  We get some sense of how al-Kindi might have applied this highly intellectualist epistemology in specific contexts from works on recollection and on dreams. His On Recollection (for which see Endress 1986 and 1994) argues explicitly that we cannot derive intelligible forms from sense-perception. Thus we do not “learn” these forms, but simply “remember” them from before the soul entered into the body. Here al-Kindi is of course broadly following the account of recollection given by Plato in the Meno or Phaedo, though how he might have known of this account remains obscure. (Most likely it is from an Arabic version, perhaps in summary, of the Phaedo.)