Knowledge and truth

What can we know, and how can we be sure? Socrates claimed to know nothing and was declared the wisest man in Greece for it. The Republic answers with an image, the cave, in which what we take for knowledge is shadows on a wall, and the philosopher is the one who has been dragged outside. Aristotle, more patiently, catalogues the kinds of knowing and works out the logic that connects them. Augustine turns the question inward and finds, in the act of doubting, something that cannot be doubted.

Descartes found the same thing twelve centuries later and made it the foundation of modern philosophy. From him the shelf splits. Locke and Hume follow the senses and end up unable to prove that the sun will rise tomorrow. Kant, woken by Hume, argues that the mind supplies the order the senses cannot. Bacon and Newton set the question aside and simply built the method that worked, and the science shelf is what came of it.

This theme carries the most works of any on the site because epistemology hides in everything: in Oedipus, who knows too late; in Hamlet, who knows and cannot act; in Montaigne’s motto, what do I know? Start with the Meno, which asks the question a student would ask.