Preview

Theories Of The Soul In Plato's Phaedo

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
290 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Theories Of The Soul In Plato's Phaedo
In Plato’s Phaedo, socrates tells us his theories of the soul before and after death. He shows us that the body and soul are separate and the soul stays after death and lives before being born. One argument Socrates uses is that snow always brings cold, as fire always brings hot. Fire will not bring cold and snow will not bring hot. He uses these opposites to say that soul brings life with it; therefore the soul will never bring death, the opposite of life. Anything that doesn't fall to death is indestructible. The soul must be indestructible. I agree with Socrates that the soul lives on. It makes sense to me that the soul is indestructible with his reasoning behind it. Plato argues that if two opposites did not balance each other out,

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Throughout Plato’s Republic, Socrates formulates an argument that is cohesive with the notion that one’s soul consists of three parts. He begins this argument by alluding to the fact that we need to determine whether or not the parts of our soul are similar, or different. “The same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same part of itself, in relation to the same thing, at the same time,” this statement is an effective premise in his argument due to its unified applicability within the confines of ones soul. If ones…

    • 193 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Plato’s “Phaedo” is a dialogue between Socrates and his friends, Cebes and Simmias. These two men have asked Socrates to prove to them that the soul survives after death due to its immortality. Socrates gives them several arguments, which ultimately lead to his conclusion that proves the soul’s immortality and furthermore its perishability. Socrates proves that soul lives despite the body’s death by showing that if an entity has a certain characteristic, it will not accept the characteristic that is the opposite to its own. Socrates believes that the soul and the body are two entirely different things; the body is created to disappear after death and the soul is created to exist forever after death.…

    • 662 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Final Paper PHL Kloke

    • 1583 Words
    • 4 Pages

    These larger questions of the soul and the mind and their existence beyond human death has been debated and explored throughout time. Yet, we lack hard evidence to support the idea of the existence of the soul and its continued ‘life’ beyond the death of the body. Individuals have not returned from the grave to transmit this knowledge in any manner that can be tested, studied, and deemed true. What a soul is and why we have it is unique to the human experience. The Abrahamic traditions defines the soul as the “I” that lives within our body and acts through it. The soul is what makes each individual unique according to theologian Thomas Aquinas. Noted philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all argued that the psyche or, the soul, was the “crown of the logical facilities”. Yet the mind is responsible for processing our human experiences and storing them as learned experiences that shape and mold our continued existence.…

    • 1583 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    -Aquinas: Soul is body, there is no body without the soul, sould makes it exist as a body…

    • 436 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Trying to prove his arguments, Socrates presents two proofs – Doctrine of Opposites and second which is based on Theory of Recollections. In Phaedo he writes: “That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world – to the divine and immortal and rational…”. In this quote, Plato uses the first argument about Opposites of things. He implies that while the body dies and decomposes, the soul still lives. In other words, if the body must cease, the soul should be immortal because it is the body’s opposite. There are a lot of examples from Doctrine of Opposites which are given by Phaedo and Socrates. Moreover, according to Socrates’ definition – one opposite thing comes from another opposite as well. For instance, increasing and decreasing, cooling and heating, separation and combination, etc. Let’s take the example of being asleep and being awake. If you are not sleeping, then you are awake, or on the contrary – if you are not awake, then you are sleeping. These two actions could not exist at the same time because when you are sleeping it is impossible to be awakened. Indeed, sleep comes from being awake. Consequently, there must be first condition before the second – in order to become awakened firstly we should be sleeping. The same we know with life and death – when a man ceases to exist anymore, he dies. But if one comes from another, thus there should be opposite action – life after dying.…

    • 999 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One of the main themes in the Phaedo is the idea that the soul is immortal. Socrates offers four arguments for the soul's immortality:…

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Throughout many of his works, Plato has continually presented the notions that we have souls and that they are or may possibly be immortal. These ideologies are suggested through a series of thoughts, mostly in the form of an argument or analogy. The main arguments presented within “Phaedo” either argue for the immortality of the soul or create a dialogue assuming that the soul is immortal and attempt to prove another aspect of knowledge or life. The main four arguments presented are the cyclical argument, the theory of recollection, the affinity argument, and the argument from the form of life. Plato depends on upon a variety of ontological presuppositions to provide sustenance to the merit of his reasoning.…

    • 1705 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Deja Vu

    • 1969 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Using the law of opposites Socrates is able to explain that the opposite of death is life so one must reenter the world from the land of the dead.…

    • 1969 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Philosophy 101 Study Guide

    • 3608 Words
    • 15 Pages

    * Plato believed that though the body dies and disintegrates, the soul continues to live forever. After the death of the body, the soul migrates to what Plato called the realm of the pure forms. There, it exists without a body, contemplating the forms. After a time, the soul is reincarnated in another body and returns to the world. But the reincarnated soul retains a dim recollection of the realm of forms and yearns for it…

    • 3608 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    In Plato’s, Phaedrus, Plato describes what has become known as the Tripartite Soul which describes the human soul as having three parts corresponding to the three classes of society in a just city. Individual justice consists in maintaining these three parts in the correct power relationships, which reason ruling, spirit aiding reason, and appetite obeying.…

    • 1238 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Plato- “According to Plato, man is a dual creature. We have a body that ‘flows’, is inseparably bound to the world of senses, and is subject to the same fate as everything else in this world– a soap bubble, for example. All our sense are based in the body and are consequently unreliable. But we also have an immortal soul– and this soul is the realm of reason and not being physical, this soul can survey the world of ideas...Plato also believed the soul existed before it inhabited the body” (Gaarder 88).…

    • 610 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Ancient Theories of Soul

    • 12490 Words
    • 50 Pages

    Adopting a bird's-eye view of the terrain that we will be covering, and setting many details aside for the moment, we can describe it as follows. From comparatively humble Homeric beginnings, the word‘soul’ undergoes quite remarkable semantic expansion in sixth and fifth century usage. By the end of the fifth century— the time of Socrates' death — soul is standardly thought and spoken of, for instance, as the distinguishing mark of living things, as something that is the subject of emotional states and that is responsible for planning and practical thinking, and also as the bearer of such virtues as courage and justice. Coming to philosophical theory, we first trace a development towards comprehensive articulation of a very broad conception of soul, according to which the soul is not only responsible for mental or psychological functions like thought, perception and desire, and is the bearer of moral qualities, but in some way or other accounts for all the vital functions that…

    • 12490 Words
    • 50 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Plato argues that the soul comprises of three parts namely rational, appetitive, and the spirited. These parts also match up the three ranks of a just community. Personal justice involves maintaining the three parts in the proper balance, where reason rules while appetite obeys. According to Plato, the appetitive part of the soul is the one that is accountable for the desires in people. It is accountable for the effortless cravings required to stay alive like hunger, thirst, and for pointless cravings like desire to over feed. The desires for essential things should be limited by other sections of the soul, while illegitimate desires ought to be limited entirely by other elements of soul.…

    • 827 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Soul Searching

    • 2444 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Prior to the sixth century B.C. the soul was primarily associated with death or dying (Hendrik, 2003). It was believed that when a person died their soul parted from their body and traveled to the underworld, where it remained as a shadow image of the person that once was. Although loosing one’s soul meant the end of life, not much speculation was given to how the soul was connected to a person while they were alive. The idea that we each have some kind of ‘essence’ that makes us the individual that we are began to be explored in ancient Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.…

    • 2444 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Aristotle V. Plato

    • 1965 Words
    • 8 Pages

    At the time that Plato was actively philosophizing, the majority of people in Greece did not believe in an immortal soul (Phaedo, 70a), and so the ideas that Plato propagated might have contradicted the ‘common sense’ of his likely audience. In the Phaedo, he used the context of Socrates’ final moments as an appropriate setting in which to discuss, among other things, whether a person’s soul survives death. In this dialogue, Plato asserts that the soul is immortal, unchanging, separate from the body, and that it is through the soul that we acquire truth and wisdom. Plato details several theories to explain his conclusions including the Theory of Opposites, the Theory of Recollection and the Affinity Argument. Another good account of Plato’s philosophy on the nature of the soul is found in Book IV of the Republic. There, Plato describes his Tripartite Theory of the Soul and discusses what conditions culture a healthy soul and why it is important.…

    • 1965 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays