Quest Journals Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science Volume 5 ~ Issue 1 (2017) pp: 95-98 ISSN(Online) : 2321-9467 www.questjournals.org Research Paper
The Skepticism and the Dialectic as Instruments of Apprehension of Knowledge: Some Approaches between Descartes and Plato Pablo Silva Machado Bispo dos Santos Received 17 Jan, 2017; Accepted 27 Jan, 2017 © The author(s) 2017. Published with open access at www.questjournals.org ABSTRACT: The rationalist aspect of philosophy has in Plato and Descartes two of its main exponents. These are two distant thinkers about twenty centuries in time, but they have several possibilities of theoretical approaches, especially when used as guiding the study of his works the epistemological issues related to the dialectic (platonic) and the logical skepticism (Cartesian). Among these multiple possibilities of understanding of philosophy (and, more precisely, the epistemological perspective) of these philosophers, i will look for in the lines bellow to develop a brief essay regarding the role of dialog and doubt methodical as possibilities of research in epistemological work of these authors that became classics of human knowledge. Keywords: Skepticism and Rationalism,Philosophy of knowledge, Epistemology
I.
INTRODUCTION
Rationalism is a philosophy that never begins, because in reality it always resumes from the obscure or unfinished points of previous reasoning (Bachelard, 2000). In this sense, it is possible to trace a genealogy of rationalism, which goes back to ancient Greece with philosophers before Socrates. There is, however, to consider the fact that even though human reason is the guiding axis of philosophical reflection, some authors will have greater affinity than others from the epistemological point of view. Among these authors, we have in Plato and Descartes two examples of thinkers whose ideas have more similarities than differences in their view of the apprehension of knowledge. The following will present similarities, differences and contributions of such authors to Epistemology and to the Philosophy of Education.
II.
THE DIALECTICS AS THE FOUNDATION OF THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE PLATONIC
The Platonic philosophy, as it’s known is built upon the employment of constant allusions to a dimension that would be beyond the concreteness of the material world, and that is called by Plato “world of ideas”. This world of ideas would be the purest expression and just the knowledge of any element of reality, and from it, everything that exists and is perceived by the senses is copied and brought to the world in which we move and have our being. In the world of ideas are the "perfect shape", which would give rise to ideas such as: the good, truth and wisdom. Such ideas do not come about in the tangible world but would be observable by reason, property of the individual soul, seen by his time as a daemon (genius). The reason would be property that would allow the genie inside remember the knowledge of the truth about the loved intelligible (components of the world of ideas). Plato uses the idea of remembrance when it refers to the process of learning the inner genius because it understand that this comes from the world of ideas and, at a given moment, comes to join a material body so as to constitute a complete individual.As a way of getting closer to the knowledge of the truth, Plato (and, perhaps, Socrates, if we consider the possibility of historical existence of this character) uses of dialectic, especially as a way to define the starting point of all research on the face of the dialogic arguments. Let us see how the concept of dialectic in Plato is expressed in the words of the philosopher in the dialog Phaedrus: Cover in a single blow of view all ideas sketchy for one side or the other and merge them into a single idea generally in order to be able to understand, thanks to an exact definition, the subject of which you want to treat (Plato, 2000, p. 106). From the analysis of the platonic prescription, can be led to believe that Plato associates directly rules of logic the imperatives of homogenization and discursive organization as a way to employ the dialectic as an instrument for understanding the world. In this regard, it is interesting to note that, in the respect of dialog Cratylus of Plato, Maria Aparecida Montenegro (2001) affirms that: *Corresponding Author: Pablo Silva Machado Bispo dos Santos1
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