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There's no consensus to this day on what the precise nature of knowledge is;
but I guess that the nearest we have to a generally accepted view
is actually close to what you have just said: namely, that it´s perception,
something that is based on direct experience plus our capacity to provide justification.
Ah. You have now produced an interesting solution to the problem
we are left with at the end of the dialogue;
namely, all of those answers have been knocked down taken separately,
it's been…, Socrates has refuted the thesis that knowledge is perception,
refuted the thesis that knowledge is true judgment,
refuted the thesis that true judgment is…, or that knowledge is true judgment with an account.
And now you are suggesting that perhaps we get a definition of knowledge by somehow
putting all the elements of the three separate definitions together into one,
and thereby making a theory of knowledge around the definition of knowledge.
That would be a highly suitable response to this kind of dialogue;
namely, suggesting a definition of one's own in terms of what one has learnt from the dialogue.
We must, I think, bring this discussion to close now, but before we do,
I would like to ask you something about the influence of all those.
Because Plato, must be either the most influential
or one of the two or three most influential philosophers they have ever been.
Can you say a little bit, only briefly, about what the main lines of that influence have been?
I think it is important to remember there were two philosophies opposed to materialism in the ancient world.
There was Materialism in the form of the atomic doctrine held by Democritus and Epicurus,
and there were anti-materialist philosophers: Plato and Aristotle.
Both of whom are opposed to the suggestion that everything
- life, order, mind, civilisation, art, nature -
can all be explained as the outcome of the movements of particles of matter
subject just to the laws of motion and their own nature.
Now, Aristotlianism is opposed to that sort of Materialism,
but Aristotelianism carries the war so far into the enemy camp
that it is actually very hard to reconcile the Aristotelian philosophy with the modern scientific enterprise,
which is a lot about atoms and the movements of particles of matter or that sort of stuff,
and indeed, I think, it was no accident that when the modern scientific enterprise got going,
and got going by throwing away the Aristotelianism which had so dominated the Middle Ages.
But Platonism is much easier to reconcile with the modern scientific enterprise,
and that's why, I think, since the Renaissance really,
Platonism has lived on after the death of Aristotelianism,
because that's a philosophy which you can use or be influenced by
if you are seeking to show how scientific and spiritual values can be reconciled,
if you want to do justice to the complexities of things,
where materialism is giving just too simple and simplistic a story.
And there´s something very contemporary to us, isn´t there,
it's about the fact that, Plato's cosmology and Plato's science is based on the essentially mathematical physics.
- Yes. - Thank you very much, Professor Burnyeat.