Socrates Recollection Essay

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Philosophy Assignment 1a During Plato’s writing of Phaedo, the readers can learn about Socrates ideas of knowledge and how one obtains knowledge of different things. Socrates believes that the true forms of knowledge is not through the experiences that one lives throughout life, but a recollection of things that already exist in the human soul. He sets forth this notion by saying, “Learning is no other than recollection. According to this, we must at some previous time have learned what we now recollect. This is possible only if our soul existed somewhere before it took on this human shape” (Phaedo 72e). Anything that is truly learned during our life is simply a recollection. However, in order to have this recollection exist in the soul, it would also mean that a soul must exist before the human body exists. The reasoning behind this is due to the fact that if our soul did not exist prior to our body, then how could we recollect anything. …show more content…

When a person sees two things that are similar, they may say that the two items are equal. However, this equal argument has to come from some previous knowledge that the person has. Socrates argues this saying, “We must then possess knowledge of the Equal before that time when we first saw the equal objects and realized that all these objects strive to be like the equal but are deficient to this” (75a). If one did not have the knowledge of Equal prior to the instance that he or she is in front of, they may simply think that things are similar and move on. However, this is not the case and we all have previous exposure to the form of Equal and recollect it in these

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