Abstract

SEARCHING and learning... are altogether recollection". A long and strong tradition in Platonic studies has taken this statement as a literal description of what happens when we come to know something that we had not known before. That literal interpretation is commonly linked to a similarly literal interpretation of Plato's statements about the soul's cycle of rebirths, and to a transcendent rather than a transcendental view of the Ideas, one which gives them an ontological status separate from sensible particulars. Sensibles thus recall to our minds the Ideas which we saw in our earlier life in the other world, the world to which our disembodied souls will return as a reward for having pursued the philosophical life.