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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: spirit of Aristotle, how can there be a knowledge of knowledge, and even if
attainable, how can such a knowledge be of any use?
The difficulty of the Charmides arises chiefly from the two senses of the
word (Greek), or temperance. From the ethical notion of temperance, which
is variously defined to be quietness, modesty, doing our own business, the
doing of good actions, the dialogue passes onto the intellectual conception
of (Greek), which is declared also to be the science of self-knowledge, or
of the knowledge of what we know and do not know, or of the knowledge of
good and evil. The dialogue represents a stage in the history of
philosophy in which knowledge and action were not yet distinguished. Hence
the confusion between them, and the easy transition from one to the other.
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