Philosophy 290-3

Plato, Theaetetus

For various reasons the Theaetetus is not only crucial for an understanding of Plato’s later philosophy, it also sheds significant light on the earlier dialogues because its central question: ‘What is knowledge?’ underlies Plato’s dialogues right from the Socratic investigations on. Plato’s treatment of this question raises significant questions: They concern the sceptical atti-tude expressed in the sophist Protagoras’ maxime that man is the measure of all things, and in the flux-theory of the extreme Heracliteans. A further intriguing problem concerns the status of non-being and saying or thinking what is not. The dialogue’s negative end, despite some promising manoeuvres, leaves open to speculation what are the ultimate conditions of Plato’s epistemology and metaphysics.