The Phaedo is a key source for Platonic metaphysics and for Plato's conception of the human soul. Contemporaries of Plato's, such as the philosopher Phaedo (another of Socrates' students whom … (If, however, the soul is polluted by bodily influence, it likely will stay bound to world (a) upon death (81b-82b).). Couldn’t all life simply cease to exist at some point, without returning? He used to think, for instance, that people grew larger by various kinds of external nourishment combining with the appropriate parts of our bodies, for example, by food adding flesh to flesh. Search Clues. To begin, he gets both Simmias and Cebes to agree that the theory of recollection is true. (The Greek word psuchē is only roughly approximate to our word “soul”; the Greeks thought of psuchē as what makes something alive, and Aristotle talks about non-human animals and even plants as having souls in this sense.) Some contemporary scholars have challenged Plato’s description of hemlock-poisoning, arguing that in fact the symptoms would have been much more violent than the relatively gentle death he depicts. While the philosopher seeks always to rid himself of the body, and to focus solely on things concerning the soul, to commit suicide is prohibited as man is not sole possessor of his body. Plato draws attention (at 59b) to the fact that he himself was not present during the events retold, suggesting that he wants the dialogue to be seen as work of fiction. Socrates too pauses following this objection and then warns against misology, the hatred of argument. The scene of the story is the prison where Socrates is held. However, Socrates also refers to “being alive” and “being dead” as opposites—but this pair is rather different from comparative states such as larger and smaller, since something can’t be deader, but only dead. (99a-b). 2. A defense of Plato’s argument and examination of its underlying assumptions regarding the soul. Discusses Simmias’ account of the soul beginning at 85e. His most famous theory, the theory of Forms, is presented in four different places in the dialogue. Phaedo (Full Text) Lyrics. Their punishment will be of their own doing, as they will be unable to enjoy the singular existence of the soul in death because of their constant craving for the body. Paperback. The argument may be reconstructed as follows: 1. When Crito asks him what his final instructions are for his burial, Socrates reminds him that what will remain with them after death is not Socrates himself, but rather just his body, and tells him that they can bury it however they want. But what about those, says Cebes, who believe that the soul is destroyed when a person dies? The dialogue commences with a conversation (57a-59c) between two characters, Echecrates and Phaedo, occurring sometime after Socrates’ death in the Greek city of Phlius. Philosophy itself is, in fact, a kind of “training for dying” (67e), a purification of the philosopher’s soul from its bodily attachment. – and I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and, in short, of the reality or true nature of everything. Thus, in addition to being an account of what Socrates said and did on the day he died, the Phaedo contains what is probably Plato’s first overall statement of his own philosophy. Plato's Meno and Phaedo are two of the most important works of ancient western philosophy and continue to be studied around the world. A passage in Homer, wherein Odysseus beats his breast and orders his heart to endure, strengthens this picture of the opposition between soul and bodily emotions. He agrees to tell the whole story from the beginning; within this story the main interlocutors are Socrates, Simmias, and Cebes. For readers who do not agree that such items are deathless in the first place, however, this sort of appeal is unlikely to be acceptable. (76d-e). Clever readers may notice other apparent difficulties as well. Aeschines also wrote a dialogue called Phaedo. While certainty, he says, is either impossible or difficult,  it would show a weak spirit not to make a complete investigation. While Plato’s relation to traditional Greek mythology is a complex one—see his critique of Homer and Hesiod in Republic Book II, for instance—he himself uses myths to bolster his doctrines not only in the Phaedo, but in dialogues such as the Gorgias, Republic, and Phaedrus as well. In like manner, what makes a body sick is not sickness but fever, and what makes a number odd is not oddness but oneness (105b-c). Consequently, as absolute beauty is a Form, and so is Life, then anything which has the property of being animated with Life, participates in the Form of Life. The philosophical subject of the dialogue is the immortality of the soul. It was the last dialogue that he wrote in the middle period of Socrates final days. If the soul is immortal, then we must worry about our souls not just in this life but for all time; if it is not, then there are no lasting consequences for those who are wicked. Discusses Plato’s argument concerning equals at 74b7-c6. Given the respective affinities of the body and soul, Socrates spends the rest of the argument (roughly 80d-84b) expanding on the earlier point (from his “defense”) that philosophers should focus on the latter. [20], Socrates thus concludes, "Then, Cebes, beyond question, the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will truly exist in another world. Socrates’ friends learn that he will die on the present day, since the mission from Delos has returned. Phaedo is closely connected to the other dialogues Plato wrote concerning Socrates. This new kind of entity puts Socrates beyond the “safe answer” given before (at 100d) about how a thing participates in a Form. After an interval of years, the story is related to Echecrates by Phaedo, who was one of Socrates' beloved disciples. The Meno is a seminal work of epistemology. He does not elaborate on this suggestion, however, and instead proceeds to offer a third argument. First, if the soul is a harmony, he contends, it can have no share in the disharmony of wickedness. The philosopher frees himself from the body because the body is an impediment to the attainment of truth. . Therefore, our souls must have existed before we were born. He took this to mean that everything was arranged for the best. The soul, Socrates asserts, is immortal, and the philosopher spends his life training it to detach itself from the needs of the body. 6. Retrouvez Phaedo et des millions de livres en stock sur Amazon.fr. Get answers to your Plato’s Phaedo questions like Who wrote Plato’s Phaedo? He provides four arguments for this claim. When Socrates was young, he says, he was excited by natural science, and wanted to know the explanation of everything from how living things are nourished to how things occur in the heavens and on earth. Therefore, supposing it has been freed of bodily influence through philosophical training, the soul is most likely to make its way to world (b) when the body dies (80d-81a). So “fire” will not become “cold” without ceasing to be “fire,” nor will “snow” become “hot” without ceasing to be “snow.”) (103c-105b), 3. . Therefore “soul” will never admit the opposite of “life,” that is, “death,” without ceasing to be “soul.” (105d-e), 5. (He is referring here, of course, to his defense at his trial, which is recounted in Plato’s Apology.) Phaidros), written by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues.The Phaedrus was presumably composed around 370 BCE, about the same time as Plato's Republic and Symposium. for its moving account of the execution of socrates, the phaedo ranks among the supreme literary achievements of antiquity. Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. He became a pupil of Socrates, who conceived a warm affection for him. Are Forms causes? And just as fire always brings the Form of Hotness and excludes that of Coldness, the soul will always bring the Form of Life with it and exclude its opposite. rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote. Phaed. Phaedo relates the dialogue from that day to Echecrates, a Pythagorean philosopher. Misology, he says, arises in much the same way that misanthropy does: when someone with little experience puts his trust in another person, but later finds him to be unreliable, his first reaction is to blame this on the depraved nature of people in general. PHAEDO: It is the ship in which, according to Athenian tradition, Theseus went to Crete when he took with him the fourteen youths, and was the saviour of them and of himself. Since Socrates counts himself among these philosophers, why wouldn’t he be prepared to meet death? All told, then, the body is a constant impediment to philosophers in their search for truth: “It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body” (66c). If something is beautiful, for instance, the “safe answer” he now offers for what makes it such is “the presence of,” or “sharing in,” the Beautiful (100d). Socrates, Apollodorus, Simmias, Cebes, Crito and an Attendant of the Prison. Yes, Echecrates, I was. The myth thus reinforces the dialogue’s recommendation of the practice of philosophy as care for one’s soul. [17], Socrates pauses, and asks Cebes to voice his objection as well. The first argument that Socrates deploys appears to be intended to respond to (a), and the second to (b). Simmias, for his part, says he agrees with Socrates’ line of reasoning, although he admits that he may have misgivings about it later on. Socrates offers four arguments for the soul's immortality: The scene is set in Phlius where Echecrates who, meeting Phaedo, asks for news about the last days of Socrates. Based on this theory, Socrates now commences a second proof for the soul’s immortality—one which is referred to with approval in later passages in the dialogue (77a-b, 87a, 91e-92a, and 92d-e). He says, "I am ready to admit that the existence of the soul before entering into the bodily form has been ... proven; but the existence of the soul after death is in my judgment unproven." Phaedo explains why a delay occurred between his trial and his death, and describes the scene in a prison at Athens on the final day, naming those present. Returning again to the prison scene, Socrates now uses this as the basis of a fourth argument that the soul is immortal. Forms, then, will never become their opposite. Crito and Phaedo (eBook) by Plato (Author) Socrates lives for us in the works'of Plato as the loftiest expression of the spiritual life of ancient Greece. Besides philosophical argumentation, it contains a narrative framing device that resembles the chorus in Greek tragedy, references to the Greek myth of Theseus and the fables of Aesop, Plato’s own original myth about the afterlife, and in its opening and closing pages, a moving portrait of Socrates in the hours leading up to his death. For he, like the swan that sings beautifully before it dies, is dedicated to the service of Apollo, and thus filled with a gift of prophecy that makes him hopeful for what death will bring. Suppose, for instance, that Socrates wanted to know why the heavenly bodies move the way they do. This difficulty, Socrates suggests, can be resolved by combining the present argument with the one from opposites: the soul comes to life from out of death, so it cannot avoid existing after death as well. 5. Careful readers will distinguish three different ontological items at issue in this passage: (a) the thing (for example, Simmias) that participates in a Form (for example, that of Tallness), but can come to participate in the opposite Form (of Shortness) without thereby changing that which it is (namely, Simmias), (b) the Form (for example, of Tallness), which cannot admit its opposite (Shortness), (c) the Form-in-the-thing (for example, the tallness in Simmias), which cannot admit its opposite (shortness) without fleeing away of being destroyed, (d) a kind of entity (for example, fire) that, even though it does not share the same name as a Form, always participates in that Form (for example, Hotness), and therefore always excludes the opposite Form (Coldness) wherever it (fire) exists. Since the person in Socrates' story is able to provide correct answers to his interrogator, it must be the case that his answers arose from recollections of knowledge gained during a previous life. Socrates says that this is only because their hypotheses need clearer examination—but upon examination they will be found convincing. While these questions are perhaps not unanswerable from the point of view of the present argument, we should keep in mind that Socrates has several arguments remaining, and he later suggests that this first one should be seen as complementing the second (77c-d). Phaedo. As the soul is that which renders the body living, and that the opposite of life is death, it so follows that, "... the soul will never admit the opposite of what she always brings." (Some commentators think  the “we” here refers to followers of Pythagoras.) There is also a dispute about Socrates’ last words, which invoke a sacrificial offering made by the sick to the god of medicine: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.”  Did Socrates view life as a kind of sickness? The text can be divided, rather unevenly, into five sections: (1) an initial discussion of the philosopher and death (59c-69e), (2) three arguments for the soul’s immortality (69e-84b), (3) some objections to these arguments from Socrates’ interlocutors and his response, which includes a fourth argument (84c-107b), (4) a myth about the afterlife (107c-115a), (5) a description of the final moments of Socrates’ life (115a-118a). The papers by Crook and Most (cited below) consider some puzzles regarding Socrates’ final words at the dialogue’s end. He wanted to know why you who never before wrote a line of poetry, now that you are in prison are putting Æsop into verse, and also composing that hymn in honor of Apollo. Asked by Simmias to elaborate further upon this doctrine, Socrates explains that recollection occurs “when a man sees or hears or in some other way perceives one thing and not only knows that thing but also thinks of another thing of which the knowledge is not the same but different . 2. But this is only “an illusory appearance of virtue”—for as it happens, “moderation and courage and justice are a purging away of all such things, and wisdom itself is a kind of cleansing or purification” (69b-c). (Socrates himself challenges his listeners to provide such defense at 84c-d.)  How seriously does Plato take these arguments, and what does the surrounding context contribute to our understanding of them? Not the same would be true of the body because the body is more world... Apparent difficulties as well as discussion of the soul is more like who wrote phaedo ( a (... We must have gained this knowledge in a similar way of knowing 82b ff (. 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