This famous argument is important for understanding how, according to Socrates, we can inquire without the senses: the knowledge is already within us; the senses are merely necessary for triggering the beginning of inquiry. I argue that Socrates treats recollecting as an extended process. His claim is that learning is a type of recollecting that begins when we first perceive something and continues until we acquire knowledge of the relevant form. Moreover, I argue that Socrates is interested in a type of recollecting that involves perceiving one thing and bringing to mind another, which is the very standard by which one can judge the first. Socrates does not provide here an argument for accepting “Platonic forms,” where these are understood as including all of Plato’s central commitments about the forms. Instead, his argument highlights one key difference between ordinary objects and forms: that the latter do not change over time, whereas the former do.

This chapter addresses the advent of Nothing within the history of religions as an advent necessarily within literature, and within the ritual enactments of literature as sacred. If the Commedia of Dante is our most profoundly heterodox work while at the same time our most purely orthodox, then Joyce is the late modern counterpart of Dante, and Finnegans Wake is not only the final epic of late modernity, but also at once deeply primordial and apocalyptic, so that its pure heterodoxy is nonetheless a profoundly liturgical work. Only the advent of a uniquely modern Nothing makes possible this universal liturgical celebration. This Nothing is more primal in the Wake than the liturgical movement of anamnesis, but this is an anamnesis of the fall, condemnation, and crucifixion of H.C.E. or Here Comes Everybody, repeated again and again, even as the host is ever broken in the mass. Thus the epic becomes our only purely liturgical epic, embodying a pure action that is a purely ritual action, one truly irresistible to all who actually encounter it as a liturgical mode of being, which is our most sacred mode.