Comparing Socrates Argument On Death And Life

Socrates’ two premises support his initially stated conclusion that death and life are cyclical opposites or, in other words, that they flow back and forth as states of existence. He concludes, “…living people come to be from nowhere other than from the dead” (Plato, 2014, p. 58, 70d).
While Socrates’ argument is valid, his first premise is problematic. It is within this premise that he assumes fundamentally dissimilar relationships between fundamentally dissimilar entities are analogous. When discussing degrees of being, Socrates makes two calculated but flawed transpositions. For the sake of this argument, transposing is the act of stating that entities or relationships, which are within fundamentally different categories, are in the same category. His first transposition goes from a discussion of degrees, to one of …show more content…
This is troubling because, unlike his first transposition, death and awake are not obviously cyclical in nature. They are also fixed states of being and thus diverge even more from the degrees of being which are the foundation of Socrates’ first premise. Death and life may be logically opposite, and share this relationship with asleep and awake, but the fact that they are superficially opposite is there only similarity. Opposite, in this context, refers to two entities that perfectly mirror one another, and have universally diametric properties. The relationship between life and death differs in two fundamental ways from the relationships between degrees of being. As stated before they are fixed states and the only proof that they are cyclical is inherent in the assumption that that they are opposites in the same manner as all the other aforementioned entities. Therefore, life and death cannot be used in the same logical framework. It follows then that his first premise is untrue and his argument is