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Dear Socrates
Dear Socrates
Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.
Dear Socrates,
May I say how gratified I was to have sparked off a debate between such illustrious forbears on the subject of wisdom (Issue 33, pp.38-42). However I confess myself more than a little puzzled about your own initial answer to my question, upon which the entire symposium was predicated. For I asked you whether wisdom was knowledge or perhaps intelligence or some virtue, and you replied that wisdom is “the recognition that our claims to knowledge are always based upon assumptions.” I find myself not much the ‘wiser’ for this response, for what exactly is this recognition: Is it knowledge and, if so, is it also based upon assumptions, and so on forever? Or is this recognition perhaps a kind of understanding other than knowledge? Furthermore, if knowledge is always based upon assumptions, does this mean that scientific truths do not depend purely on observation and experiment as many of us thought, but on unproved assumptions? Are these assumptions social conventions, or a priori or what?
Dave Henley
Dear Socrates,
Your style of philosophy seems to be a search for useful knowledge of oneself, fellow man, and society.
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