History of Philosophy Commons^™

Platonic Recollection And Mental Pregnancy, Glenn Rawson

Faculty Publications

This article proffers reinterpretation of Platonic recollection and examines Plato and his models for philosophical inquiry. One underappreciated puzzle about Platonic recollection is why this notorious legacy to epistemology and theory of education, this pioneering notion of innate ideas, should so often be ignored by its author ... Plato finds ways to remind us constantly of his favorite teachings, and recollection would be particularly relevant at important moments in Symposium and Republic, which offer different models of innate ideas instead: in place of the non-dispositional model of recollection, which implies the innate possession of the content of the knowledge …