The philosopher Socrates rejected the Sophists view of truth as being subjective and held to the notion of absolute truth. For Socrates truth was found by dialectic logic.
He believed that in side every one was a divinity and that by looking within oneself one could find truth through the process of dialectic reasoning and introspection. The problem with this view was that reason again becomes the ultimate source of truth. It makes his introspection and conclusions to be subjective claims and we may ask how does his subjective views of the world relate to the objective world.

Plato
The Philosopher Plato is classed as one of the greatest thinkers. Out of all the secular thinkers of the world I believe Plato almost had an epistemology that made sense of both our inner thoughts and their relation to the objective world outside. Plato held that that there are many concepts in our minds that we can not see in the world, such as goodness, or justice. But we know they exist as actual things. For Plato these were called the forms or ideas that exist in another realm, a world of forms. Plato believed that these concepts were eternal models of which things were on earth copies.

By human reason Plato believed that we could tap into an eternal realm of prefect immaterial changeless forms. It was almost like promoting there was a mind behind the universe, but for Plato, there was no mind just abstract ideas that float around in this other realm. For Plato when he looked into the world and saw a tree or beauty his knowledge was true because the object that he was seeing was a copy of the eternal form in this realm, which reason has access to. This is almost like the Christian view that man thinks (on a finite level) Gods thoughts (interpretation) about the universe promoting a complete unity of truth.

The problem with Plato’s views is that these forms were not in a mind and were just abstract ideas with no contents. Another problem with the perfect forms is that they could not explain all reality. As the forms are supposed to be models for everything in the sense world, but the sense world is not prefect or changeless. The forms cannot model imperfections, changeless forms cannot model change. So the imperfection and change that is seen in the world when we go and try and explain it has no rational explanation.

This again leaves man with his rational mind looking at a world of change that is impersonal and irrational. Also how could finite minds think on an eternal level with the forms