowledge with regard to perceptual cognition and its epistemological status. It is argued that, in Plato’s later dialogues, the three main cognitive phenomena related to acquaintance with the realm of perceptibles – sense-perception, appearance and belief – undergo a process of reciprocal conceptual disentanglement. As a result, the notions of sense-perception and belief get disambiguated and clearly separated from the notion of appearance. In addition, those notions are integrated into an innovative epistemological model, whose accuracy and reliability is clearly superior to the model previously embraced in the early and middle dialogues. In these dialogues, indeed, sense-perception and belief were still conflated with each other and with the problematic (“sophistic”) notion of appearance.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Trivellizzi, Lara

Über Autor(innen)

Lara Trivellizzi studied classical philology and ancient history in Pisa (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) and completed her PhD in ancient philosophy in 2023 in Munich (LMU München, Munich School of Ancient Philosophy). Her main interests are Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, especially the fields of psychology, epistemology and natural philosophy.