Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy

To know epistemology’s history is to know better what contemporary epistemology could be and perhaps should be – and what it need not be and perhaps ought not to be.

Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy presents part of the history of one of Western philosophy’s greatest challenges: understanding the nature of knowledge.

Covering the Presocratics, the Sophists, the Soics, and more, along with treatments of knowledge offered by Socrates and Plato, this volume offers insights into the vast sweep of ways in which Ancient philosophers sought to understand knowledge. It focuses on thinkers from early in the Archaic Age of Greece through the work of Roman philosophers in the first centuries BCE and CE.

Introducing theories from parts of the ancient world, the fount of all Western epistemology, this collection reveals the origin and evolution of the first theories of knowledge.