The Soul Persists After Death In Plato's Phaedo

In Phaedo, by Plato, Phaedo recounts an incident with Socrates. The story starts with Socrates opening up saying that Philosophers should not only accept death, but welcome it. After all, although the body will pass, the soul is able to live on because it is immortal. He uses a lot of his intuition to back up his claim, but the main rationale is the Argument of Affinity. He claims that the world is very binary. Things are either incorporeal and invisible, or not. The body is physical, visible and corporeal. Things like the body that are visible are part of the sensible world and do not last. The soul however is not. It is invisible and incorporeal. That is why Socrates believes the soul is immortal. Simmias counters Socrates claim bringing

Socrates states that everything comes into existence from out of its opposite. For example, a tall man becomes tall only because he was short before. Similarly, death is the opposite of life, and so living things come to be out of dead things and vice versa. This implies that there is a perpetual cycle of life and death, so that when we die we do not stay dead, but come back to life after a period of time. Socrates mentions an ancient theory

In the Phaedo, Plato presents a conversation between Socrates and two of his interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, as they discuss the immortality of the soul during Socrates’ last hours before his death in the jail at Athens. At 70a, Cebes offers his worry that upon death the soul “…is destroyed and dissolved…and is dispersed like breath or smoke.” The rest of the dialogue consists of a debate between the three men as they consider the form and indissolubility of the soul. In this paper I will show that though Socrates’s position does not definitively explain his claims about the soul’s immortality, which he lays out in the Resemblance Argument, he does successfully respond to Simmias’ Lyre Objection, which itself offers a reasonable but still not infallible objection to Socrates’ original argument.

As we discussed previously Theory of Forms, states that everything in the world fits into two categories, the abstract universals, things such as beauty itself, equality itself, and piety itself and the second category is concrete particulars, things that exist in space and time, such as sunsets, music, and people. However Socrates derives his confidence from a combination of the argument of opposites and the theory of forms. This Argument from the Theory of Forms for the immortality of the soul: If we assume the theory of forms is true, and there is a form of Life itself, then souls are the sources of life because they participate in the form of life, then souls cannot participate in the opposing form of life, death, at the same time, if the principle of non-contradiction is true. Now since death is the opposite of life, souls can’t participate in it, therefore souls are immortal. Socrates makes these claims to comfort his friends and followers who are concerned

Socrates explains that philosophy is the preparation for death. In other words, Socrates has spent the majority of his life preparing for the separation of his body and soul. “…the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death” (101). He says that because our souls are immortal, we should embrace death and look forward to what it has to offer for our souls. To confirm this belief, Socrates again states, “…the freedom and separation of the soul from the body is called death…those who practice philosophy in the right way, we say, who always want to free the soul; and this release and separation of the soul from the body is the preoccupation of the philosophers” (104). A philosopher’s ambition, when looking toward death, is to free the soul from its body; therefore, when one dies, the soul lives on and the body does not.

Plato's views on life after death were manifold, and developed over time as an examination of a bevy of his literature readily indicates. However, during all phases of his writing he does demonstrate that there is in fact life after physical death, which is widely attributed to his notion of the soul. Plat always viewed the soul as an entity that was distinct from the physical body. Moreover, while the physical body was destined to die, the soul was enduring, interminable, and destined to go on somewhere in some state of being. In just what sort of way the soul would endure was a matter of question, in which at various points in his career as a writer Plato offered different accounts. Yet the most consistent part of this conception of the author's was the fact that the soul was everlasting.

After reading the excerpt from the book, I found neither side of the argument to be particularly strong, though Socrates does tend to favor side B. The passage begins with Socrates explaining the difference in the opinions one may have on the subject of death. Side A, he defines, is when a person dies he or she enters a sort of sleep-like state. A powerful, yet peaceful, dreamless state. The person has no perception of the outside world and feels absolutely nothing for the rest of eternity. The argument for side B however, contains the idea that the departed persons soul is transferred from its home in the body to another place, perhaps heaven or another location. It is as if the soul lives on, continuing what it had begun in life.

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates makes the argument that the soul is immortal. He provides several premises to back up this argument. The first premise is one that his students Cebes and Simmias seem to disagree with and object. This premise is that the soul exists after death. “So we cannot trust this argument and be confident that our soul continues to exist somewhere after out death” (88a). This is the first step upon which Socrates builds his argument.

He is persuaded that the soul has the same three forms as the city because at the beginning of his quest to find justice he referred to the city and soul as being one. He demonstrated this idea but using an eye chart. If one had poor eyesight and asked to read the small print on the chart he would struggle. However, if someone said there was another chart in the room with larger letters, he would read the big chart first and then come back to the smaller letters to see if they were in fact the same. In this analogy, the soul is the small letters Socrates struggled to see justice in and the large letters are the city, which was clearer to find justice in (368d).

The Phaedo is Plato’s attempt to convince the reader of the immortality of the soul using four main arguments. These include the argument of affinity, recollection, Forms and the law of opposites. In the final passage of the Phaedo, (Grube, 2002:102a-107b), Plato provides his ‘Final Proof’, despite seeming like the most conclusive argument it is not necessarily the most convincing. Plato has some good points and fair reasoning to believe in the immortality of the soul, however his arguments often seem to make large assumptions without any concrete backing. In this essay I will attempt to expose the flaws in Plato’s argument

Alike to the ancient Greeks, he believes that after death, the soul resides in some kind of underworld, and he uses logic to prove this point. Socrates’ logic goes as follows: Death is the opposite of life, and all things must come from their opposites. For example, swift must come from slow; thus, being alive must come from being dead. If this is true, souls must exist in a resting place until they can come back again. Similar to reincarnation, the soul dies, and the same soul is reborn later.

In Phaedo, Plato’s philosophical point is the death of Socrates. He introduces the thesis of immortality of the soul in four major argument/theory to that dialogue. The Cyclical Argument, explains that form is unchanging. The Theory of Recollection subject we possess knowledge at birth, implying that all the knowledge we carry exist at birth. and finanly Affinity Argument, explains that Our soul will continue to live even when we die. Argument from Form of Life, explains that our soul can never die.

In Phaedo Socrates claims that the soul exists somewhere after the body dies. He uses the argument of opposites to make his claim. Socrates believes that for something to “be” it must have been something else before or come from something. He gives Cebes examples of thing that are generated as a result from its opposite. “when anything becomes greater it must inevitably have been smaller and then have become greater.” He uses this example to say that being “greater” is derived from having been “smaller” at some point; and that in between being “greater” and “smaller” there are a lot of variables. After giving several examples to Cebes and Cebes agreeing to most outcomes, Socrates asks Cebes if there is an opposite to living, Cebes responds

of forms before it was planted in the body. The soul is made up of non

In a bid to explain the concept of immortality, Socrates employs the concept of opposites. He gives substantial examples which clearly depict the fact that for any object or property that claims to have been generated, it is attained through the law of opposites. To substantiate his statement, he indicates that if something was big at a given point, it must have been smaller at another given instance. In an explicit explanation, it suffices to indicate that Socrates meant that the current state of a given thing is an opposite of the state that it was at a given particular time. He uses this concept to show that life is a result of death. In this case, the living things are as a result of death which took place and once people undergo death,