Q&A Thread, I need help.

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Arkonos, Oct 5, 2011.

  1. Arkonos Registered Senior Member

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    Does anybody know who said that all of the knowledge in the world is locked inside us and learning is merely remembering it?

    I want to say a few names, but can't pinpoint it.
     
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  3. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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  5. Arkonos Registered Senior Member

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    Thank you very much, I was thinking Plato mostly.
     
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  7. Pineal Banned Banned

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    Basically it is a rationalist stance, as opposed to an empiricist one - the latter where we learn via experience. Plato was certainly a kind of rationalist and there are others, often they are mixed rationalists/empiricists. I'd need more of an exact quote. That person is a pure rationalist.
     
  8. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Confucius

    Confucius principles had a basis in common Chinese tradition and belief. He championed strong familial loyalty, ancestor worship, respect of elders by their children (and, according to later interpreters, of husbands by their wives), and the family as a basis for an ideal government. He expressed the well-known principle, "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself", one of the earlier versions of the Golden Rule.
     
  9. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I'm sure that somebody must have said that, but I don't associate it with any names, offhand.

    It does sound like a (perhaps inaccurate) paraphrase of Plato's doctrine of 'anamnesis'. He discusses it in his dialogue 'Meno' and mentions it in the 'Phaedo'.

    Plato believed that all of us possess knowledge of the universal forms, since that knowledge is (arguably) necessary in order for us to reason and to use language. We (again arguably) can't have gotten our knowledge of universals from experience in this life, so he argued that it must be innate, that we are born with it. And he explained that in turn by turning to the Orphic doctrine of reincarnation, suggesting that we must have directly experienced the world of forms in a previous existence.

    But I don't think that Plato intended to say that all knowledge is recalled that way. Only knowledge of 'first principles' and of the meaning of general and universal terms. In the 'Meno', Socrates is portrayed as guiding an untutored slave boy to "remember" the principles of geometry. Particular applications of these general terms is still learned through sensory experience.
     
  10. Arkonos Registered Senior Member

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    The question was answered with the first response, no need for discussion after that point.
     

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