Plato

“Boy, call Charmides and say that I want to introduce him to a physician, in relation to that ailment he told me he was suffering from yesterday.”

Then Critias turned to me and explained, “In fact he said recently that he has a headache when he gets up in the morning, so what is to stop you from pretending to him that you know a remedy for a headache?”

“Nothing,” said I, “just let him come over.”

Plat. Charm. 156a

The word ‘epistemology’ has always given me a headache. It is certainly a mouthful: ‘the study of knowledge’, from epistēmē (Greek) and logos (Greek). It begins by asking: what is knowledge, and how do we know that we know?

But here is my problem: the question already assumes something. Whoever raises it must already believe they know how to judge an answer. Otherwise, why ask?

Epistemology seems to me, therefore, self-contradictory. The very act of demanding proof of knowledge implies that the questioner knows more: they already know what counts as proof. So the question ‘what is knowledge?’ presupposes a standard of knowledge that cannot itself be proven, only assumed.

Epistemology, then, becomes a personal issue. The epistemologist questions authority, effectively asking, ‘Who are you to say?’ or ‘Why should others listen to me?’. He questions the authority conferred by knowledge, but every reason he proposes must itself be known in order to justify the rest. This creates an infinite regress: how do you know that you know that you know? At some point, the only answer is: I just do.

Epistemology rests on the same kind of gesture we find in religion and myth: the claim that someone—some parental figure—has such an ultimate answer. And that, because of this, they know and had better be obeyed.

That leap of authority is the essence of moral persuasion. When a father says ‘don’t steal’, for example, he does not simply command, but implies some kind of knowledge of good and bad. The politician, the priest—they all appeal to knowledge to justify power. And so does the philosopher, who, like an inquisitive child, questions this knowledge but is trapped by the self-contradiction.

Ink-style illustration of a bearded Socrates seated with his head in his hand, visibly distressed, as a youthful Charmides stands nearby watching him with calm curiosity; the setting is sparse and classical, evoking an Athenian gymnasium.

This is why, in Plato’s dialogue Charmides, the ‘knowledge of knowledge’ is equated with temperance, which is not knowledge per se, but a virtue for those who claim authority on the basis of knowledge. In trying to define temperance, Critias—who would later become one of the Thirty Tyrants—reflects that the famous inscription at the Oracle of Delphi, ‘know thyself’, is not a mere piece of advice or an exhortation by the god. It is that be certain that one knows and is justified to rule, one must know what knowledge itself is. And this is a descriptive endeavour as much as a prescriptive one.

Plato discusses temperance here because both Critias and Charmides seem anxious about losing it. He writes with irony and hindsight, knowing the historical crimes these two would later commit, but also the sexual background of their will to power. Charmides is a beautiful boy. Everyone—Socrates included—seems intent on devouring him, and knowledge becomes the key to securing the coveted relationship. The boy, understandably, has a headache—a disturbance of reason.

The dialogue begins when Socrates proposes to heal him by applying a ‘charm’ to his soul, the charm of ‘temperance’. Yet the charm fails to contain the appetite. In fact, Socrates and Critias seem to know from the very beginning that this is destined to happen. They know themselves—and the fallacy of epistemology.

In Plato’s Euthydemus, a young man named Ctesippus is trapped by a sophist (paraphrased from Plat. Euthyd. 298e):

You have a dog? — Yes, a mischievous one.
And the dog is a father? — Of puppies, yes.
So the dog is a father. And you have a father? — Yes.
So you have a father, and the dog is a father. Therefore, the dog is your father.

Plato’s Euthydemus is, on the surface, a comedy. It is full of logical fallacies, verbal gymnastics, and the kind of wild, circular reasoning that seems designed less to enlighten than to bewilder. Readers often come to it as one of the “lighter” dialogues, a playful satire of sophists and their absurd arguments. One of those arguments, perhaps the most absurd of all, is the one you have just read.

But Plato is not likely to be joking. He himself took these arguments seriously in future dialogues, such as the Sophist, the Parmenides, and the Theaetetus, where he confronted the deep ambiguities of identity, falsehood, and non-being. What begins in Euthydemus as an attempt to ridicule his opponents, the sophists, becomes the foundation of a philosophical crisis in Plato’s later work.

So in this tentative blog series, I begin by taking the statement seriously: what if the dog really is your father? Or is the father your dog? Euthydemus may be a comedy, but comedy is not necessarily the opposite of seriousness. It is, often, another path to what we cannot say directly, especially when it involves our parents and kin.

The structure of Euthydemus reinforces this reading. Socrates recounts the dialogue to Crito, who tells Socrates that he is worried about his own son being educated by sophists. Meanwhile, Cleinias, the beautiful boy at the center of the discussion, is positioned between the sophists and Socrates like a child caught between competing fathers. This layering is significant: Socrates is not merely defending philosophy from sophistry; he is also, in a deeper sense, trying to justify fatherhood itself. Socrates defends the unity of being, wisdom, and kinship against a rhetorical hydra that spawns a bewildering multiplicity of “father-heads.” (Plat. Euthyd. 297c) Who is a father—or perhaps, who is Father?

Indeed, in Ancient Greek, as in many languages, terms like “father” are used both to denote a specific individual and to name a general role. Children (big and small) don’t usually say, “my father is in the kitchen,” let alone “a father is in the kitchen.” They say, “Father/Dad is in the kitchen,” and we, as their interlocutors, are happy to respond, “Tell Dad I said hello.” But this means that Dad could be anyone’s father, including ours! Could Plato’s philosophy — and by extension, all of philosophy — be an attempt to come to terms with human kinship? In the Euthydemus, the sophists effectively tell us that we are fatherless, because if the child’s father is Father, then ours cannot be Father too.

So who is our father, then? The dog, perhaps. And maybe now we can understand why Socrates always swore “by the Dog!”

Epistemology as a Headache

The Dog Is Your Father