What Are The Arguments For Phaedo's Existence

In the dialogue Phaedo by Plato, Socrates offers three different arguments for the existence of the soul after death. The three arguments consist of arguments of the movement of life and death, argument from knowledge and memory, and the similarity argument. While each argument has its strong points, there are also some weaker points causing it to fall short. Of these three arguments, the argument of the movement of life and death is the worst because it is unclear as to what Socrates is alluding to when making such an argument, leading to the rise of different questions and interpretations. Socrate starts off by stating that “those that have an opposite must necessarily come to be from their opposite and from nowhere else” (Plato 107).

In this quote, he is alluding that similar to the claims of just from unjust or the swifter from the slower, indeed life come from death and death from life, like a cycle. However, a question arises as to whether Socrates is talking about the soul or the body itself, causing the argument to fall short. It could be expected that he is not referring to the soul because the main purpose of the argument is to explain how the soul continues to exist when the person dies, “to believe that the soul still exist after a man has died and that it still possesses some capability and intelligence” (Plato 106). Nonetheless, if Socrates is referring to the body itself, it is absurd for him to claim that the body can die from the living and then be reborn into life again. Since this argument is meant to support the claim of existence of the soul after death, the terms “living” and “dead” may not be the best words to describe or explain such a process since the soul is not dead in any state or world. Instead, better terms such as “integrated/disintegrated” or “embodied/disembodied” can better represent the opposites of the soul within the body during life and the living soul away from the body after