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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: the absence of science or knowledge, will not be able to distinguish the
physician who knows from one who does not know but pretends or thinks that
he knows, or any other professor of anything at all; like any other artist,
he will only know his fellow in art or wisdom, and no one else.
That is evident, he said.
But then what profit, Critias, I said, is there any longer in wisdom or
temperance which yet remains, if this is wisdom? If, indeed, as we were
supposing at first, the wise man had been able to distinguish what he knew
and did not know, and that he knew the one and did not know the other, and
to recognize a similar faculty of discernment in others, there would
certainly have been a great advantage in being wise; for then we should
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