Plato The Soul

The soul is a mortal, dependent entity created by the body. The soul is the sum of all the parts in the body along with the experiences, accumulated knowledge, and innate instinctual knowledge. The soul is a corporeal entity that lives and dies with the body. This means that the soul is just a part of the body, they are inseparable entities. The soul as described in Plato’s Phaedo is described as individual, eternal, indivisible, and divine, but the soul is not any of these. The soul is what we would call our personality. The personality is created by the body growing and experiencing new things. It grows and gains knowledge of the world through perception. The body is the creator and lone owner of the soul, because as the body grows and develops

Plato believes that our soul is immortal for a few main reasons, his reasons in short are that: souls transfer from the living to the dead and vice-versa, all knowledge is recollected from past lives, the soul is divine and invisible, and that the soul participates in the form of life, so it cannot partake in death. Socrates’ first argument called the “cyclical argument” describes how souls are immortal due to the living souls coming from the dead after visiting another world. He argues this by describing how opposites come from their opposites, like hot and cold, asleep, and awake. So that the living comes from the dead and over again. This argument is flawed due to the soul being connected with the body. The soul is only ever detected or seen when the body is alive, when the body is out of energy or consciousness then the soul is not present. Plato states that: “All things come to be from their opposite states: for example, something that comes to be “larger” must necessarily have been “smaller” before (Connolly).” and later in the text: “Since “being alive” and “being dead” are opposite states, and “dying” and “coming-to-life” are the two opposite processes between these states, coming-to-life must balance out dying (Connolly).” He uses this to show how opposites counteract each

The qualities of the forms that they are non-identical and self-predicating allows the third man argument to prove that the forms are ‘like’ the things that the objects partake in the form. This creates the dilemma of having to create a greater form that leads to infinite progression and shows that it is a circular argument. Instead of the forms describing the identity of things that make them what they are, instead we see objects as the same categorical thing by subjecting them to a test of their qualities, and purpose that allow us to identify what makes something itself. There may not be a singular idea or quality that makes something what it is, but it is the person that interprets what the thing