The Birth of Belief

Did Plato and Aristotle have anything to say about belief? The answer to this question might seem blindingly obvious: of course they did. Plato distinguishes belief from knowledge in the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the Posterior Analytics. Plato distinguishes belief from perception in the Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the de Anima. They talk about the distinction between true and false beliefs, and the ways in which belief can mislead and the ways in which it can steer us aright. Indeed, they make belief a central component of their epistemologies. The view underlying these claims—one so widespread these days as to remain largely unquestioned—is that when Plato and Aristotle talk about doxa, they are talking about what we now call belief. Or, at least, they are talking about something so closely related to what we now call belief that no philosophical importance can be placed on any differences. Doxa is the ancient counterpart of belief: hence, the use nowadays of ‘doxastic’ as the adjective corresponding to ‘belief.’ One of our aims in this paper is to challenge this view. We argue that Plato and Aristotle raise questions and advance views about doxa that would be very strange if they concerned belief. This suggests either that Plato and Aristotle had very strange ideas about belief, or that doxa is not best understood as belief. We argue for the latter option by pursuing our second aim, which is to show that Aristotle, expanding on ideas suggested in Plato, explicitly develops a notion that corresponds much more closely to our modern notion of belief: hupolêpsis. Hupolêpsis is a much-ignored and often misunderstood component of Aristotle’s epistemology, usually set aside under the un-illuminating name of ‘supposition.’ We will argue, however, that it exhibits the central feature of belief as nowadays understood: it is the generic attitude of taking-to-be-true. Furthermore, we will show, because Aristotle *Authors names listed alphabetically; both contributed equally to all parts of the project.