Death In Plato's Life And The Definition Of Death

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Given what Socrates states in the Phaedo through his arguments about the afterlife and the definition of death, I argue, that he would he say, that we are alive when we are no longer in our body. This paper will argue that an individual is not only alive after death, but that we are most alive when we are not in the body, through an outline of premises picked from the book Phaedo, in The Last Days of Socrates by Plato.
Socrates defines death as the separation of body and the soul through his dialogue with Simmias, “Is it simply the release of the soul from the body? Is death nothing more or less than this, the separate condition of the body by itself when it is released from the soul, and the separate condition by itself of the soul when released …show more content…

According to Socrates, philosophers spend their entire life preparing for death. Why, one might ask, because the soul will finally be free. The philosopher wants to free the soul as much as possible, from being connected with the body. Philosophers are in search for truth, as a result they try to attain a state as close to death as conceivable, by trying to distance the soul away from the body. Therefore, there must be an afterlife for the soul which it lives, that the philosopher is preparing …show more content…

The soul lives on after the death of its physical body. There is much more to living beings than just having a physical body. This is made evident through Plato’s idea of reincarnation. This idea is made when Socrates introduces the Argument from Opposites. Plato claims, “Everything that comes to be so of anything comes to be in this way and no other – opposites from opposites…” (Phaedo 70e). For instance, for an object to become bigger, it must have been first been smaller, and has become bigger out of this smallness. If everything is born of its opposite; then surely the soul is alive after death. This then leads the argument that dead things come from living things, and vice versa, that living things must come from dead things. Socrates also points out that if this were not the case, soon the world would be dead. The soul is immortal, it never dies. Instead, it just transfers out of the body when the body dies and then rejoins the body at

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