ABSTRACT
For Plato,17 rational thought was the activity of the immortal soul. At the core of rational thinking, at least when this was viewed as the route to infallible knowledge, lay the capacity to recognize in the sensorily presented, the efSo?, or abstract idea, which was there exemplified. For the Plato of the Socratic dialogues such recognition involved reference to another world. Knowledge was in fact recognition, and this belief underpinned arguments both for the pre-existence of the soul and for its
immortality. The animal passions, and the more praiseworthy traits such as courage, had to come under the guidance of the rational soul before a man achieved the all-round integrated activity which classical Greece regarded, and applauded, as rational in a broader sense. Colouring Plato’s approach was the asceticism that filtered into Christian theology, and the assump tion that it is only part of the man, for Plato his immortal soul, that truly thinks, in the sense of attaining true concepts by means of recognition.
