(1)Explain and evaluate Platos epistemological position or - Essay Example

Many philosophers regard experience and reason as the basis of knowledge. Reason and experience as ways of identifying knowledge commonly referred as rationalism and empiricism. A rational philosopher deems that, knowledges basis is on self-evidence and principles. Knowledge that does not rely on sense of experience is priori while knowledge that relies on experience posteriori. Plato is an example of a rationalist because he believes that sense experience does not provide people with certainty whether what they experience is true.

He deems that, the information people receive by relying on sense is unreliable because it changes constantly. The unchanging forms or principles are what Plato believes to be thinking or reasoning (Bobonich 15). When an individual has an opinion founded on undoubted principles, then he has a strong foundation of the opinion. This foundation helps individuals to take a belief to be more than an opinion and makes people identify a belief to be true. When individuals believe something is true, then this is knowledge.

For individuals to gain the knowledge they ought to surpass the changing flux of the physical world and hold a rational permanent order behind the world. The grasping of a rational permanent order is an intellectual functioning of the mind, and in its purest form there is formal (Brandwood 25). The intellectual act can only take place when there are innate ideas that have a foundation. Knowing normally assumes the definition as the process of making the observable world intelligible through relating it to the external order of the truth.

Plato defines the changing world and materials as the realm of forms. He argues that physical objects are real if only they are intelligible, but they can only be intelligent in unchanging terms. What makes something to be intelligible cannot be constantly changing; hence, it being unrecognizable to be that thing. It is therefore; correct to say that a