Socrates Proof For The Existence After Death Essay

In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, there are a series of arguments presented by Socrates as proofs for the existence of the soul after death. The final and most convincing argument works as a direct application of Socrates’ idea of the Forms. Socrates begins to examine the question of whether the soul exists after death by establishing the basis upon which his proof must function. Socrates takes his idea of Forms to be the most certain of all of his theories and so he contends that it ought to be the basis upon which he and others ought to test hypotheses that they discuss (100a). Cebes, for sake of the expediency of Socrates’ argumentation, concedes that this should be alright (100b-c). In this sense, Socrates’ idea of Forms can be said to be an agreed premise upon which both he and Cebes agree to. Socrates, satisfied with Cebes conceding to the use of Socrates’ idea of Forms, goes on to explain his
After all, his reasoning in the final passage and its conclusions do seem to conclusively prove the existence of the soul after death. However, I am not so convinced that Socrates gives sufficient argumentation to support his premise of the idea of Forms and of a few of the intermediary conclusions. Though Socrates does explain his theory of the Forms for a fair amount in the dialogue and despite it appearing to provide useful explanations to the conception of the ideas of addition and subtraction, which had previously troubled Socrates, argumentation for the foundational aspects of his theory are lacking. There is no explanation for why one ought to accept there being Forms to which any object must have characteristics of or what exactly the relation is between an object and its characteristic Form. This is rather