Immortality Of The Soul

In a Peloponnesian town of Phlius, Echecrates encounters Phaedo, one of the men present during Socrates' final hours. Echecrates presses Phaedo to tell what happened. A number of Socrates' friends were gathered in his cell, including his old friend Crito and two Pythagorean philosophers, Simmias and Cebes. The account begins with Socrates proposing that though suicide is wrong, a true philosopher should look forward to death. The soul, Socrates asserts, is immortal and the philosopher spends his life training it to detach itself from the needs of the body. In Phaedo by Plato, Socrates provides four arguments for this claim: the opposites, recollection, affinity between the forms and the soul, and the argument that essentially brings life with it can never die.

Plato uses the from opposites to support his idea uses the first argument for the immortality of the soul. Socrates repondes with two general statements,list statements then applies these hypotheses to life, death, and the soul. Socrates’ first general statement is that change is between contraries. The hard becomes soft and objects which are soft hardens or becomes hard. The cold becomes hot and the hot becomes cold. The sick become healthy and the healthy become sick. All things, come to be from their opposite; for example, a tall man becomes tall only because he was short before. Similarly, death is the opposite of life, and so living things come to be out of dead things and vice versa. This implies that there is a cycle of life and death. Thus, when we die, we do not stay dead, but come back to life after a period of time. The second general statement is that if both contraries continue to exist. In the world, there must be change in both directions. Therefore, if ther...

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...e soul participates in the Form of Life. Like fire, the soul will have to resist its opposite, the Form of Death, to exist. Furthermore, for a soul to exist, it has the ontological necessity of being undying immortal just as the number 3 to be considered odd has the ontological necessity of being uneven. Therefore, while the soul is contained inside the body and the body is subject to death, the soul eschews death in order to exist from one life to the next.

In conclusion, In Phaedo, Plato is using Socrates to put his own philosophical views. Socrates relies on four arguments to convince his friends of the soul's immortality. Also, Plato demonstrates that how Socrates uses human reason. Socrates uses Plato's theory of Forms is pivotal in Socrates' final attempt to prove the immortality of the soul. By using four arguments for to prove the immorality of the soul.