The Role Of Objects In Plato's Phaedo

All human civilizations and cultures throughout time have in some way had to deal with accounting for the plethora of objects and phenomena surrounding them. We live in a world of infinite objects that are constantly changing, yet even in this world of objects and seemingly constant change, there seems to be an underlying unity and stability. For example, every human being begins as an infant before they grow into an adult. Every adult is in fact a different object than they once were as an infant—in fact, they are unrecognizable as being the same object. Yet we must recognize that the are the same object, that something has remained the same even though the infant has changed into an object that is nowhere close to its original state. Likewise; a corpse is nothing like the original living human being, but we still recognize that something has remained constant, it is then a fragment or remnant of what it once was. We can see the same stability and constancy even across many

Similar to musical intervals, in medicine there are opposites, such as the hot and the cold, the wet and the dry, and it is the very purpose of the physician to produce a proper ‘ratio’ of these in the human body. In a commonly known passage of Plato's Phaedo (86 b) we are told by Simmias that the Pythagoreans held the body to be strung like an instrument to a certain pitch, hot and cold, wet and dry taking the place of high and low in music. Musical tuning and health are alike means arising from the presentation of Limit to the Unlimited. It was natural for Pythagoras to seek something of a similar kind in the world around him. The doctrine of Pythagoras stated that all things are numbers. In certain fundamental cases, the early Pythagoreans portrayed numbers and explained their properties by means of dots arranged in certain 'figures' or