Plato on Divination and Nondiscursive Knowing
Plato on Divination and Nondiscursive Knowing
This chapter attempts to lay out a general sense of how divination functions in Plato's work. It focuses not on how seriously Plato takes divination, but rather on how he takes it. Irrespective of any endorsement he may have hinted at toward the idea of knowledge arriving via traditional divinatory pathways, in what particular ways does he talk about it? The analysis proceeds from a sense that Plato uses divination as an authoritative piece of his cultural context, to specify with greater precision his own ideas about ways of knowing; and as he is doing this, he helps us understand the nature of divination, as it is understood in his time. In general in his corpus, it is argued that Plato treats divination (in a rainbow of tones from irony to seriousness) as being based on a claim about a particular form of cognition, one marked especially for being nondiscursive.
Keywords: Plato, ancient divination, nondiscursive knowing
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