Outline
1. Why a philosopher shouldn't fear death************************************a. Why you shouldn't commit suicide2. Does the soul survive death?
b. What is death? - Dualism
c. The body as obstacle to knowledge
d. The Theory of Formsa. The Argument from Opposites3. The Concluding Myth
b. The Argument from Memory
c. The Argument from Affinity
d. The Argument from Forms
"… Tell this to Evenus, Cebes, wish him well and bid him farewell, and tell him, if he is wise, to follow me as soon as possible. …." (97)
Why does Socrates say this?"… is Evenus not a philosopher? ...Then Evenus will be willing [to follow Socrates] like every man who partakes worthily of philosophy. Yet perhaps he will not take his own life, for that, they say, is not right. …" (97)
(2) Why should a philosopher be willing to die?
(2) Why should a philosopher be willing to die?
A New Question: What does Socrates mean by saying that the philosopher is practising for death?
What is Death? "the separation of the soul from the body" (100)
Mind-Body Dualism: the view that individuals are a composite of a non-physical soul and a physical body.In what way does a philosopher prepare for death?
What is Socrates getting at here?
We shall never get at the truth about what? What’s all this talk of ‘the Beautiful’, ‘the Just’, etc. ?
The Theory of Forms
For every general concept or property, there is a form which makes particular things possess the concept or property.*******************************These forms are ‘more real’ than anything else.
They exist in a world of their own which we have access to through reason.
They are unchanging, timeless and perfect.
There is an infinite # of them - the form of the good, the form of chairness, the form of the green, etc.
Things in our world are what they are by virtue of the forms those things ‘participate in’
A New Question: Does the soul really survive death?
Cebes points
out that many think that "after it [the
soul] has left
the body it no longer exists anywhere."
(106)
Answer #1: The Argument from Opposites (AKA the Cyclical Argument)
Socrates’ Claim: The souls of the living come from the dead. (107)********************************P1. "those [things] that have an opposite must necessarily come to be from their opposite and from nowhere else". (107)
Proof: " if something smaller comes to be, it will come from something larger before" and if "the weaker comes to be from the stronger, and the swifter from the slower" and "if something worse comes to be, does it not come from the better". (107)P2. "Is there an opposite to living"? Yes, "being dead"."So we have sufficiently established that all things come to be in this way, opposites from opposites?" Yes, says Cebes. (107)
C: So, by 1 and 2, "living creatures and things come to be from the dead". (108). They therefore conclude that "our souls exist in the underworld." (109)
Is this convincing?
Answer #2: The Argument from Memory
Background - Reference is made to Socrates' idea that learning is recollection (i.e., learning something is just remembering something you in some sense already knew):
"when men are interrogated in the right manner, they always give the right answer of their own accord, and they could not do this if they did not possess the knowledge and the right explanation inside them." (110)The Argument:See the Meno for more details.
1. Sometimes perceiving one thing brings to mind another.[Part II of Phaedo notes]2. Sometimes, such a recollection is caused by similar things, other times by dissimilar ones. (111)
E.g., Similar - a person you see on the street looks similar to your friend Thad Weinerman and this makes you think of him3. One can think about how close the similarity is (and in what respect).Dissimilar - you see a really handsome philosophy professor interviewed on TV and this makes you think of your present professor
4. How do we do this?
"we see that there is something that is equal. I do not mean a stick equal to a stick or a stone to a stone, or anything of that kind, but something else beyond all these, the Equal itself." (112)5. Where did we get knowledge of the Equal?i.e., we draw on the idea (form) of Equality in general.
Not from particular things.After all, sometimes "do not equal stones and sticks sometimes, while remaining the same, appear to one to be equal and to another to be unequal?""But what of the equals themselves? Have they ever appeared unequal to you, or Equality to be Inequality?"
"These equal things and the Equal itself are therefore not the same". (112)
6. "We must then possess knowledge of the Equal before that time when we first saw the equal objects and realized that all these objects strive to be like the Equal but are deficient in this." (113)7. "before we began to see or hear or otherwise perceive, we must have possessed knowledge of the Equal itself if we were about to refer our sense perceptions of equal objects to it" (113)
"we must have possessed it [knowledge of the equal] before birth." (113)8. We must have forgotten our knowledge of the Forms when we were born for "A man who has knowledge would be able to given an account of what he knows" and it is not true that "everybody can give an account of the things we were mentioning just now [i.e., the Forms]". (114)That is, we must have existed before birth. Our souls have been around longer than our bodies have.
9. Couldn’t we have acquired knowledge of the forms at birth?
But then "at what other time do we lose it? … Do we then lose it at the very same time we acquire it"? (115)Simmias answers that "he did not realize he was talking nonsense" when he made this suggestion. (115)
Is this convincing?