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Essay on Rough Draft #3
Plato leaves no doubt that the knowledge acquisition is meant to be read in this order. To suppose that anything remotely resembling the conversation in this dialogue could have occurred at that date would make nonsense of the whole history of philosophy in the fifth and fourth centuries; and I believe that the meeting itself is a literary fiction, not a fact in the biography of Socrates. No ancient historian of philosophy mistook it for the record of an actual event, which, had it occurred, would have been a very important landmark.
The more popular writings of Plato would serve the double purpose of attracting students to the Academy and of making known to the Greek world a doctrine which, in common with most scholars, I hold to be characteristically Platonic. Its two pillars are the immortality and divinity of the rational soul, and the real existence of the objects of its knowledge—a world of intelligible 'Forms' separate from the things our senses perceive. Neither doctrine clearly appears in any dialogue that can be dated, on grounds of style, as distinctly earlier than the Meno. Both are put forward in the Phaedo in a manner suggesting that Plato arrived at them simultaneously and thought of them as interdependent.
Plato believes that knowledge is acquired, not through the senses or as information conveyed from one mind to another by teaching, but by recollection in this life of realities and truths seen and known by the soul before its incarnation. Socrates bases this doctrine on an account which he believes to be true learnt from men and women who are wise in religious matters and from inspired poets. The human soul is immortal (divine) and is purified through a round of incarnations, from which, when completely purified, it may finally escape..................
