display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
10 ideas
| 16120 | Knowing how to achieve immortality is pointless without the knowledge how to use immortality [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If there exists the knowledge of how to make men immortal, but without the knowledge of how to use this immortality, there seems to be no value in it. | |
| From: Plato (Euthydemus [c.379 BCE], 289b) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be not a gormless utilitarianism about knowledge, but a plea for holism, that knowledge only has value as part of some larger picture. The big view is the important view. He's wrong, though. Work out the use later. |
| 2080 | Things are only knowable if a rational account (logos) is possible [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Things which are susceptible to a rational account are knowable. | |
| From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 201d) |
| 2133 | Knowledge must be of the permanent unchanging nature of things [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Those who can see each thing in itself, in its permanent and unvarying nature, we'll say they have knowledge and are not merely entertaining beliefs. | |
| From: Plato (The Republic [c.374 BCE], 479e) |
| 16126 | Expertise is knowledge of the whole by means of the parts [Plato] |
| Full Idea: A man has passed from mere judgment to expert knowledge of the being of a wagon when he has done so in virtue of having gone over the whole by means of the elements. | |
| From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 207c) | |
| A reaction: Plato is emphasising that the expert must know the hundred parts of a wagon, and not just the half dozen main components, but here the point is to go over the whole via the parts, and not just list the parts. |
| 20184 | The only real evil is loss of knowledge [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The only real kind of faring ill is the loss of knowledge. | |
| From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 345b) | |
| A reaction: This must crucially involve the intellectualist view (of Socrates) that virtuos behaviour results from knowledge, and moral wickedness is the result of ignorance. It is hard to see how forgetting a phone number is evil. |
| 20219 | True opinions only become really valuable when they are tied down by reasons [Plato] |
| Full Idea: True opinions are a fine thing and all they do is good, …but they escape from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 98a3) | |
| A reaction: This gives justification the role of guarantee, stabilising and securing true beliefs (rather than triggering some new thing called 'knowledge'). |
| 20185 | The most important things in life are wisdom and knowledge [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It would be shameful indeed to say that wisdom and knowledge are anything but the most powerful forces in human activity. | |
| From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 352d) | |
| A reaction: He lumps wisdom and knowledge together, and I think we can take 'knowledge' to mean something like understanding, because obviously mere atomistic propositional knowledge can be utterly trivial. |
| 2050 | It is impossible to believe something which is held to be false [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible to believe something which is not the case. | |
| From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 167a) |
| 2076 | How can a belief exist if its object doesn't exist? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If the object of a belief is what is not, the object of this belief is nothing; but if there is no object to a belief, then that is not belief at all. | |
| From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 189a) |
| 389 | How can you be certain about aspects of the world if they aren't constant? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Could we attribute certainty to studying aspects of the world, such as how it arose, or acts, or is acted upon, when none of them ever was or will be constant? Of course not. | |
| From: Plato (Philebus [c.353 BCE], 59b) |