ABSTRACT
In Cicero and in Dio Chrysostom the ‘knowledge’ the artist expresses in sensible form can be thought of in accordance with Plato’s rationalism. But there is an ambiguity in Plato’s theory of knowledge which the Neoplatonists were to use to split off intuitive from discursive reason. Knowledge for Plato is knowledge of what is true and cannot be otherwise. Belief may be true or false; but true belief is not knowledge simply because it happens to be true. Does it become knowledge when a valid account can be given of the reasons why it is held to be true? Or is there such a great divide between the flux of the sensible world and the fixities of the Platonic forms that beliefs about the flux can never turn into knowledge, but at most set off those direct intuitions of the eternal world of forms of which true knowledge consists? And, if so, does Plato think of knowledge in terms of propositions in which the forms are related together, or in terms of a quasi-mystical direct intuition of forms or patterns of forms? 1
