Plato Reflection

Socrates’s work has laid the foundation for all philosophical thinkers after his time. Although never writing anything down, Plato’s account of Socrates’s fundamental thoughts gives us a direct insight into our own beliefs and helps us question our very core values. Socrates has brought about many theories of existence due to the mere questioning of daily attributes like the existence of learning. In Plato’s dialogue, Meno, Socrates poses a valid argument that we do not learn but seemingly recollect knowledge from a previous life. He uses a vague example of a slave boy “recollecting” a geometric problem. After establishing this, he then postulates that our soul is immortal and recollection is evidence of such. This is yet another mistake in

(Plato 71)” In this quote, Socrates brings forth the theory of recollection, which states that we do not learn things but have previously known them and are merely remembering these forgotten pieces of information from previous lives. Meno and Socrates both come to the conclusion that one cannot learn what they already know and cannot seek what they do not know, rendering learning unfeasible. Socrates states, “[…] a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for”(Plato 70). Most famously this is referred to as “Meno’s paradox”. Although convincing, this argument stands on loose ground. If we are to remember information from our past life or lives, we had to have learned them in those lives initially. At some point we are to have learned something in order for us to recollect it. This “paradox of recollection” is simple, we cannot recollect something we have previously learned without first learning it in a past life and cannot learn if we are only to recollect. This poses a serious dilemma in Socrates’s argument, for if we are to have learned