Customer Reviews

Theatetus (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What is knowledge? That is the issue taken up in "Theaetetus", this dialogue from ancient Greece which is one of the seminal investigations of epistemology, the study of knowledge. In the dialogue, Socrates, Theodorus, and Theaetetus examine whether everyone's individual perceptions can be regarded as knowledge, or if knowledge must consist of either a true belief or a true belief plus a rational account.

The interlocutors do not reach a definitive conclusion concerning what knowledge is, but the dialogue is still well worth reading in the English-speaking world in the early twenty-first century, a place and time in which it is hotly debated whether truth and knowledge are absolute or relative. The final half of this volume is an interpretive essay by Robin Waterfield that discusses the dialogue and its implications, in many places comparing "Theaetetus" with other Platonic works.

Plato's Theatetus is considered the originary work of epistemological inquiry. Wittgenstein looked to this dialogue as a major source for epistemological problematics in his later philosophy, and it continues to be studied in the continental tradition as well. Socrates and Theatetus attempt to resolve the problem of defining knowledge-first by examining knowledge as a a mode of perception, then through in investigation of knowledge as correct judgment. Socrates and Theatetus give an account of the true role of 'legein' logos and speech in the final sections of the dialogue. Although nothing is resolved the basic problems of epistemology are formulated, and they remain alive to the present day.