Plato's Epistemology: Being and Seeming

by Jessica Moss

Plato's Being and Seeming presents an original interpretation of one of the central topics in Plato's epistemology. Jessica Moss argues that Plato's epistemology is radically different from our own.Going against the grain of recent scholarship, and drawing on ancient interpretations of Plato, Jessica Moss argues that Plato is not best understood as studying what we now call knowledge and belief. Instead, Moss proposes that the central players in his epistemology, epistêmê and doxa, are each essentially to be understood as cognition of a certain kind of object. Epistêmê is cognition of what Is - where this turns out to mean that it is a deepgrasp of ultimate reality. Doxa is cognition of what seems - where this turns out to mean that it is atheoretical thought that mistakes images for reality. The book defends these characterizations by arguing that they explain important features of Plato's epistemology. In particular, it shows that they underlie and make sense of a view which waslong attributed to Plato but has recently been deemed "outrageous": that there is no doxa of Forms, and no epistêmê of perceptibles. Finally, Moss contends that Plato's epistemology is so different from modern epistemology because it is motivated by his central ethical and metaphysical views. As the Cave allegory illustrates, he holds that the goal of life is to be in contact with genuine Being, and that the greatest obstacle to this goal is our tendency to restcontent with appearances. Therefore, when Plato turns to epistemological investigations, the distinction he finds most salient is that between cognition of what Is and cognition of what seems.

Genres: Philosophy

268 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 11, 2021

Reviews

[Bailey Ingham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two Worlds supremacy.