The full-strength doctrine carries not only the implication that non-empirical knowledge can exist but also, unfortunately, that empirical knowledge cannot exist. This latter thesis could be sugar-coated with the plea that since Plato is willing to admit what we call ‘empirical knowledge’ under the name of ‘true belief’, nothing is changed except the name. … In refusing the term ‘knowledge’ to propositions of ordinary experience and of the observational sciences Plato is downgrading quite deliberately those truth-seeking and truth-grounding procedures which cannot be assimilated to deductive reasoning and cannot yield formal certainty; and this has enormous implications, theoretical, and also practical ones, as can be seen in the exclusion of disciplines like medicine, biology, and history from the curriculum of higher learning in the Republic. —G. Vlastos, ‘Anamnesis in the Meno’ in Plato’s Meno in Focus (ed. J.M. Day) (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 101–2

Fire alarm this morning, I was in the shower, so had to walk across two quads to the assembly point in just a towel, ouch my feet.