Theories of knowledge in the old Academy

Abstract

The task of identifying the particular epistemological theories of the members of the old Academy is not an easy one, by reason of the general lack of evidence, but, at least in the case of Speusippus and Xenocrates, some insights are derivable. In both cases what we can observe is – while doubtless acknowledging the inferior status of sense-perception – a concern, in the case of Speusippus, to arrive at a criterion of accuracy in the perception of sense objects, namely by applying logos to raw sense-data, thus achieving epistemonike aisthesis; and in the case of Xenocrates, the application of his theory of minimal parts to the elucidation of the process of aisthesis.