Death Will Be A Blessing In Plato's Apology

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates presents his audience with an argument to defend his feelings of content, calmness and honor when placed with the verdict of the death sentence. An argument is considered logically valid if the premises provided, necessarily, lead to its conclusion, and soundness of an argument can be established if its validity is recognized and all the premises are accepted as true. Socrates argues that death should be looked upon as a blessing. His claim is explicated through several premises and illustrates quite an interesting argument, allowing the audience to reconsider the common interpretation of death, as something unvaryingly bad, however, his argument ultimately falls as unconvincing, as it suffers from a few flaws …show more content…
In order to evaluate this claim, the premises of the argument may be analyzed by formulating them in the following sequence of statements: (one) death is the dispossession of all sensation, (two) if there is no sensation, then death is similar to a dreamless sleep, (three) anybody would feel that a dreamless sleep is better than most days and nights. Some of these premises, however, once analyzed and dissected, are essentially presumptions, drawing to other inferences, or conclusions, within the main argument, and thus, contribute to the weakness of the argument that essentially deems it invalid. These presumptions and the premises that Socrates does not deliberately present, the inferences, act as premises for the main inference, or conclusion, of the argument, which is “death […] [is] a blessing” (Plato 70). Adding these presumed premises, along with the hidden inferences, changes the sequence to: (one) death is the dispossession of all sensation, (two) if there is no sensation, then death is similar to a dreamless sleep, (three) death is a dreamless sleep, (four) anybody would feel that a dreamless sleep is better than most days and nights, (five) anybody would feel death is better than most days and nights, (six) if something is better than most days and nights of your life than that thing is a blessing. One, two, four, and six are assumptions. Three is a …show more content…
This generalization, however, is hard to establish. It may be a rational assumption, though, that many individuals would choose a dreamless sleep over the average boring day at work, or a bad day or experiencing nights where it’s troubling to fall asleep etc. Premise number five acts another conclusion of for the sub-argument displayed in premises three and four. Five states the conclusion that anybody would choose death over most days and nights. If the overviews in four are ignored, then the soundness for this sub-argument and conclusion stated in five is just as sound as it is for premise three, which relies on premise two, which is the