1001Philosophers

Plato vs Socrates on Knowledge

The historical Socrates' relation to knowledge is the famous Socratic disclaimer: he knows nothing except his own ignorance, and his philosophical method is the elenchus that exposes the same in his interlocutors. Plato's literary Socrates inherits this method but extends it into the positive doctrine of recollection: the soul has seen the Forms before its embodiment, and learning is the recovery of what it once knew. The line between Socratic ignorance and Platonic recollection is one of philosophy's deepest interpretive puzzles.

About this topic

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. Philosophers have asked what distinguishes knowledge from mere opinion, whether it requires certainty or can be probabilistic, and how perception, reason, memory, and testimony each contribute. Ancient skeptics challenged the possibility of knowledge altogether, while rationalists located its source in reason and empiricists in experience. Contemporary epistemology investigates justification, reliability, and the social conditions under which beliefs count as knowing.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full Plato vs Socrates comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the Knowledge quotes hub.

Representative quotes on knowledge

Plato on knowledge

  • “Philosophy begins in wonder.”

    155d, The Dialogues of Plato , Volume 3, 1871, p. 377

  • “I shall assume that your silence gives consent .”

    435b

  • “If the very essence of knowledge changes, at the moment of the change to another essence of knowledge there would be no knowledge, and if it is always changing, there will always be no knowledge, and by this reasoning there will be neither anyone to know nor anything to be known. But if there is always that which knows and that which is known —if the beautiful, the good, and all the other verities exist— I do not see how there is any likeness between these conditions of which I am now speaking and flux or motion.”

    440a–b

  • “155d, The Dialogues of Plato , Volume 3, 1871, p. 377”

    Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

  • “Perception and knowledge could never be the same.”

    186e

All 12 Plato quotes on knowledge →

Socrates on knowledge

  • “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

    Variant: The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. | Socrates II: xxxi . Original Greek: ἓν μόνον ἀγαθὸν εἶναι, τὴν ἐπιστήμην, καὶ ἓν μόνον κακόν, τὴν ἀμαθίαν

  • “I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed ... from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.”

    Plato , Symposium , 175d

  • “Plato , Symposium , 175d”

    I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed ... from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.

  • “It would be better for me... that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.”

    Gorgias , 482c

  • “Oh dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.”

    Socrates' prayer, Phaedrus , 279

All 9 Socrates quotes on knowledge →

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