Plato's Phaedo

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Plato's Phaedo

Plato's Phaedo is a dialog between Phaedo, Cebes, and Simmias depicting Socrates explanation as to why death should not be feared by a true philosopher. For if a person truly applies oneself in the right way to philosophy, as the pursuit of ultimate truth, they are preparing themselves for the very act of dying. Plato, through Socrates, bases his proof on the immortality of the soul, and it being the origin of our intellect. Several steps must be taken for the soul to be proven immortal. First the body and all the information acquired though it must be discredited. For without the question being addressed of whether sensory information can be trusted, looking inwards towards the soul and the intangible for the essence of truth would be absurd. Plato must prove through Socrates that this is in fact so, For without this his legacy would be one of being condemned to death for committing a grievous crime. Not as a philosopher being granted a release from the body to achieve ultimate knowledge. The pursuit of philosophy, to Socrates, involves the denial of the body's desires due to their distraction to any intellectual engagement. For the acquirement of knowledge is an intellectual pursuit, one that the body confuses with faulty sensory information, Plato says through Socrates, "Now take the acquisition of wisdom; is the body a hindrance or not, if one takes it into partnership to share an investigation? What I mean is this: is there any certainty in human sight and hearing, or is it true, as the poets are always dinning into our ears, that we neither hear or see anything accurately?" (1) What we perceive though the senses has to be quantified constantly by the intellect. For example, a man seen in the distance ...

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...y appropriate decision. To observe the soul itself by itself may involve the concept; that though we are intangible and immortal in essence, we can only be quantified physically. For we have no way of quantifying the soul, besides being life itself, and those qualities used to define life are quantified solely in a physical context, as that which gives an object the qualities that make it distinct from death and those objects that are inanimate such as; movement, reproduction, respiration, and growth. If an object contains life, that life can not be quantified only without containing those physical qualities.

Bibliography

Bibliography (1) Phaedo 65 b (2) Phaedo 65 e (3) Pheado 66 c (4) Pheado 64 c (5) Phaedo 71 a (6) Phaedo 71 a (7) Pheado 71 a (8) Pheado 71 b (9) Phaedo 75 b (10) Phaedo 75 c (11) Phaedo 93 d (12) Pheado 93 e (13) Phaedo 89 b (14) Phaedo 66 b

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