FRANK PICCININI MATTOS

In this work I intend to argue for a reading of Plato's Theaetetus from the concepts of perception, temporality and soul. I will attempt to demonstrate how the first moment of the dialogue, which examines the definition of knowledge as perception, constitutes a gradual establishment of necessary conditions (still insufficient) for knowledge, these conditions being resolved, ultimately, into a notion of temporality. From this, then, we have the emergence of the soul as a necessary concept for the satisfaction of these conditions, thus allowing, given its relation to being and what is common in the perceptions, an essentially temporal relation, a conceptual advantage vis-a-vis mere sense-perception in the attempt to define knowledge. Perception, however, does not seem to be entirely abandoned, whereby we will propose an elucidation of the articulation between the soul and the senses, and the consequences for the rest of the dialogue, especially in what concerns the second definition of knowledge as true judgment, the exam of fallibility and the two models of memory there presented.