Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Colby Access Only)
Department
Colby College. Philosophy Dept.
Advisor(s)
Elizabeth Hill
Second Advisor
Dan Cohen
Abstract
Plato and Descartes are often paired together as the two great dualists of the Western philosophical tradition. In this essay, I challenge this narrative and show how Plato’s Republic and Descartes’ Meditations present fundamentally irreconcilable epistemological systems. For Plato, knowledge is an encounter with the natural intelligibility inherent in all true being. For Descartes, in contrast, knowledge is reduced to the correspondence of our ideas to the external state of the world.
Keywords
Plato, Descartes, Republic, Meditations, Epistemology
Recommended Citation
Smith, Jordan H., "Plato and Descartes: From Informed Reason to Deformed Logic" (2025). Honors Theses. Paper 1502.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1502