The Theaetetus is one of the most widely studied of any of the Platonic dialogues because its dominant theme concerns the significant philosophical question, what is knowledge? In this new interpretation of the Theaetetus, Paul Stern provides the first full-length treatment of its political character in relationship to this dominant theme. Stern argues that this approach sheds significant light on the distinctiveness of the Socratic way of life, with respect to both its initial justification and its ultimate character.

Zina Giannopoulou offers a new reading of Theaetetus, Plato's most systematic examination of knowledge, alongside Apology, Socrates' speech in defence of his philosophical practice, and argues that the former text is a philosophical elaboration of the latter.

An Innovating approach to Plato’s philosophy Through a careful survey of several significant Platonic texts, mainly focussing on the nature of knowledge, Essays on Plato’s Epistemology offers the reader a fresh and promising approach to Plato’s philosophy as a whole. From the very earliest reception of Plato’s philosophy, there has been a conflict between a dogmatic and a sceptical interpretation of his work and thought. Moreover, the two sides are often associated, respectively, with a metaphysical and an anti-metaphysical approach. This book, continuing a line of thought that is nowadays strongly present in the secondary literature – and also followed by the author in over thirty years of research –, maintains that a third way of thinking is required. Against the widespread view that an anti-dogmatic philosophy must go together with an anti-metaphysical stance, Trabattoni shows that for Plato, on the contrary, a sober and reasonable assessment of both the powers and limits of human reason relies on a proper metaphysical outlook.

It was Nietzsche who first identified the similarities between the radical sophistry of antiquity and the contemporary relativism that has come to characterize modern thought. The anti-foundationalism of contemporary thought can be said to have been born with the Sophists, and, of all the Sophists who have come down to us, Protagoras is the most famous and challenging of them. Robert Bartlett s masterful book is the first to examine Plato s Protagoras and Theaetetus together to uncover what lies at the heart of Protagoras teaching, both its moral and political components and its theoretical and epistemological groundings. His superb exegesis of these two dialogues allows one to see more clearly the power of radical relativism: its strengths and its deficiencies. Bartlett notes that political philosophy has been supplanted in the modern era either by the study of the history of political philosophy or by relativism. Although "Understanding Political Philosophy and Sophistry" can certainly be taken as an example of the former, it is much more than that. It seeks to uncover what Socrates, in responding to that teaching, begins to reveal of his own understanding and characteristic activity. It helps us begin to understand, in other words, the phenomenon of philosophy, not just as a system of thought, but as Socrates lived it."

The Theaetetus provides Plato's fullest discussion of human knowledge and is a rich vehicle for reflection upon its topic. Polansky's commentary demonstrates that the dialogue in fact holds the complete Platonic account of knowledge -- an account which is as sophisticated as any offered by contemporary philosophers.

Two masterpieces of Plato's later period. The Theaetetus offers a systematic treatment of the question "What is knowledge?" The Sophist follows Socrates' cross-examination of a self-proclaimed true philosopher.

A new and lively translation of two Platonic dialogues widely read and discussed by philosophers, with introduction and notes.

This book intersperses philosophical commentary with a new translation of the whole dialogue to present an original case for thinking that Plato's aim in the Theaetetus is to further the cause of his own anti-empiricist theory of knowledge by testing -- and destroying -- a series of empiricist theories of knowledge.

Several myths about Plato's work are decisively challenged by Catherine Rowett: the idea that Plato agreed with Socrates about the need for a definition of what we know; the idea that he set out to define justice in the Republic; the idea that knowledge is a kind of true belief, or that Plato ever thought that it might be something like that; the idea that “knowledge proper” is propositional, and that the Theaetetus was Plato's best attempt to define knowledge as a species of belief, and that it only failed due to his incompetence. Instead Rowett argues that Plato was replacing the failed methods of Socrates, including his attempt to find a definition or single common factor, and that he replaced those methods with methods derived from geometry, including methods that involve inference from shadows to their originals (a method which Rowett calls “the iconic method”). As a result we should see that Plato is presenting the knowledge that is acquired as non-propositional and pictorial in nature, and that it is to be identified not with knowledge of facts nor of objects, but of types qua types-types that stand to the tokens that are used in our enquiry as original to shadow. The book includes detailed studies of the Meno, Republic and Theaetetus, and argues that the insights that Plato brings about the nature of conceptual knowledge, its importance in underpinning all other activities, and about the notion of truth as it applies to conceptual competence, are significant and should be taken seriously as a corrective to areas in which current analytic philosophy has lost its way.

This book meets the need to revise the standard interpretations of an apparently aporetic dialogue, full of eloquent silences and tricky suggestions, as it explores, among many other topics, the dramatis personae, including Plato's self-references behind the scene and the role of Socrates on stage, the question of method and refutation and the way dialectics plays a part in the dialogue. More especifically, it contains a set of papers devoted to perception and Plato's criticism of Heraclitus and Protagoras. A section deals with the problem of the relation between knowledge and thinking, including the the aviary model and the possibility of error. It also emphasizes some positive contributions to the classical Platonic doctrines and his philosophy of education. The reception of the dialogue in antiquity and the medieval age closes the analysis. Representing different hermeneutical traditions, prestigious scholars engage with these issues in divergent ways, as they shed new light on a complex controversial work.