Keywords
anamnesis
recollection
epistemology
myth
memory
Eliade
Allen
Gulley
Scott
How to Cite
Abstract
The Platonic doctrine of anamnesis—recollection—stands at the intersection of epistemology and myth. Originating in the Meno as a response to the paradox of inquiry and further developed in the Phaedo and Phaedrus, anamnesis asserts that learning is the recollection of knowledge possessed by the soul prior to birth. This paper examines anamnesis in its philosophical and symbolic dimensions, arguing that it functions simultaneously as an epistemic method and as a salvific act embedded in a mythic anthropology. R. E. Allen (1959) and Norman Gulley (1954) illuminate its role as a dialectical criterion for converting doxa into epistēmē. Dominic Scott’s (1987) distinction between a “Kantian” and a “Demaratus” model reveals divergent accounts of the relation between innate cognition and philosophical attainment. Mircea Eliade’s (1963) cross-cultural study of “mythologies of memory and forgetting” situates Plato’s theory within a broader symbolic matrix that includes both Indian yoga traditions and Greek religious imagery. The analysis suggests that anamnesis resists reduction to either rationalist epistemology or religious myth, instead operating as a boundary concept that links intellectual recollection to the restoration of the soul’s true nature. In remembering truth, the knower also reconstitutes the self.
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