Plato, Theaetetus, section 203d

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

[203d]

Theaetetus
Of course.

Socrates
He knows, that is, the S and the O.

Theaetetus
Yes.

Socrates
How is that? He is ignorant of each, and knowing neither of them he knows them both?

Theaetetus
That is monstrous and absurd, Socrates.

Socrates
And yet if a knowledge of each letter is necessary before one can know both, he who is ever to know a syllable must certainly know the letters first, and so our fine theory will have run away and vanished!

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.