A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE: INNATE OR ACQUIRED?
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 that Socrates is also trying to figure out where our knowledge comes from. Not what we learn as we grow up, but the ability to learn and understand in the first place. As they discuss "equality" in Phaedo they raise the question "Then, it must surely, have been before we began to see and hear and use the other senses that we got knowledge of the equal itself" (p. 74d). This leads Simmias to proclaim that "our souls existed before we were born" (p. 76d). Yet, lat...