Phaedo By Plato

In his work titled Phaedo, Plato portrays his master Socrates in his final day before execution. Many philosophers gather with him and a dialogue arises, by which Plato conveys one of the most fundamental theories unfolding the after life. During this conversation Socrates exposes his believe of the immortality of the soul, arguing that he indeed is eager to die, claiming that death just represents the separation of soul and body. According to him, philosophers prepare throughout their lives for this, given that by the soul alone, reason, and wisdom flourish. By presenting different ideas like the argument of opposites, the theories of recollection and forms, and the simplicity argument, Socrates manages to fully convince his visitors of his
He claims that everything comes to be from an opposing side. “Everything that has an opposite necessarily comes to be from nowhere other than from its opposite…whenever something comes to be larger, that it is necessarily from being smaller” (Phaedo 70e-71a). By presenting this, Plato shows that nothing can naturally come into being or end, and that life and death, likewise follow this progression; each one coming to be from the other one. Interestingly many philosophers around Greece and the world also expose this argument. The Pythagoreans for instance, developed the table of opposites, which compromised of a set of ten pairs of opposing qualities. On the other side, Lucretius’s On Natural Things, contemplates the idea that “Nothing ever comes from nothing” (156), claiming that in order of something to come to be, “a seed is needed”. Further on, Plato presents two types of opposites, comparative and absolute. The difference between these two is that comparative opposites contain gradations and can vary. Absolute opposites on the other way, must come into being totally from their opposite and they can’t contain both at the same time. According to this, when the soul is connected to a body there is life, therefore the soul is associated to life and cannot admit its opposite, death. When death comes therefore, the soul simply “withdrawals” from the body, living perpetually. Plato also
In here he states that humans possess knowledge before being born and that the process of learning is just recollecting the information they already know. For Plato this is called “knowledge of the forms”. Equality, justice, and beauty are some of the elements that conform this theory. “Now if having got it before we were born, we were born with it in our grasp, did we know both before birth and from the moment we were born not only the equal, the larger, and the smaller but also the entire set of such things? For our present argument is no more about the equal than about the beautiful itself, the good itself, the just, the pious… So we must have got the knowledge of each of these before we were born” (Phaedo 75c-d). As Plato explains, we all have this knowledge in our sub consciousness and through the process of recollection we bring it out. As Plato shows in this excerpt, the soul doesn’t born with the body, but rather has been perpetually living long