Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:17:56 — 126.3MB)

Discussing the Theaetetus and the Meno, two dialogues about knowledge.

We’re returning to Plato for a somewhat more thorough treatment than we gave him in Episode 1. This should be considered part two (Hume being #1) of three discussions intended to convey the main conflict in the history of epistemology between the empiricists (like Hume) and the rationalists (like Plato).

We slog through most of the Theaetetus, where Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. Seth is crushed. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe), like anything worth knowing can’t be learned but only elicited out of the depths of your unconscious.

Read along: The Theaetetus and The Meno, or if you don’t like the funky background on those pages, look them up via Project Gutenberg. You could also purchasethem.

Seth did this diagram to express his love of the Meno.

End song: “Obvious Boy” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Listen to the whole album online.