Several Philosophical Theories

One of the most famous statements of a theory of knowledge comes in Plato's Republic in Book VI. He introduces the figure of the divided line, with one half representing the visible order and the other the intangible. Lavine describes the divided line as follows:

A vertical line is divided into four segments, each of which from the lowest to the highest represents a level of knowledge. Each level of knowledge--imagining or conjecture, belief, understanding, reason--has its own objects and its own method for knowing them. The basic division, however, is between knowledge, whose objects are in the intelligible world, and opinion, whose objects are in the visible world (Lavine 31).

This division is a ranking of knowledge according to the degree of reliability that can be placed in it, and it is clearly based on a belief that knowledge is possible.

Following Plato, Descartes sets forth a theory of rationalism in wh

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they as well derive from God and are worked through us but not with us, as Aquinas states it. The four cardinal virtues among the moral virtues are prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. The virtues are called cardinal because they are "principal," meaning they are fundamental to attaining the "rectitude of appetite" of virtuous living. For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, there is no distinction between private morality and public morality. Prudence exists in the very act of reason and is the principal virtue. As reason puts its order into something else, we achieve the virtue of justice. As the order of reason is put into passions, there may be an incitement of the passions to something against reason. Prudence orders our practical reason; justice orders the will or our intellectual appetite; temperance and fortitude perfect the passions, which are divided into the concupiscible or desiring power and the irascible or struggling power. The four virtues are cardinal because they sufficiently order all those areas of our lives that are engaged in moral acting. . . They are necessary and sufficient conditions for describing an agent and an action as virtuous (Keenan 715). In scholastic language, these are the acquired
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