One of the results of the preceding chapters has been the distinction between two theories of innateness in antiquity, Platonic recollection and Stoic dispositionalism. Some of the differences between these two theories are obvious: for instance, Plato has the soul endowed with memories, the Stoics with dispositions. But a further difference is that, unlike Plato, the Stoics used innateness to account for the formation of common ethical conceptions. In doing so they also gave those notions an enhanced status that they never enjoyed in Plato's theory. It is this difference that will give us the momentum for the next two chapters, where we shall find the Stoic theory to have been the true ancestor of the seventeenth-century theory of innate ideas. However, the distinction between these two theories is not the only conclusion that we have reached so far; and before going on, we need to draw together some of the other strands of the argument as well. This will also be an opportunity to look across the different theories we have discussed and make some comparisons that have so far been left implicit.

INNATISM AND EMPIRICISM

In the general introduction, I set out three issues around which the study would be structured, the first of them being the distinction between innatism and empiricism (pp. 4–5). At the beginning of section I, I argued that the theory of recollection should be seen as a variety of innatism. When it came to locating the positions of the other philosophers on this issue I had to prepare the ground more carefully.