A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE

One could start a discussion of the Platonic dialogue about the doctrine of recollection with a more modern clichT: that we should not judge someone unless we have walked a mile in their shoes. While this is, of course, impossible, the theory still stands: that knowledge of someone's actions or desires may have some sort of un-personal (that is, as Descartes might say) God-given or spiritual antecedents. But what may truly be pertinent in the discussion of recollection and knowledge itself, is that one has to separate knowledge from opinion. One also has to investigate the limitations of knowledge.

This idea of "limitation" is important as a starting point, because we need to investigate whether the theory of recollection or a priori knowledge is traceable from one life to another. Does a human's knowledge end when the body dies? Here is meant not factual innovation as the individual's reaction to it. Obviously Einstein's theory goes on even though he is long dead. If, as Socrates states: "we're agreed that living people are born from the dead, no less than dead people from the living" (Plato 1999 72a). Avoiding the obvious that Socrates is actually talking about the physical, it is certainly relevant to our discussion that living people get the basis of their knowledge from the past. But, is it inherited or innate or is knowledge something that just is.

What is important to realize in this particular discussion is tha

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"wrong" is a knowledge that we have no input toward. We "know" from previous experience, even if it came before we were actually born. In so many words, then, Plato has his characters argue that we come with an agenda. This is certainly far different from those psychologists and philosophers who believe in the theory of tabula rasa: that we are born with a clean slate and that life's experience fills that slate for good or evil, rich or poor, achievement or non-achievement. What we need to distinguish in the Platonic dialogues is the difference between innate knowledge and acquired knowledge. It may be un-Socratic and rather simplistic to say that hunger is innate knowledge, what is good to eat and not is acquired knowledge. But to elevate this concept of what one knows and when one knows it, in bringing Rene Descartes into this discussion, we have to at least be tempted by his concept that "Indeed, the gradual increase (of knowledge) is itself a most certain proof of imperfection" (Descartes 1993 32). Descartes believes that the thought process and the human idea of thought cannot exist without some sort of understanding of, and approval of God. The real YOU, according to Descartes, is not your material body but some sort
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Approximate Word count = 1579
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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