Four Arguments In Plato's Phaedo

Plato’s Phaedo is set in the city of Philius where a follower of Socrates, named Phaedo, meets Echecrates, a thinker. Echecrates was very interested in Socrates’s final hours before he died and Phaedo was the best person to tell the story since he was present on Socrates’s last day. In Phaedo, there are two separate degrees of narration: Phaedo is telling Echecrates the story of Socrates and Socrates’s final philosophical discussion prior to his death. The reason for Socrates’s death was that he undermined the official religion of Athens, which made him “corrupt the youth” and simultaneously created new spiritual theories. However, Socrates’s last philosophical discussion in Phaedo isn’t even genuine: Plato isn’t even with Socrates on …show more content…
These arguments all encircle the claim that both The Doctrine of Forms and The Doctrine of Recollection are true. In Plato’s Doctrine of Forms, he claims there are two dimensions of reality: the realm of intelligible forms and corporeal possessions. The realm of intelligible forms proposes that the forms are eternal, perfect, and unchanging. Platos overall position was a combination of metaphysics (reality), epistemology (knowledge) and ethics (the good). The realm of corporeal possessions suggests the material objects in the sensible world around us are imperfect copies of these perfect Forms. According to Platonic form, we can only discover the Forms by using reason and they are the essential natures of a species or things. Ultimately, the Forms are absolute, perfect, eternal, and indivisible. Plato’s Doctrine of Recollection suggests that learning is remembering through dialectic: we know the Forms before we are even born. The recollection argument is if the Doctrine of Recollection is true, then the soul must have existed before birth. However, the doctrine is true since these arguments encircle this claim, which means the soul is