Plato's Doctrine Of Ancient Materialism

“How successful is Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis in undermining Ancient materialism?”

Throughout Plato’s “Meno” and “Phaedo” dialogues, the philosopher presents his readers with the doctrine of anamnesis, a psychological theory which undermines ancient materialism. Plato’s theory states hat man discovers in his own memory, knowledge which he previously acquired during previous incarnations of the soul, such as; values whose objects can not be material and basic universal ideas, as well as the concept that the soul is immortal. The theory supports the idea of the transgression of souls and pre existence. Plato succeeds in delivering his theory through putting forward different arguments such as; theory of recollection, the argument from

Throughout this dialogue, Plato delivers the theory of eternal forms which he touched up on, in his previous dialogue, immortality and purification. He introduces the argument of the opposites, and the argument of affinity to back up his explanation. Plato begins the dialogue by suggesting that the world in which we live in, is surely not where we are presented with the finest forms, but rather a “prison” (62b) leading up to the afterlife. Phaedo suggests that Socrates stated “We men are in a kind of prision, and that one must not free ourselves or run away”(62b) trying to state that the world we are in is not the world which our souls continue the rest of their lives immortally. He clarifies that one should not kill themselves to get there and in order to receive a good after life one should not take their own life away, as it is surely wrong and we would want our soul to be pure. This basically puts forward the idea that there is another place which we go to that consists of better forms of beauty and justice making Socrates not afraid of death; “That is why i am not so resentful because i have good hope that some future awaits men after death, as we have been told for

For instance, so that an object can become bigger, it must have been smaller beforehand, and has become bigger out of this smallness. Further, there are two forms of generation between opposites, where each opposite comes into being out of the other opposite. For instance, between big and small there are the twin processes of increase and decrease. He states; “the beautiful is the opposite of the ugly and the just of the unjust and a thousand of those other things of a kind” (70e) Plato uses this argument of opposites in order to clarify that everything must have an opposite, therefore, there must surely be an opposite to the simple act of living which is death and the opposite of death being living and that living creatures come to be from the dead so therefore there must be life in the underworld. Basically that they must both