ABSTRACT
Parmenides was perhaps the first Greek philosopher to draw a technical distinction between opinion and knowledge, together with corresponding distinctions between appearance and reality, and becoming and being. Plato interpreted the distinction in such a way that, while opinion (doxa) relates to the changeable world of sense-experience, knowledge (episteme) is of the universal principles of explanatory science, having as its object immutable transcendent forms. Apprehension of the universal can be prompted by the deliverances of sense, but is itself the operation of a higher faculty. Plato sometimes suggested that the forms were directly apprehended before birth, so that in this life we grasp universal truths by recalling them. That thought introduced the notion of innate knowledge to European philosophy.
