Who said learning is remembering

For Aristotle, the panorama of reality includes the past in addition to the present and future and memory is the cognitive power in virtue of which we apprehend objects in the past. Chapter 1 argues that for Aristotle, remembering is simply the awareness of objects in the past. This conception of remembering excludes much that today is considered part of memory, such as procedural memory and the memory of unqualifiedly intelligible objects e.

Recollection often takes place for the sake of remembering, but it is also used to facilitate perceiving, imagining, thinking, and understanding. In Chapter 3 I support my argument of the first two chapters with a careful analysis of Aristotle's remarks on slow people and fast and good learners at the outset of the De Memoria.

See the list of occurrences of "learning" click "More" for the full list. Some translations use "recollection" instead of "remembering". The basic idea is that the soul comes from the world of ideas and everything we learn in this world is really remembering something from that ideal place. See also Wikipedia on pre-existence of the soul. There is a fair summary of the Phaedo here which gives more context and explanation.

From section IV:. Guthrie notes in The Greek Philosophers: "The Heracliteans maintained that everything in the world of space and time was continually flowing, as they put it. Change never ceased to operate for a moment and nothing was ever the same for two instants together.

The consequence of this doctrine appeared to be that there could be no knowledge of this world, since one cannot be said to have knowledge of something which is different at this moment from what it was a moment ago. Plato accepts that material things are in a constant state of becoming, but he also takes it as obvious that we do have knowledge, a grasp of stable, unchanging realities.

This is most evident in mathematics. There is, in fact, some stable knowledge, but the problem is how we can have this stable knowledge when everything we sense is not stable.

The Equal-itself is what all instances of equal things have in common in virtue of which we say that they are equal. So, learning is a matter of recollection. The doctrine of recollection solves the Meno paradox because it says that we are not in the situation that the paradox says we are. The paradox works only if gaining knowledge is like putting something new or new information into the soul.

So, since, when we are inquiring, we are not searching for something, but instead trying to remember something, the paradox is not a problem. Socrates supports the doctrine by saying he will show that a common slave boy has knowledge already inside of him. He asks the slave boy a series of questions about geometry asking the boy what the length of a side of a square double the area of an original square is. The slave boy eventually comes to give the right answer after a lot of questions and a few mistakes.

Socrates thinks that his interaction with the slave boy proves his theory of recollection because Socrates never told the boy what to say. You must be logged in to post a comment. Sites at Penn State. Philosophy of Education Phil Skip to content. Knowledge: Learned or Remembered?