The Chemistry of Knowledge Essay - 1905 Words

The Chemistry of Knowledge Hippeas thought he had all the answers. â€Å"I have never found any man who was my superior in anything,† he boasted. Then he meets Socrates. Though he had made thousands of public speeches about virtue, a dialogue with the wisest of Athenians leads Hippeas to confess that he â€Å"cannot even say what [virtue] is† (Hippeas 70). Lesser Hippeas discredits Hippeas but offers little more than a negative definition of knowledge. Meno, Phaedo, and the Republic provide a more comprehensive discussion of the definition, the good and the teaching of knowledge. The following pages will explore Plato’s theory of knowledge and will conclude with an examination of organic chemistry at Swarthmore College. According to Plato,†¦show more content†¦Meno provides a more grounded discussion of Plato’s ideas about the acquisition knowledge and about his conception of the soul. According to Plato, the immortal soul provides the potential to gain knowledge: â€Å"there is nothing which [the soul] has not learned, so it is no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before† (Meno 71). Recollection is a process of â€Å"searching and learning† (71) whereby a person extracts knowledge from the memory bank of their soul. Socrates’ dialogue with a slave reveals that any person can give a â€Å"right answer of their own accord,† (Phaedo 111) given sufficient information and an able interrogator. The recollection of opinion can subsequently be translated into knowledge when it is stirred â€Å"stirred by questioning† (Meno 78) and discussion yields â€Å"an account of the reason why† (90). In Meno, Plato introduces the idea that knowledge and the Good are inextricably linked. Lesser Hippeas alludes to the moral neutrality of skill and broaches the subject of wrongdoing in conjunction with knowledge. In Meno, Plato first refers to the relation between knowledge and the good: â€Å"there is nothing good that knowledge does not encompass† (80). Moreover, Plato insinuates that the knowledgeable man knows no evil. Plato’s Sun analogy in the Republic makes more explicit the relationship between knowledge, understanding, truth, the soul and the Good. The sun emits light and bestows sight to the eye.Show MoreRelatedPersonal Knowledge And The Chemistry Field1339 Words   |  6 PagesShared knowledge is assembled by a group of people. For example, biology is an enormous subject comprised of work done by many people over hundreds of years. To add to this knowledge, individual scientists can perform experiments. The results from these experiments are then taken and written in research papers, a very basic version being a lab report. 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