Socrates Argument Of Recollection

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In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates asserts that a pure philosopher should look forward to death. One of the main reasons he says this is the belief that the soul is immortal. Upon hearing this belief Socrates' friend Cebes asks him to explain how he knows the soul is eternal. In order to do this, Socrates presents many interconnected arguments. Out of these arguments, the argument of recollection is one of the most elaborate.
In order to understand Socrates' argument of recollection, we must first understand his Theory of Forms. This theory states that certain absolute truths, known as forms, exist in a realm outside of our own physical reality. According to the theory, our own physical reality attempts to match these perfect forms, but ultimately …show more content…
First, he states that all learning is recollection, and that we can only recollect what we've already known. This makes sense as it would be impossible to remember something we've never known. Then, he points out that through seeing imitations of the forms in our physical world we can remember what the perfect form is. For example, seeing a picture of a near-perfect circle reminds us of perfect roundness. Because we can recall these forms, we must have known them at some point. The idea of having known the forms at some point is perplexing because the actual forms do not exist in our physical world. Socrates' concludes that we must have known these forms from before life in the spiritual realm, which proves the existence of the soul before birth.
While this argument proves the soul's existence before birth, Socrates' friends question how this proves it exists after death. In response, Socrates references his previous cyclical argument which basically concluded the soul is reborn to our world from death. With this argument in mind, we know the soul is reborn from the dead and exists before birth. From this we can logically conclude that the soul must exist after death, because there is no other way the soul could be reborn from
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