ABSTRACT
The view that in the Republic Plato is advocating a philosophical method consisting in an upward progress of hypotheses includes the claim that the first unhypothesised beginning is grasped intuitively. Such a position might receive reinforcement from the view that Plato predominantly seems to think of knowing as a sort of intellectual seeing. Argument, objections, and dialectic generally do not in the last resort establish conclusions. One of their main functions is to bring about that intellectual perception of the relevant Form that constitutes knowledge. Some people (e.g. Runciman, 1962) take it for granted that at any rate up to and including his middle period, Plato had a view of knowledge as a kind of intellectual perception. To know something was to be aware of it. For there to be an it to know, there must be something not in a process of change. Nothing in the perceptible world meets this condition. So knowledge could only be acquaintance with unchanging intelligible entities. No doubt Plato also wanted to say other things about knowledge, but this perceptual model can be shown to be operative in causing certain difficulties. Thus if one has this model it is natural to think that just as we get a better view of an object if we can see it in isolation and clearly separated from other objects, so if we wish to get a clear mental view of justice we must see it in isolation from equality, goodness and so on. We must see it in its pure simple form by itself. This is just how Plato tends to talk (e.g. Phaedo 78-9, Symposium 210-11, Republic 532-4), and it of course gives rise to difficulties. For Plato also conceives of knowledge as supplying the answer to ‘what is X?’ and so being expressible in terms of ‘X is F and G’. This seems to be not just a shortcoming of language, but reflects the necessary fact that various forms are inextricably interrelated. In the earlier to middle dialogues the concern is to isolate items such as courage, excellence, equality as candidates for apprehension in abstrac-tion from particular items that manifest them. The emphasis is therefore on these isolable units in contrast with the multifarious particulars which manifest a host of properties in a confusing jumble. The requirement that these units should be definable, however, leads to a sense that they were not so isolable but themselves constituted an interrelated set. This produced difficulties for the perceptual view of knowledge and a gradual progress to seeing knowledge as propositional. This development can be seen starting in the Theaetetus and coming to fruition in the Sophist where we finally get both a view of dialectic as discerning eternal interrelationships rather than viewing separate objects and a view of propositions as again combinatory of elements rather than complex names or pictures.
