Recollection and Experience: Plato's Theory of Learning and its Successors
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reissue, 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521030915, ISBN10: 0521030919
Paperback, 300 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Questions about learning and discovery have fascinated philosophers from Plato onwards. Does the mind bring innate resources of its own to the process of learning or does it rely wholly upon experience? Plato was the first philosopher to give an innatist response to this question and in doing so was to provoke the other major philosophers of ancient Greece to give their own rival explanations of learning. This book examines these theories of learning in relation to each other. It presents an entirely different interpretation of the theory of recollection which also changes the way we understand the development of ancient philosophy after Plato. The final section of the book compares ancient theories of learning with the seventeenth-century debate about innate ideas, and finds that the relation between the two periods is far more interesting and complete than is usually supposed.
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
General introduction
Part I. Platonic Recollection
Introduction
1. The Meno
2. Recollection in the middle period
Part II. Aristotelian Experience
Introduction
3. The rejection of innatism
4. Levels of learning
5. Discovery and continuity in science
6. Discovery and continuity in ethics
Appendix to Part II - perception of the universal
Part III. Hellenistic Concepts
Introduction
7. Hellenistic philosophy and common sense
8. Innateness in the Hellenistic era
Interim conclusions
Part IV. Innatism in the Seventeenth Century
Introduction
9. The inner core and mortar of our thoughts
10. Locke and the posture of blind credulity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of ancient passages
General index.