Essay On Theaetetus

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In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates examines the first definition of knowledge that theaetetus gives that knowledge is perception. Socrates gives us many example that both supports and refutes that knowledge is perception. The basic claim from Protagoras is that truth is based on the perception of every man. This means that things are to any person as they seem to that person. Socrates explains to us Protagoras’s view with the cold wind example. He say that through Protagoras theory, the wind is cold to the person that feels cold, and the wind is warm to the person that feels warm. Both “the wind is cold” and “the wind is war” is true according to Protagoras and it is based on the perception of the person. Then we learn from Socrates that if …show more content…

He starts off telling us that we do not perceive senses with our sensory organs but we perceive them through our sensory organs. We perceive our senses with our mind and not through our mind. The senses are different from each other and have very little in common. Socrates tells us that sight cannot translate sound, like language or music, and that hearing cannot translate sight, like color or vision. It is our mind that takes the sense that we acquire through our sensory organs, puts them together and compares them to each other to make an example of being. General ideas can be formed by the mind without the use of our senses or sensory organs. Senses are acquired at birth but, the essentials of knowledge, truth and being, is slowly and hardly gain through many years of education, experience, and reflection later on. We now know that we cannot get the essentials of knowledge, truth and being for perception itself. Therefore knowledge cannot be based on …show more content…

He quickly releases that this is the foundation of most of his beliefs. He first acknowledges that sometime our senses can deceive us, but say that our senses is mostly sturdy. It is after this that Descartes realizes that there has been times where he has been sleeping and in his dream he was certain that he was awake and sensing real objects. Though his current senses may have be dream senses, he suggests that even dream senses are drawn from our experience of us awake. He then discovers that there are times in which he cannot distinguish whether he is in his waking state and his dream state. This lead to Descartes saying that he cannot use his sensory perception to interpret his belief because he is not able to tell if the senses are dreams or

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