Notes on Plato’s Phaedo
Translated with an introduction and commentary by R Hackforth

Hackforth’s Introduction

“Plato clearly conceives it that the human soul should be proved immortal” (p.16) yet that is not the main purpose of the dialogue
-	it is related to Plato’s “whole conception of the philosophic life” (p.17) which requires that the soul survives bodily death
↓↓
yet, this is an assumption that, like the others, must be rationally proved

The proof that the soul survives bodily death doesn’t have to be immortality, the soul could survive for a period after death and it says nothing about the soul pre-birth BUT Plato does go to lengths to prove immortality, but in the cycle of opposites argument and in the soul/life connection.

The Theory of Recollection (72E, p.66)

Comments:
-	proves the soul’s existence before birth
“the content of our sense-perceptions resembles the forms, but only does so deficiently and our recognition of this defectiveness implies a pre-natal knowledge of the forms”
-	thus “the doctrine of Forms is with that of the soul’s existence before its incarnation: in other words, they stand and fall together” (p.66)

“learning is really just recollection” (72E) 
What we remember now must be something that we have already seen “which would not be possible unless out souls existed somewhere before being born in this human frame…another indication that the soul is something immortal” (72E-73A)

“to be reminded of something implies having at some previous time know it” (73B) – not knowing the object itself, but its form, which we have knowledge of

As we are experiencing things from immediately after birth, we must “have had knowledge, both before birth and immediately after of the forms” (72C)

At birth we lose/forget knowledge (EVAL: is this arbitary?)	

-	this recollection argument depends of the existence of the forms: which “is still assumed rather than proved” (73)

note: this is an extension of the argument in the Meno

the senses are meaningless in themselves but they point towards the forms

“a religious doctrine supported by poets…but the argument for it is completely rationalised” (74)

Plato “implicitly assumes…the impossibility of false judgement” (75)

“to understand…Recollection in its fullest sense is a long and gradual process which includes both the prelude to the dialectic and the dialectic itself” (75)

Criticism – Cornford says it “is an impersonal memory: its contents are the same in all human beings” (76)
Essential part of the “judgement of deficiency is only possible on the assumption of our pre-natal knowledge of the forms” (77)

Empirically true? Falsification? 
Plato argues that it is possible to learn non-form knowledge but does he prove that this is impossible for the forms