When I was born, I did not know the difference between right and wrong. Now, I do. The word philosophy means
the love of knowledge. One type of knowledge is propter quid, which ask the question why or how. In this paper, I
will demonstrate how Socrates, Hume and Aristotle, three well known philosophers, would explain how I acquired
this knowledge in relation to the principles of right and wrong.
Socrates is the first philosopher, I will discuss. Since Socrates did not write anything down, Socrates thinking is told
through his student, Plato, who wrote his teachers' thoughts. Socrates is an idealist who believes that things are in
born. Therefor he believed that before we are born our soul knows everything, but when we are born our mind is a
tabular rasa (blank slate). As we grow day by day, we recollect the knowledge from our soul.
... the soul, that is, the human mind, before it is united with the body, is aquatinted with the intelligible world or the
world of Forms. In this prior existence, the true knowledge. After its union with a human body, a person's mind
contains its knowledge deep in its memory. True knowledge in this world consists of remembering, in reminiscence
or recollection. What the mind or soul once knew is raised to present awareness by a process of recollection aided by
the technique of dialect or the Socratic method. (Stumpf 260)
This is known as the theory of recollection. The theory of recollection is told through Plato in the Phaedo and the
In the theory of recollection "Socrates' answer to the paradox is that knowledge is recollection. This thesis allows a
man to have ideas of which he later becomes conscious by recollection; thereby overcoming the sharp division
between not-knowing and knowing, and justifying inquiry." (Sternfeld, 35) Socrates states in the Meno " A man
cannot inquire about what he knows, because he knows it, and in that case he ...