Contemporary philosophers distinguish a certain "propositional knowledge (KP)" from other sorts of knowledge such as "knowledge by acquaintance (KA)". However, when Plato began to do philosophy no one had formulated the concept of KP, indeed, no one had formulated the notion of what we call a "proposition". On the contrary, the ancient Greeks unreflectedly presupposed that all knowledge was simply some sort of acquaintance with the object of knowledge. This presupposition of theirs naturally caused a great deal of confusion in their epistemology and at the beginning of his career, Plato himself was victim and perpetrator of this confusion. However, as the following thesis shows, Plato began to make explicit and to question the presupposition that all knowledge was KA and he did make progress towards finding the crucially missing category, KP. It was not that he succeeded totally in isolating the notion of KP. For that matter, he never attained to a notion of "proposition" in all its modern generality. However, he did come to hold that sometimes knowledge involves not only acquaintance with the object of knowledge but also a knowledge of interrelations among things known. Having at first tried to understand all knowledge in terms of a model that construed it as nothing more complex than some sort of acquaintance with the object of knowledge, Plato subsequently abandoned this model and proceeded to develop an epistemology capable of accomodating cases of what we would call KP. I shall argue that Plato did this after he had written the Charmides and before he wrote the Theaetetus. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/19352 |
| Date | January 1975 |
| Creators | Anglin, William Sherron Raymond |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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