Immortality Of The Soul In Plato's Phaedo

The dialogue “Phaedo” takes place during the time that Socrates was to be executed after being falsely convicted. Before his death, Socrates explored many theories regarding the body and the soul with his pupil Plato. Plato presents four different arguments to prove the immortality of the soul, that all though the human body perishes after death; the soul still exists. Firstly, he explains the Theory of the Opposite Forms that something came to be living only after having first been dead. Then his second is Theory of Recollection which assumes that the information that we have in our mind is received from our previous life. The third is Theory of Affinity, it explains when our body dies, and our soul will continue to live. And the fourth is Theory of Forms, explains that the Forms, is the cause of all things in the world and everything in it participates in the forms. These arguments give fair reasoning to believe in the immortality of the soul; however there are some arguments that can be made. In this paper I will attempt to evaluate each argument in order, as well as defining the immortality of the soul. …show more content…
This theory tells us of the existence of the soul before death. That it doesn’t die, but separates from the body during death. Plato explains that the soul is deathless, but assumes immortality of the soul and doesn’t explicitly tell of it. The theory of recollection only proves that our souls exist before birth. Also the source of our thoughts being from our past souls seems a little un-reasonable. I believe that the source of our thoughts is the mind rather than the soul. All the knowledge that we come to acquire we acquire it after birth. We learn and understand things as we come upon