A report on Truth, Knowledge and Reason

An angel carrying the banner of "Truth", Roslin, Midlothian

Los portadores de la antorcha (The Torch-Bearers) – Sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington symbolizing the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next (Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain)

Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos), c. 1797

Walter Seymour Allward's Veritas (Truth) outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Canada

'"What is Truth?" by Nikolai Ge, depicting John 18:38 in which Pilate asks Christ "What is truth?"

The parable of the blind men and the elephant suggests that people tend to project their partial experiences as the whole truth

Dan Sperber believes that reasoning in groups is more effective and promotes their evolutionary fitness.

The owl of Athena is a symbol of knowledge.

Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth.

- Reason

Knowledge of facts, also referred to as propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification.

- Knowledge

The role that truth plays in constituting knowledge.

- Truth

Specifically, this covers cases of superstition, lucky guesses, or erroneous reasoning.

- Knowledge

Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell if a proposition is true or not.

- Truth

The first question is concerning whether we can be confident that reason can achieve knowledge of truth better than other ways of trying to achieve such knowledge.

- Reason

3 related topics with Alpha

René Descartes, who is often credited as the father of modern philosophy, was often preoccupied with epistemological questions in his work.

Epistemology

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Bertrand Russell famously brought attention to the distinction between propositional knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance.

An Euler diagram representing a version of the traditional definition of knowledge that is adapted to the Gettier problem. This problem gives us reason to think that not all justified true beliefs constitute knowledge.

The analytic–synthetic distinction was first proposed by Immanuel Kant.

David Hume, one of the most staunch defenders of empiricism.

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge.

Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues.

1) The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification

Plato

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Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece.

Diogenes Laertius is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy.

Through his mother, Plato was related to Solon.

Plato in his academy, drawing after a painting by Swedish painter Carl Johan Wahlbom

A detail of Spinoza monument in Amsterdam.

The "windmill proof" of the Pythagorean theorem found in Euclid's Elements.

A Venn diagram illustrating the classical theory of knowledge.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri, with fragment of Plato's Republic

Bust excavated at the Villa of the Papyri, possibly of Dionysus, Plato or Poseidon.

The Death of Socrates (1787), by Jacques-Louis David

Plato's Allegory of the Cave by Jan Saenredam, according to Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604, Albertina, Vienna

Painting of a scene from Plato's Symposium (Anselm Feuerbach, 1873)

Volume 3, pp. 32–33, of the 1578 Stephanus edition of Plato, showing a passage of Timaeus with the Latin translation and notes of Jean de Serres

First page of the Euthyphro, from the Clarke Plato (Codex Oxoniensis Clarkianus 39), 895 AD. The text is Greek minuscule.

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle gestures to the earth while holding a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics in his hand. Plato holds his Timaeus and gestures to the heavens.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929).

Just as individual tables, chairs, and cars refer to objects in this world, 'tableness', 'chairness', and 'carness', as well as e. g. justice, truth, and beauty refer to objects in another world.

Many have interpreted Plato as stating — even having been the first to write — that knowledge is justified true belief, an influential view that informed future developments in epistemology.

In addition, the ideal city is used as an image to illuminate the state of one's soul, or the will, reason, and desires combined in the human body.

Detail of Pythagoras with a tablet of ratios, numbers sacred to the Pythagoreans, from The School of Athens by Raphael. Vatican Palace, Vatican City.

Rationalism

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Plato in The School of Athens, by Raphael

In spite of his early death, Spinoza exerted a profound influence on philosophy in the Age of Reason. He is often considered one of three most remarkable rationalists of modern Western thought, along with Descartes and Leibniz.

In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".

Much of the debate in these fields are focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification.

The Innate Knowledge thesis is similar to the Intuition/Deduction thesis in the regard that both theses claim knowledge is gained a priori.