Anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις) — Recollection, reminiscence. From the Greek anamimnēskein (“to remind,” “to call back to mind”). In Plato’s philosophy, anamnesis is the thesis that learning is recollecting: the immortal soul contemplated the Forms before being joined to the body, and knowledge consists in reviving what it already possessed. The doctrine appears in the Meno as a reply to the paradox of inquiry (80d–e), according to which one can search neither for what one knows nor for what one does not know. Socrates illustrates it (82b–85b) by leading an uneducated slave boy, by questions alone, to the solution of a geometrical problem, that of doubling the area of a square. In the Phaedo (72e–77a), anamnesis serves as an argument for the soul’s pre-existence and immortality: equal sensible things remind us of Equality itself, which the soul must have known beforehand; in the Phaedrus (249b–c), the human soul is capable of knowing because it has seen true realities. Aristotle rejects Platonic innatism: in the Posterior Analytics (II.19), knowledge arises from perception, memory and experience, out of a capacity (dynamis) the soul already has. The notion reappears in the Christian tradition, in a liturgical sense, as the memorial of the Last Supper. In modernity, the debate over innate ideas, in Descartes and Leibniz, takes up the question in other terms. See also eidos, alma, episteme and dialectic; the central thinker is Plato, with Socrates as a character.
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