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Knowledge and Belief from Plato to Locke

This essential historical introduction to the main themes of the book starts with a close, sympathetic, and significantly novel analysis (with reference to associated arguments) of a famous argument in Plato’s Republic in which Plato draws a distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, and between their objects. It is then demonstrated that the distinction, broadly so understood, remained a dominant force, in one form or another, in all non-sceptical branches of the European philosophical tradition, including empiricism (not least, Locke’s), until the eighteenth century (the epistemology of the Stoics and of Aquinas being particularly striking examples). It is argued that there is much to learn from this history (so different from the myth of a ‘traditional analysis’ of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’), and specific features of the traditional distinction are identified as deserving the further, sympathetic consideration given, in effect, in later chapters.