In this paper, I will attempt to interpret Plato's concept of knowledge as he presents it in the very end of Book V of the Republic. An adequate interpretation of Plato's concept of knowledge must be able to account coherently for the following, According to Plato, knowledge is not a state of mind, but an ability or power of the mind and is therefore, formally analogous to sight. This analogy is presented explicitly and in great detail in the famous ‘similes (...) of light,’ the Sun, Divided Line, and Cave passages of Books VI and VII. Cognition, for Plato, comes in degrees from clearer to less clear. Finally, knowledge is related in a special way to being. (shrink)

If you would reflect that the part of the soul that in the former case, in our own misfortunes, was forcibly restrained, and that has hungered for tears and a good cry and satisfaction, because it is its nature to desire these things, is the element in us that the poets satisfy and delight, and that the best element in our nature, since it has never been properly educated by reason or even by habit, then relaxes its guard over the (...) plaintive part, inasmuch as this is contemplating the woes of others and it is no shame to it to praise and pity another who, claiming to be a good man, abandons himself to excess in his grief; but [he] thinks this vicarious pleasure is so much clear gain, and would not consent to forfeit it by disdaining the poem altogether. (shrink)

I discuss Aristotle’s opening argument against Platonic Forms in _Metaphysics_ A.9, ‘the Razor’, which criticizes the introduction of Forms on the basis of an analogy with a hypothetical case of counting things. I argue for a new interpretation of this argument, and show that it involves two interesting objections against the introduction of Forms as formal causes: one concerns the completeness and the other the adequacy of such an explanatory project.