obviously the soul can exist without the body, since it used to do so. Furthermore, the soul must be akin to the things it knew before birth. This is the cue for the Forms to make their entrance. What we knew before birth and now recollect are things like “the beautiful itself” and “the equal itself,” or as we would usually put it when talking about Plato, “the Form of Beauty” and “the Form of Equal.” These are not physical objects but the natures of which beautiful or equal physical objects partake. So, we already have another way to show the soul’s independence of body, the so-called
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