  Epistemology, for Plato, is best thought of as the account of what knowledge is. A reader who has some familiarity with philosophy since Descartes may well think that epistemology must address the question whether there is any knowledge. Plato never considers the global skeptical challenge. He assumes that there is knowledge, or at least that it is possible, and he inquires into the conditions that make it possible. These conditions, broadly conceived, concern, on the one hand, the rational capacities of humans, or more accurately souls, and, on the other hand, the objects of knowledge. With respect to objects, Forms certainly are objects of knowledge. However, there is much dispute as to whether anything in the material world is a suitable object. The physical world is an image, an imperfect world of change.  Many passages in the Phaedo and, most dramatically, the Republic's great metaphors of Sun, Line and Cave, imply that Plato is a skeptic about knowledge of the physical, sensible world.  Humans can have only beliefs about it. But many recoil at the prospect that Plato is such a skeptic. Citing the thrust of other discussions, these readers argue that while all knowledge for Plato must be based, in some sense, on Forms, one who knows Forms can also acquire knowledge of the physical world (see Fine 1978; 1990).