8/7/2019 Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher

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TOK Essay

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Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophicaldialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning

in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato

helped to lay the foundations of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy.

Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as

by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death.

Knowledge is expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or

education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a

particular field or in total; facts and information, or awareness or familiarity gained by

experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato's

formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief".

According to Plato, knowledge can only be knowledge if it can justified, believed,

and true. By having these three concepts in mind, you can quarrel with anyone about

what you know because first u believe it, and by believing it you know that its true to

you, and you can argue about it even more if you can justify it. Keeping these concepts

in mind, you can argue with anyone anytime about anything if you have the knowledge

about the topic. There are always ways that you can know your things from, which are

called ways of knowing; language, perception, reason, and emotion.

Truth is the most obvious thing that distinguishes knowledge from belief. Truth is

a thick concept that you can write a lot of pages about it. So simply, truth is

independent of what anyones happens to believe is true, and that simply believing that

something is true does not make it true. Truth is a never ending concept. As time

passes, new facts will be discovered and the old facts that we used to believe that they

were true will become false, thus truth is a never ending concept.

Another concept which Plato thinks that is important in indentifying what

knowledge is, is belief. Belief is the confidence in the truth or existence of something

not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof. Belief can be of many types, for example

human belief. Humans believe in many things such religion. Most people argue about

which religion is more valid than the other. But the one that believes his/her religion is

more valid and thinks its true and can actually justify it will obviously win the argument.

There is a clear difference between knowing something and believing something.

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