‘A Divinity Moving You’: Knowledge and Inspiration in Plato’s Ion

Abstract

Our beliefs often fail to meet even very minimal epistemic conditions: they fail to be true, or they fail to be justified. Even where some belief is both true and justified, the believer may hold it for the wrong reasons; That is, the reasons he adduces may not be those which in fact justify the belief. The project of identifying and evaluating our reasons for — and sources of — belief is central to contemporary philosophy, but its present-day form first found expression in Plato’s early ‘Socratic’ dialogues. These dialogues aim less at positive conclusions than at negative critique, many of them ending with an aporia, leaving their central question unresolved. They typically pose definitional problems — What is beauty? What is piety? What is virtue?, but seldom yield conclusive answers.