ABSTRACT
This chapter presents several perspective on knowledge. It examines the full spectrum of ways of knowing, elicited from the works of Aristotle. The chapter focuses on Plato as a dialogical philosopher and Aristotle as a philosopher emphasising and articulating different ways of knowing. It also presents the idea of society as a knowledge system. The chapter also examines that human beings have a capacity to know both what is concrete and abstract, what is present and what is durable. Differently from modern epistemology, Aristotle's theory of knowledge is a gnoseology, explicitly multidimensional, non-reductionist and relational, where episteme is split and takes a position among several other forms of knowledge. The argument is that knowledge becomes institutionalised and is related both to culture and social structure. As knowledge is basically a social product, based on deliberation and conceptualisations that happens in the public domain, the challenge becomes one of utilising the rationality and insight of all individuals in the social deliberation.
