“Our ideas about such things, he says in the Republic, we have through a pre-birth experience of the eternal forms. Whether that constituted a kind of “experience” is, perhaps, a question best left to the Plato scholars.”
I think, not as a Plato scholar but as another amateur, that, given the parallel between ontology and epistemology we see in the Timaeus, where like is known by like, considering that the forms are eternal, the knowledge of the forms must therefore correspond in kind. This would suggest that we can categorize it as reason and not experience that knows the pre-birth eternal forms. Before corporeal existence, pre-birth, can we assume that there were no senses in the physical meaning, leaving us only with the reasoning soul as a way to receive knowledge?
I think your inference is very solid. I don’t recall Plato making it himself, but I think the case could be made. For all I know (not being a Plato scholar), someone has made the case. Plato repeatedly says that like is known by like; in this life we know Being by what we might call rational apprehension; why would we not have been acquainted with the forms directly, as Plato says, in a way that was at least as reliable? More to the point, how would present certain knowledge of the forms be possible if we are recalling something that was of a lower grade of acquaintance?
(Sorry for the delayed reply.)
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