Abstract

This text aims to show how the inclusion of sense-perceptions in cognition reformulates Plato’s “canonical version of the theory of Forms” (TF). Knowledge is no longer understood as the activity of a formal, epistemic, subject, but of a psychological one. In those dialogues dedicated to the exposition of the TF Plato’s view of cognition is based on the identification of epistêmê with Forms (according to the model of anamnesis). In the Theaetetus, however, sense-perceptions are related to knowledge in a way which sees the psychê no longer as an impersonal soul, travelling through a succession of bodies. Plato’s analysis of doxa takes psychê as a feeling and thinking, irreducibly personal, subjective mind.