Plato’s and Smith’s Differing Epistemologies: Assessing "Phaedrus" and "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov" Amanda Abere College

To figure out the nature of knowledge, one must ask what it means to know, or fail to know something. This involves understanding what knowledge is, and determining cases in which one knows something, and cases in which one does not know something. When acquiring knowledge, people try to increase their supply of true beliefs, and in turn minimize their false beliefs. In The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, epistemology is defined under the definition of feeling: epistemology is “the theory of how we come to know” (Childs 85). It is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge, and what makes knowledge knowable. Between the two processes involved in knowing, “traditionally, reason and feeling,” (85) philosophy concentrates on reason. Plato’s Phaedrus, and Zadie Smith’s, Re-reading Barthes and Nabokov, analyze epistemology and discuss the nature/extent of human knowledge. Both philosophers use reason, for Plato’s Socrates does not mention feeling at all, and Barthes eliminates feeling entirely. In Smith’s reading of Barthes, she struggles to eliminate feeling.

According to Plato’s Socrates, knowledge is already known before one is born, and life requires recollecting these concepts, thus learning the “...