Originally Posted by
Perumthachan
i wouldn't say diffuse. because later day philosophers took on certain aspects which plato had took for granted. granted in the sense, he assumed they were for real. for plato, the material world was in a domain of itself. mind was in another. and knowledge would be what the mind perceives and forms into ideas. in that sense, descartes, spinoza, leibniz and other rationalistic thinkers on one hand and the british empiricists thinkers on the other hand took on the subject of knowledge itself, or the source of it as worth a subject of study. it needed immanuel kant to make a bridge between these two factions.