ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social and political implications of the understanding of human mortality by exploring the theory of recollection as it is discussed by Socrates in three Platonic dialogues, the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Phaedrus. The implications of human mortality in these Platonic dialogues are threefold. First, by raising the question of the possible existence of the soul after the death of the body, thinking about mortality points to the soul’s intrinsic ability to learn truths that are within or have been seen by the soul itself, suggesting a basic dignity to every human being that would otherwise be concealed. Second, it suggests that bodily mortality is necessary for the spread and progress of knowledge. Third, spurred on by an awareness of mortality, thinking about the ideas or supra-material Platonic universals that scholars have come to call the Forms, allows for a form of speech that seeks not to win but to enlighten by revealing truth.
