Plato 's Argument On The Definition Of Knowledge - An Analysis Of The Text Of Tai Tai Tate

Plato is one of the most representative philosophers of the ancient Greek, and take a very important position among Greek philosophers. Aristotle had wrote the eulogy for Plato:"Coming to the famous plain of Cecropia. He piously set up an altar of holy Friendship. For the man whom It is not lawful for bad men even to praise. Who alone or first of mortals clearly revealed. By his own life and by the methods of his words. That a man becomes good and happy at the same time. Now no one can ever attain to these things again." The theory of Knowledge is an important part of the philosophy of Plato, and the book focuses on knowledge is "Theaetetus." In this dialogue, Plato, Theaetetus and Theodorus talk about the question that what is knowledge. Knowledge in here, Plato pointed out, neither asked what the object of knowledge is, nor categories of knowledge, but what we want to find is knowledge itself, that means make the definition of knowledge. By critiquing the three definitions that Theaetetus raised one by one, we draw the conclusion that "knowledge is not perception," "knowledge is not true judgment," "knowledge is not true judge with logos." Midwifery-the early form of Platonic dialectics, is the main method of Expanding the text. It used for testing Theaetetus’s thoughts and distinguish it between true and false.The structure of this paper will be divided into four parts, the first part discusses the origin of thought of Plato’s theory of knowledge, including the critique of relativism of the Sophists and rheological theory of Heraclitus, as well as the inheritance of number theory of Pythagoras, Socrates’s general concepts and Parmenides’s ontology. The second part is the key of the article, it discusses the time of writing of the dialogue, as well as the content and nature of issues, and each of the three definitions of knowledge Theaetetus proposed has to be refuted. In the end of "Theaetetus", Plato did not give a positive definition of knowledge, but by reading Plato’s other related texts, we will find that the definition of knowledge has a further explanation. The third part will study the relationship between the three elements of knowledge, and discuss the contemporary theory of knowledge and the response that scholars made to Gettier problems and Agrippa’s difficulties, and on this basis, I will try to make some of my own view about knowledge. The last part will talk about the positive meaning of "Theaetetus", including of great significance both in epistemological and methodological aspects.