Plato, Theaetetus, section 188c

Home Collections/Texts Perseus Catalog Research Grants Open Source About Help

Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:

This text is part of:

Greek and Roman Materials

Search the Perseus Catalog for:

View text chunked by:

text : page
text : section

Table of Contents:

view as XML

[188c]

Theaetetus
That is impossible.

Socrates
But surely a man does not think that the things he knows are the things he does not know, or again that the things he does not know are the things he knows.

Theaetetus
That would be a monstrous absurdity.

Socrates
Then how could he still form false opinions? For inasmuch as all things are either known or unknown to us, it is impossible, I imagine, to form opinions outside of these alternatives, and within them it is clear that there is no place for fake opinion.

Theaetetus
Very true.

Socrates
Had we, then, better look for what we are seeking, not by this method of knowing and not knowing, but by that of being

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

view as XML

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.