Two Kinds of Belief in Plato

The purpose of this paper is to lay bare the distinction between two different kinds of belief in Plato. In the Sophist (263e10–264b4), Plato distinguishes between phantasia, which occurs “through sense perception,” and doxa, which occurs “in respect of thinking.” It is argued that a phantasia is a belief formed by means of sense perception on the basis of how things appear to be, whereas a doxa is a belief formed through a particular kind of thinking, which provides understanding of the being of the thing by sorting out how its nature is related to other natures in terms of its genus and species.