Tag Archives: anamnesis

Platonic Formulations

Posted on February 7, 2022 by Vajragoni

Plato is the father of foundational impressions of the soul up to this very day. Plato’s mouthpiece, Socrates, insisted that not only is the soul immortal, but also that it contemplates truths after its separation from the body at the moment of death. Soon afterwards, for the whole of the West “the soul was identified with our consciousness when it thinks and acts with our reason and with the source of our thinking activity and our ethical activity. In short, for Socrates the soul is the conscious self, it is intellectual and moral personhood.” (Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy: From the Origins to Socrates, pg. 202.) read more

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Soma

Posted on May 20, 2021 by Vajragoni

The word soma stands for the corpse in Homer, and only later acquires the meaning of body. So the following verse is attributed to Euripides by Plato: “Who knows whether living is not being dead, while being dead is living?” Plato’s Socrates continues: “Perhaps we too are dead. I at least heard this from the wise men that now we are dead and that for us the body is a tomb” (soma estin hemin sema: Gorg. 492e-493a).In his Commentary on Plato’s Gorgias, Olympiodorus explains this as follows: read more

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