Themes in Phaedo

This doctrine is called anamnesis and is widely attributed to Plato. The principle of anamnesis holds that each moment of education, illumination, or knowledge is a moment of recollection. Each human is born with all the knowledge she will ever need already latent in her soul. The process of education is a steady unveiling of ever deeper layers of inner knowledge as each revelation is drawn out of the dark wells of forgetting.

This statement is broad enough to be both falsifiable and supportable. It is not necessarily true, for modern biology tells us that despite the fact that inorganic matter may become organic matter, reproduction requires the living to create more life. On the other hand, "the dead" may entail decomposing organic matter, which contributes to the growth of new life.

A "thyrsus" was a staff of fennel topped with a pinecone, representing fertility and associated with Dionysus, the god of hedonism. The larger point here is that there are many who stand adjacent to true knowledge, perhaps bearing such ceremonial displays as the thyrsus, but "few are the mystics[...] the true philosophers."

This relates directly to Plato's idea of the alternation of opposites. In Plato's view, opposites in a given duality necessarily take on opposing sets of characteristics. This principle was important to Plato for it allowed him to prove the immortality of the soul: if the body is mortal, it must be that its opposite—the soul—carries the opposing quality of immortality.