The Mortality Of The Soul In The Phaedo By Plato

In "The Phaedo," which is included in Plato’s “Five Dialogues” he explains his theory of the forms and his ideas concerning the mortality of the human soul. He finds that the soul and body are separate and that the soul lives after death as it did before birth. This leads him to the idea of form, which is that we know things through substance, and how we acquire the knowledge of these substances before birth. He comes to the conclusion the only time the soul is separate from the body is in death and since the soul can only obtain knowledge of forms when it is away from the body, we understand that after death is the only time when the soul can gather this information. The intellect (mind) loses the idea of forms when it is born unto a physical body.

This argument relies on the point that opposites rely upon one another and in fact lead to one another. In terms of life and death, this leads to the conclusion that, if life leads to death, then death must also lead to life. So, this means the living come from, or are reincarnations of, the dead, which then die and are born again. Second, knowing is remembering, called the recollection argument. This second argument is based on the idea that all knowledge is simply a form of recollection. This is proven by showing that a young, untutored boy, with no knowledge of mathematics at all, can be led to display or arrive at knowledge which he did not know he possessed. The third argument attempts to prove that the soul, although it may perhaps pre-exist birth, also survives death. Since the body is mortal, changing and made up of different parts, the soul; which seems not to be composed of many parts, must therefore also be immortal and unchanging. The last is the argument from opposites. Since death is the opposite of life, and opposites are mutually exclusive, therefore when the body dies, life must go