The theory of cognition as recall. Anamnesis

Philosophy is a “bright space”, an “understanding place”. What does it say here?

Understanding as understanding the invisible.” How can you develop this thesis?

Philosophizing means genetically protecting yourself from your own and other people’s stupidity.” How do you see the truth of these words?

What are the features of mythological thinking?

There is no division into subjects and objects, no division into “I” and “world”. In myth, ancestral consciousness is always expressed. There is no “I” in myth.

Any event expresses a general event. This is always a metaphorical consciousness. Animating everyone inanimate objects. Everything is spiritualized.

Myth is historically the first form of spiritual connection between man and nature.

Some features of this thinking are a consequence of the fact that “primitive” man had not yet clearly distinguished himself from the surrounding natural world and transferred his own properties to natural objects, attributed life to them, etc.

Mythological thinking is a type of mental activity, an archaic form of understanding reality, in which primitive beliefs, artistic exploration of the world, and the rudiments of empirical knowledge are syncretically combined.

It is associated with the sensory perception of reality and is clothed in a figurative form, the generalization appears in the form of a single-typical, abstraction ability is poorly developed.

There is no awareness of the difference between man and external nature, individual consciousness is not isolated from the group consciousness, image and object, subjective and objective are not distinguished, the principles of activity are not separated from activity.

The ability of thinking to fix the properties of things and assign these properties to a given thing is poorly developed; the logical structures of mediation, justification, and evidence have not yet been formed. An explanation is a story about why, where, how, and for what purpose something arose.

Conclusions are often based on the principle “after this means as a result of this.”

These features of thinking are found in language. There are no names that fix generic concepts, but there are many words that designate a given object from its different properties, at different stages of development, in different points space, from different perspectives.

The same thing has different names, and different objects and beings (living and nonliving, animals and plants, natural objects and people, etc.) are assigned one name.

This thinking is still evident today, not only in “backward” cultures, but also in highly developed cultures.

The doctrine of recollection (theory of recollection) is Plato's teaching in the field of epistemology (theory of knowledge).

Plato believed that true knowledge is knowledge of the world of ideas, which is carried out by the rational part of the soul. At the same time, there is a distinction between sensory and intellectual knowledge (intelligence, thinking).

To find knowledge in oneself means to remember.

Plato's doctrine of recollection (ancient Greek ἀνάμνησις) indicates as the main goal of knowledge the recollection of what the soul contemplated in the world of ideas before descending to earth and incarnating in the human body. Objects of the sensory world serve to excite the memories of the soul.

Plato's theory of knowledge is constructed as a theory of memory, with the guiding principle being the mind or the rational part of the soul. According to Plato, the soul is immortal, and before the birth of a person it resides in the transcendental world, where it observes the brilliant world of eternal ideas. Therefore, in the earthly life of the human soul, it becomes possible to comprehend ideas as a recollection of what was seen before.

“And since everything in nature is related to each other, and the soul has known everything, nothing prevents the one who remembers one thing - people call this knowledge - from finding everything else himself, if only he is courageous and tireless in his search: after all, to search and to know is precisely to remember” (Meno).

A person receives true knowledge when the soul remembers what it already knows. Knowledge as the recollection of what happened before the birth of a person is one of Plato’s proofs of the immortality of the soul.

In the dialogue “Meno,” Plato proves the correctness of the doctrine of recollection using the example of Socrates’ conversation with a certain young man. The boy had never studied mathematics before and had no education. Socrates posed the questions so well that the young man independently formulated the Pythagorean theorem. From which Plato concludes that his soul earlier, in the kingdom of ideas, encountered the ideal ratio of the sides of a triangle, which is expressed by the Pythagorean theorem. To teach in this case is nothing more than to force the soul to remember.

Many researchers thought that Menon- this is the decisive stage in the formation of Platonic philosophy. Created during the founding of the Academy, this dialogue opens with a classic elenkhos debate aimed at rejecting the definitions of virtue offered by the young Men. But in Menone there are also important differences from earlier dialogues: firstly, a significant place is given to mathematics, secondly - and this is the main thing - in a lengthy passage from the central part of the dialogue, Plato’s definition of cognition as a process of remembering is given for the first time; this is one of the basic and most constant postulates of Platonism.
Meno, wanting to show the impossibility of any research, formulates a paradox: either we do not know what we are looking for, and therefore we can neither find it nor understand what we have found; or we know what we are looking for, and then searching is pointless. Socrates, in fact, does not undertake to find a solution to this dilemma. But he assumes, as the only proper answer, that the soul has a tendency to remember truths which were once known to it. “And since the soul is immortal, is often born and has seen everything both here and in Hades, then there is nothing that it does not know; therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that about virtue and about everything else it is able to remember what what she knew before" (81 p.). In other words: before incarnation in its current life, the soul already knew everything that it had to know, i.e. the search and act of knowledge is only the revival of the universal, present in the soul, but dormant knowledge. On the other hand, since the phenomena of nature are related and interconnected, the recollection by the soul of any truth previously known to it allows it to know all the others hidden in it, if only the owner of the soul “will be courageous and tireless in search: after all, to seek and to know is this is precisely what it means to remember” (81 d).
From the definition of the search and acquisition of knowledge as a process of remembering, it does not in any way follow that learning as such is rejected. The act of learning actually corresponds to the effort to recall and revive forgotten and hidden knowledge in the soul. But remembering, according to Plato, is an effort not only of memory, but also of the investigating mind, armed with the confidence that it is impossible to be completely ignorant of any subject and you just need to remember what you know. Recall, understood as the mental state of recollection, allows one to recognize the item being remembered at the very moment of recollection. In this sense, it is a twofold process: on the one hand, the revival of a certain hidden content, or memory itself (anamnesis/ἀνάμνησις), on the other hand, genuine learning (mathēsis/μάθησις), which becomes obvious when correlating the revived memory with the previous state of ignorance. A person does not rush chaotically among his memories, but makes an effort to remember the truth that he already possesses; It is she who directs this effort from within.
IN Menone we immediately find an illustration of what recollection is. One of Menon's young slaves is asked what is the length of the side of a square with an area twice that of the given one. In the time of Plato, they knew that the length of the side of a square is numerically incommensurable with the length of the side of a square with twice the area. Therefore, Socrates does not expect an exact number in response: a rational integer or fraction, since the required length ( a√2, for a square with side a) is an irrational number. The Greeks believed that problems involving irrational numbers could only be solved geometrically; The task given by Socrates requires not mathematical calculation, but geometric construction. At first, the young man gives two false answers: first, he constructs a square with twice the area as a square with twice the side length; then - like a square with a side one and a half times longer. And only then does he manage to draw a square with double the area, using the diagonal of the first, smaller one as its side. Both incorrect answers still indicate an elementary attempt at reasoning. The mental effort made by the young man to discard the initial wrong decisions is already the beginning of recollection, because if he did not realize his ignorance, further search would be devoid of any psychological plausibility. When the young man, with the help of questions asked by his interlocutor, determines that the diagonal of the square is the side of the future figure with double the area, Socrates proclaims that a truth has arisen, born of the effort of remembering.
Many have wondered whether the truths acquired by the soul before its next incarnation have an empirical component (the taste of Samos wine, the features of a face, the road leading to Larissa), or whether they are completely free from sensory experience. It should be noted that Plato Menope speaks of everything that the soul saw “here” (81 p.). But the author strives for the rigor of his theoretical construction, and therefore prefers the position of remembering only extra-empirical truths. For if recollection is the awareness of truths that are indisputable for every person, then by such we must understand only those of them, the knowledge of which does not depend on the incarnation of the soul in a particular body residing in some specific place in certain time. One can even assume that regarding some areas of empirical knowledge (for example, musical harmony, differences between colors, etc.) in the soul there are some general learning schemes under which a person can bring this or that information obtained from sensory experience.
In his later discussions on the subject of recollection, Plato specifically relates it exclusively to truths independent of experience. So, in Phaedre recollection, without unnecessary details, is described no longer as a cognitive process through which learning is determined, but as the restoration of knowledge acquired by the soul through the contemplation of intelligible entities. IN Fedone Cebes, one of Socrates' friends who had gathered to bid him farewell, says that if we believe the argument about recollection, "often repeated by Socrates," we must admit that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body. Indeed, “what we now remember, we should have known in the past - this is what necessarily follows from this argument. But this would be impossible if our soul did not already exist in some place before being born in our human form" (72 f-73 a). But when Socrates, at the request of his friends, agrees to explain once again how remembering occurs, then main reason it turns out to be a certain essential incompleteness characteristic of empirical, sensory objects. At the very moment of their perception, a thought about something else arises, since “a person, having seen something, or heard something, or perceived it with some other sense, not only recognizes it, but also imagines something else, belonging to a different knowledge.” (73 s). Understanding that a log is equal to another log or a stone to another stone, we also understand that sensory perception is characterized by a certain incompleteness, hence the difficulty when trying to determine what equality is; difficulty and leads to the memory of Equality in itself. This process begins with the recognition of equality between logs or stones; “You invent and derive knowledge about it precisely from these equal things, no matter how different they are from equality itself” (74 p.). In order to feel the incompleteness of “resemblance with what is remembered” in the world of sensory things, it is absolutely necessary to recognize equality in itself even before birth, that is, before a person has the opportunity to observe the empirical expression of equality in reality. So, our knowledge of equality itself depends on a certain essence that our soul forgot at the moment of its incarnation into the earthly body. It is to such an essence that “we trace everything received in sensory perceptions, and it turns out that we got all this from the very beginning” (76 d-e). But if sense perception cannot be recognized as an instrument of knowledge, it still has some value as a kind of trigger for the process of remembering (75a). When Cebes says that the fact of recollection is confirmed by the answers given by a person placed in front of a geometric drawing or “something else of the same kind” (73 a-c), Socrates, joining him, emphasizes that recollection can be caused by what -or sensory perception.
For the history of philosophy, Plato's theory of recollection is especially significant in that it was the first to formulate the concept of innate knowledge. Descartes (Letter to Voetius, Adam et Tannery VIII, 2,167,1643) and Leibniz ( Discourse on Metaphysics XVII) tried to use it to understand why some of the ideas that are most natural to us are at the same time the least accessible to comprehension. When innate knowledge is not in demand Everyday life, it takes effort to restore it in oneself through study and exercise. Recall theory also explains how our knowledge grows - from internal sources, and not through the process of learning, usually understood as acquiring knowledge from the outside. At the same time, Plato's theory has a number of distinctive features that we allow ourselves to recall. Its essence is that all knowledge contained in the soul was acquired before incarnation, and then forgotten. This pre-birth knowledge includes the totality of all possible knowledge; thanks to him, with each new incarnation in the body, the soul retains its nature. It includes a number of basic concepts (for example, geometric ones), as well as rules of inference, synthetic concepts about objects and, virtually, about the many ways in which this innate material can be used. In this sense, the soul virtually contains all future knowledge, and not just the ability to remember some part of it. Finally, in the Platonic concept, the soul’s recollection of any one previously known truth opens the way to the possession of all the other truths contained in it, thanks to reflection and the gradual identification of connections between various knowledge. This theory of Plato is one of the most significant responses to skepticism and relativism in the field of knowledge. Platonism gives a person the opportunity to defend his knowledge, explore the causes and beginnings of the reliable truths he has acquired and, therefore, find the foundations of science.

Materials of lectures on philosophy (R.R.)

The main problem of the whole ancient philosophy– problem of dialectics matter And ideas. In relation to anthropology, this is a dialectic souls and bodies.

“Matter is that in which the sensible likeness of an intelligible pattern arises” (Plato). Potency and possibility of any things and phenomena of reality.

Plato, in his philosophical searches, continues the Socratic line. Things are not considered only in their empirical existence.

There are many horses: piebald, black, dwarf, etc., but they all have the same meaning - equineness. This is a general, generic concept. Accordingly, we can talk about a home in general, a flower in general, about beauty in general, about goodness, red, green. (Malevich’s squares in this series of examples carry not only symbolic, but also philosophical meaning, and Kandinsky’s Pushkin is more psychological and energetic than the best realistic portraits).

Plato believes that one cannot do without turning to ideas - to generic, general concepts, This the only way overcoming the diversity and inexhaustibility of the sensory-empirical world.

The idea is understood as :

1. View ( eidos ), image , material, bodily, conceivable principle.

2. Meaning essence , each individual thing (capacity, horsepower) “Diogenes: But here I am, Plato, I see the table and the cup, but I don’t see the table and the cup. Plato: And it’s clear: in order to see the table and the cup, you have eyes, but in order to see the table and the cup you have no mind.” ABOUT general, generic in things, phenomena, events, their meaning.

3. Idea how sample (paradigma) - perfection. (The closest thing to the idea of a table is the most perfect table...; the perfect horse, woman, etc.)

4. The idea as a general concept - the result of a logical operation.

Thus, the idea (eidos) has a mental and visual nature.

An idea is something common in a given class of things. An idea is inextricably linked with a specific individual thing.

How do Plato relate the idea of a thing and the individual thing itself?

1) as a transition from a thing to an idea (B - I) There is always a limit here.

2) As a transition from an idea to a thing (I - B) There is no limit here. The idea appears as generative model the class of things to which it belongs.

But for Plato, the ideas of ideas born in a person’s head and embodied in things exist independently of a person, objectively. (Art is the “third bench”).

Thus Plato postulates primacy And objectivity (independence) of the general, ideal from the real, material.

Plato's idealism is that:

1. Material things are changeable, impermanent - finite in their existence;

2. The world of ideas (eidos) exists forever, they are true, permanent;

3. The world of things is a reflection of the world of ideas.

Relevance for modern science: ideas (general - laws, principles, properties of things, concepts and categories of science) the key to understanding the world. (for example, physical bodies of various qualities and properties can be weighed due to what we call their mass - grams, kilograms, etc.).

And in this sense, they are primary - we operate with scientific data, principles for constructing theories, axioms, etc., knowing or guessing that they are the result of experience, experiment, or practice.

Plato's doctrine of the soul.

Plato inherited his belief in the immortality of the soul from Pythagoras.

The main influence on the formation of his ethical ideas was Socrates.

Philosophy is the contemplation of truth. This is the highest Good. There are two types of intelligence - mind and reason. The method of the mind is dialectics.

Good = intelligence + morality.

2) Soul - a mental category (the properties of the soul are different among the three classes of people: lust (artisans), courage (guards), prudence (rulers, philosophers). Each occupies his niche in the state in accordance with his soul abilities. This is also justice .

3) Soul - organ of cognition , because god (Demiurge) creating the Cosmos, looking at prototype, placed the Mind in the Soul, and the soul in the body. (See Psychology of cognitive activity).

Cognition as remembering.

Before acquiring a new bodily shell, the soul (as an eternal beginning) has already accumulated experience (the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul by Pythagoras, who traveled to the East, influenced Plato). In addition, the soul has already known everything, having previously been in the world of Ideas. She knew the truth. This is where the concept of “recall” comes from.

Truth is contained in the soul.

The sensory world, being a reflection of the world of ideas, becomes a symbol for the soul another world. The sensory world is a bridge, an intermediary, leading from the visible to the invisible.(That's philosophical basis for the formation of Christian dogma).

So, everything that is in the world of ideas is initially contained in the soul.

Growth and manifestation of hidden potentials is a process recollection.

It can be assumed that abilities are the knowledge that the soul acquired in previous incarnations, they precede experience, this is what we possess a priori (before experience).

Plato's ideas are consonant with the concept of archetypes by K.G. Cabin boy.

Archetypes - in depth psychology - the innate ability of the soul to grow in a certain direction.

The soul is the basis of movement, a self-propelled principle.

The soul is spoiled by: injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance, excessive selfishness, selfishness that blinds a person.

Plato's historical merits:

1. The founder of the genre of philosophical dialogue - left a written philosophical legacy.

2. Founder of idealism as philosophical direction(absolutization of the Object).

3. Investigated issues of nature (cosmology), society, but also problems of knowledge (epistemology). Developed the basics of conceptual thinking.

4. Founder of his own school “Academy”.

Which is carried out by the rational part of the soul. At the same time, there is a distinction between sensory and intellectual knowledge (intelligence, thinking).

Plato's doctrine of recall(ancient Greek ἀνάμνησις ) indicates as the main goal of knowledge the recollection of what the soul contemplated in the world of ideas before it descended to earth and incarnated into the human body. Objects of the sensory world serve to excite the memories of the soul.

In the dialogue “Meno” Plato proves the correctness of the doctrine of recollection using the example of a conversation between Socrates and a certain young man. The boy had never studied mathematics before and had no education. Socrates posed the questions so well that the young man independently formulated the Pythagorean theorem. From which Plato concludes that his soul earlier, in the kingdom of ideas, encountered the ideal ratio of the sides of a triangle, which is expressed by the Pythagorean theorem. To teach in this case is nothing more than to force the soul to remember.

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- (nlato) (427 347 BC) other Greek. thinker, along with Pythagoras, Parmenides and Socrates, the ancestor European philosophy, head of philosophy School Academy. Biographical information. P. representative of an aristocratic family that took an active... Philosophical Encyclopedia

Plato (428/7 BC - 347 BC) ancient Greek philosopher, classic of the philosophical tradition; Philosophy for Plato is not only a cognitive process, but also the desire of the soul for the supersensible world of ideas, and therefore it is closely connected with Love. The doctrine of ideas is a central element of Plato's philosophy. He interpreted ideas as some kind of divine essence. They are eternal, unchanging, independent of the conditions of space and time. They summarize all cosmic life: they control the Universe. These are archetypes, eternal patterns according to which the whole multitude of real things is organized from formless and fluid matter. Ideas have their own existence in a special world, and things exist only insofar as they reflect this or that idea, since this or that idea is present in them. The highest idea is the idea of absolute Good, the source of truth, beauty and harmony.

Plato's theory of knowledge is constructed as a theory of memory, with the guiding principle being the mind or the rational part of the soul. According to Plato, the soul is immortal, and before the birth of a person it resides in the transcendental world, where it observes the brilliant world of eternal ideas. A person receives true knowledge when the soul remembers what it already knows. Knowledge as the recollection of what happened before the birth of a person is one of Plato’s proofs of the immortality of the soul.

Accepting the idea of the immortality of the soul and realizing that in this case death takes away everything from a person except the soul, Plato leads us to the idea that a person’s main concern in life should be caring for the soul. This care means cleansing the soul, liberation from the sensory in the desire to unite with the spiritual - the intelligible world. Outwardly, the soul seems to be one creature, but in fact it is a combination of three - a man, a lion and a chimera, which are firmly fused with each other. Each of the three parts of the soul has its own virtue: a smart start- wisdom, to the fierce - courage, and to the lustful - moderation. Plato's purification of the soul is associated with bodily and mental discipline, which internally transforms a person and likens him to a deity. The theory of the ideal state is most fully presented by Plato in the Republic and developed in the Laws. Only if a politician becomes a philosopher (and vice versa) can a true state based on highest value Truth and Good. To build a City-State means to fully understand man and his place in the universe.

The state, according to Plato, like the soul, has a three-part structure; the population is divided into three classes: farmers-artisans, guards and rulers (sages-philosophers). Rulers should be those who know how to love their City more than others, and most importantly, if they know how to know and contemplate the Good, that is, the rational principle prevails in them. So, a perfect state is one in which moderation predominates in the first estate, courage and strength in the second, and wisdom in the third. The concept of justice is that everyone does what they ought to do; Therefore, in a perfect City, education and upbringing must be perfect, and for each class it has its own characteristics. Plato attaches great importance to the education of guards as an active part of the population from which rulers emerge. The purpose of education is, through the knowledge of the Good, to provide a model to which the ruler should become like in his desire to embody the Good in his state. “not as important as it should or as it could be” in an ideal state, it is enough if someone alone lives according to the laws of this City, that is, according to the law of the Good, Goodness and Justice.

The theory of cognition as recall. Anamnesis

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