of the most influential thinkers in history. His belief in the separation between the body and the immortal
soul, for example, was naturally appreciated by early Christian writers, and a number of Church Fathers
tried everything in their power to reconcile the theology of the New Testament and the philosophy of
Plato. But, as with the early Ionian philosophers, so with Plato, it is not so much his solutions to
philosophical problems that are of greatest importance but the terms in which those problems are set out
in his works. In recent years, philosophers, computer scientists, linguists, and neuroscientists have
directed much of their energy toward many of the same questions that prompted Plato’s Theory of Forms:
What is the relationship between the mind and the body? What innate ability do we humans have that
enables us to learn a language? How is it possible for us to generalize on the basis of limited experience?
Plato’s answer to these questions is that our soul attained knowledge of the Forms at a time when the soul
was not tainted by contact with the body and with the world of the senses; for Plato, what we call
“learning” is actually a laborious, progressive, and necessarily faint recollection of what we previously
knew more securely. This view, of course, is not accepted by contemporary cognitive scientists, but the
very fact that the field of cognitive science exists is proof that some of today’s best minds are still
wrestling with the problems posed by Plato in the fourth century BC.
“Well, since the soul is immortal and has been subject to frequent reincarnations, and since it has
come in contact with all things, both here and in Hades, there is nothing that it has not learned. For
this reason it is no wonder that it is capable of recalling what it knows about virtue and whatever
else it has come to know on previous occasions. After all, since everything is connected and since
the soul has learned everything, there is nothing to prevent a person, once he has recalled (or, in
popular parlance, ‘learned’) one single thing, from recovering all the rest, as long as he meets the
challenge resolutely and refuses to give up the quest. For the quest for knowledge is quite simply a
matter of recollection.” (Plato, Meno 81c–d, Socrates recounting what he has heard from certain
unnamed priests and priestesses)