How Have Western View Of Knowledge Changed Over Time
How have Western views of knowledge changed over time?
Throughout history, cultures have held disparate views on the nature of knowledge. Epistemology, the branch of philosophy that focuses on basic questions such as: “What is knowledge? How do we know what we know?”, lies at the heart of these views. In Western culture, the answers to these basic questions have changed markedly over time. Throughout history, this evolution in philosophy has been inextricably linked to science and religion. Much of Western thought has been heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks. In particular, the epistemological views of the Ancient Greeks dominated Western thought for centuries. Of all the Greek philosophers, Plato was one of the most influential. In his most famous work The Republic, Plato used the Allegory of the Cave to describe the role of sensory perception in knowledge acquisition. In his analogy, Plato described a cave in which people …show more content…
Today, we describe Plato’s philosophical views as rationalist. He argued against reliance on sensory experience because he believed that it failed to provide us with any guarantee that what we experience was, in fact, true. He believed that the information we get by relying on sensory experience is constantly changing and often unreliable. It can be evaluated only by appealing to higher principles that do not change. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato was comparing our sensory perception to the shadows on the wall of the cave. Plato saw us as the chained prisoners unable to know anything but this false reality. Only by leaving the cave and ascending to higher orders of thought are we able to know true reality. Implicit in this view was the belief that true knowledge cannot be found through empirical investigation. According to Plato, empirical knowledge was merely opinion. Only thought and abstract reasoning could produce true
Throughout history, cultures have held disparate views on the nature of knowledge. Epistemology, the branch of philosophy that focuses on basic questions such as: “What is knowledge? How do we know what we know?”, lies at the heart of these views. In Western culture, the answers to these basic questions have changed markedly over time. Throughout history, this evolution in philosophy has been inextricably linked to science and religion. Much of Western thought has been heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks. In particular, the epistemological views of the Ancient Greeks dominated Western thought for centuries. Of all the Greek philosophers, Plato was one of the most influential. In his most famous work The Republic, Plato used the Allegory of the Cave to describe the role of sensory perception in knowledge acquisition. In his analogy, Plato described a cave in which people …show more content…
Today, we describe Plato’s philosophical views as rationalist. He argued against reliance on sensory experience because he believed that it failed to provide us with any guarantee that what we experience was, in fact, true. He believed that the information we get by relying on sensory experience is constantly changing and often unreliable. It can be evaluated only by appealing to higher principles that do not change. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato was comparing our sensory perception to the shadows on the wall of the cave. Plato saw us as the chained prisoners unable to know anything but this false reality. Only by leaving the cave and ascending to higher orders of thought are we able to know true reality. Implicit in this view was the belief that true knowledge cannot be found through empirical investigation. According to Plato, empirical knowledge was merely opinion. Only thought and abstract reasoning could produce true