Socrates and Plato

Abstract

The question as to the relation of the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues to the historical Socrates, over which an apparently endless and irreconcilable controversy has raged, is well raised by a passage from Cornford,Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, at page 28: “Anamnesis appears first in the middle group of dialogues and provides the link between the two Platonic doctrines—the eternal nature of the human soul and the ‘separate’ existence of Forms, the proper objects of knowledge. The probable inference is that Anamnesis was a theory which squared the professions and practice of Socrates with Plato’s discovery of the separately existing Forms and his conversion from Socratic agnosticism to a belief in immortality.”