Guus Willem Eelink

At Theaetetus 181b8–183c3, Plato refutes a radical flux doctrine about the perceptual world. According to various recent interpretations, Plato shows that radical flux rules out the possibility of linguistically describing the perceptual world. I shall argue that such interpretations only identify a consequence of what Plato really shows, namely that radical flux rules out the very existence of the perceptual world. Plato thereby demonstrates that the perceptual world must involve certain stable patterns which play a crucial role in his subsequent argument against Theaetetus’ definition of knowledge as perception (at 184b3–187a8).