Plato's Phaedo

This paper deals with three scenes in Phaedo that re-elaborate previous passages from the
Apology and the Crito:
-Socrates’ dreams at Ap. 33c, Cri. 44a-b and Phd. 60e;
-escaping the body (Phd. 61c-62c) and escaping the prison (Crito);
-the eschatological myth in the Phaedo (106c-114c) as an expansion of Ap. 40e-41e.
Plato’s efforts to link the Phaedo thematically with the Apology and the Crito through
the inclusion and expansion of key elements in them result in the formation of a kind of trilogy on condemnation, imprisonment, and death, as embodied in the persona of Socrates. This trilogy could be compared to a tragic trilogy by Aeschylus, in which the same character suffers various calamities before eventually being liberated.

In this paper I argue that in the Phaedo (101b1-105b3) 1) there is an homologous (according to Greimas-Courtes’ definition of “homology”) relationship between the pragmata and the ideas which is based on a semantic logic, 2) pragmata and ideas observe the same kind of relationship which depends on “compatibility” and “incompatibility” (“conjunction” and “disjunction” for Greimas), and, 3) in this excerpt, Plato inaugurates a semiotics of the natural world. In the last argument of the Phaedo there is a discussion about the direct and indirect opposition by which Socrates states that an opposite cannot become its own opposite. When an opposite approaches a thing carrying the respective opposite, this thing will either withdraw or will cease to exist. This excerpt is close to Timaeus 56-57 in which the same warlike metaphor is employed to explain the change of matter. This metaphor shows that what is different becomes opposite. This is the case of fire and snow in the Phaedo: when the heat approaches the snow, the latter either escapes or dies. Starting from these considerations, Plato analyses the relationship of opposition. Indeed, it seems that the relationship between two things (or two ideas) can be of either similarity or dissimilarity. This allows us to look at Plato’s analysis by means of Greimas’ structural semantics which considers the basic structure of relationship (and of signification) in terms of conjunction and disjunction. The semiotic square fits well with the example of fire and snow, showing that the basic relationship between elements (things or ideas) is of polarity and analogy. This fact splits reality into two different and opposed fields according to the chosen catégorie sémique. According to these premises, a thing is a complex of properties which are opposed to the properties of another thing: this fact gives birth to an opposition of second level. This is due to the fact that a thing receives its own properties from the idea which occupies (katekhein) the thing and this means that physical processes reveal eidetic relations. Furthermore, the pragmata can be considered as epiphenomena of the ideas, i.e. as signs of the ideas since they show the structural relations among them. By following this assumption, Plato inaugurates a “semiotics of the natural world” and a “physics of the ideas”.

I will present this paper at the annual meeting of the Northern New England Philosophical Association on November 3, 2017 at Stonehill College.

This essay investigates Plato's use of " hope " (ἐλπίς, ἐλπίζειν) in the Phaedo. I have shown elsewhere that in the Philebus, Plato devotes significant attention to hope, attributing to it a number of features. Two of those will also emerge from my explanation of hope in the Phaedo: (1) That it is a pleasure of the soul, and (2) that it anticipates pleasure with certitude, unlike the ambiguity of mere expectation: προσδοκία—a reversal of the modern meaning of these words. I will also illustrate that hope is potentially inexhaustible even if it is limited by the capabilities of reason. Furthermore, my interpretation of the " True Earth " afterlife myth reveals that the dialogue engenders hope in two distinct, but closely related ways: theologically and intellectually. My explanation of the former aids in demarcating the pagan foundations for Christian theological hope, while my account of the latter contributes to an underrepresented area of Plato scholarship, and perhaps of modern philosophy broadly construed.

Thinking Life is a narrative exploration of such themes as the decline of the contemporary university, man's alienation from nature, modern melancholia, Dionysian intoxication, the relative value of knowledge, truth, and artistry in the life of the philosopher, and the creative construction of self. The work engages throughout with Plato and Nietzsche, with the Phaedo and The Gay Science in particular.

Corpus Platonicum is one of our primary evidence on the history of Greek magic in the classical period and with other sources it gives the knowledge on those who practiced magic-working (magoi, goetes, pharmakeis and epodoi). Plato is well known for his critics of magicians in the Republic and the Laws yet picturing Socrates as a magician and enchanter in other dialogues. I will address this apparent inconsistency by examining pharmakon (drug) and epode (incantation) as two magical terms that we know already from pre-platonic texts while in the dialogues Plato make use of them for depicting a variety of Socratic philosophical practices: in the Charmides Socrates presented as a follower of Thracian medical-magical practitioner, in the Theaetetus he appears as a midwife of the souls, in the Phaedo as a prophet and a servant of Apollo and in the Republic as a lover of poetry who places his own incantation in opposition to poetry’s mimetic charm. As it follows, the magic of Socrates is a counter-magic to the bewitchment and jugglery of a sophistry and mimetic poetry. By enchanting pharmakon with epode Socrates balances pharmakon’s double nature as both medicine and poison: a model for a method that Socrates is famed for yet expressed in the words of magic.

In this paper, I analyse a passage in Plato’s Phaedo (105e6–107b10), where Socrates deduces from his proof of the immortality of the soul that the soul is imperishable as well. A number of authors (e. g. Taylor, Bostock) contend that Socrates’ argumentation is false because according to their reasoning it does not necessarily follow from the immortality of an entity that it is imperishable as well. Nevertheless, I argue that the premises accepted in the previous passages of the Phaedo make it possible to deduce from the immortality of the soul that it is imperishable. It is important to observe that in the final argument Socrates treats death and immortality in a more general, metaphysical context than it might be supposed at the first glance.

Tanulmányomban Platón Phaidónjának egy részletét (105e6–107b10) tárgyalom, melyben Szókratész abból, hogy bebizonyította a lélek halhatatlanságát, arra következtet, hogy a lélek elpusztíthatatlan. Az érvet több szerző is hibásnak tekinti a Platón-szakirodalomban – például Taylor, Bostock –, ugyanis abból, hogy valami halhatatlan, nem feltétlenül következik, hogy egyben elpusztíthatatlan is. Ezzel szemben amellett érvelek, hogy a Phaidón korábbi részeiben a halállal és halhatatlansággal kapcsolatban elfogadott premisszák lehetővé teszik, hogy a lélek halhatatlanságából rögtön elpusztíthatatlanságára következtethessünk, aminek fontos előfeltevése, hogy a halált és halhatatlanságot Szókratész itt sokkal szélesebb, metafizikai kontextusban fogja fel, mint ahogy az első pillantásra látszik.

Naftali Rothenberg, “Rabbi Akiva, Other Martyrs, and Socrates: On Life, Death, and Life after Life,” in: olam ha’zeh v’olam ha-ba: This World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice, Leonard J. Greenspoon, editor; Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Symposium of the Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization, October 25-26, 2016; East Lafayette 2017: Purdue University Press.
Rabbi Akiva transformed his execution by the Romans into a further, final lesson, in his philosophy of love. Rabbi Akiva's death raises questions of theodicy, and of the place of belief in life after death—juxtaposed with the moral challenges presented within the physical world. The emphasis placed on life in this world, as opposed to life in the world to come, brings to mind a comparison between the meaning of Rabbi Akiva's death and the meaning of the death of Socrates—as reflected in the latter's conversation with his companions as the time approached for him to drink the cup of hemlock, and in the discussion between Rabbi Akiva and his students during his execution.

In Phaedo 102d and 103b, Plato seems to distinguish certain forms or characters immanent in objects as a separate ontological category from transcendent Forms. I argue, following what seems to be the scholarly majority, that this distinction does indeed identify immanent characters as a separate ontological category from transcendent Forms.

Given the prodigious amount of scholarship on Platonic love, this article explores a different question: the nature of Plato's love for Socrates as expressed in two dialogues, the Symposium and Phaedo, in which Plato depicts Socrates as surrounded by his lovers and disciples. By paying attention to the "outer frames" of the dialogues, that is, the relationship between the text and the reader, it is argued that Plato's love for Socrates is displayed not only in his loving depiction of Socrates but also in Plato's doing philosophy through the character of Socrates; Plato thereby shows what genuine love for Socrates would be like. Moreover, contrasted with the words and actions of other characters in these dialogues, Plato shows himself to be not just one among many of Socrates' lovers, but in fact the best.

This article takes a closer look at what Plato’s dialogues tell us about the incorporeality of the soul as one of the well-established Platonic doctrines, on a par with the soul’s immortality and its self-moving nature. What motivates the proposed rereading is Plato’s timidity in describing the soul, human or not, as being entirely without body of any kind. The aim of the article is not to contest the obvious fact that Plato treats souls as essentially distinct from bodies, but to understand why the assumption of incorporeality receives no detailed discussion of its own. One possible answer is that such a theoretically rigorous discussion is always less important to Plato than his emphasis on the variety of actions and experiences ascribed to the soul both here and in the afterlife. While having an essential moral dimension that connects to the soul’s activity of thinking, these actions and experiences contribute to the description of the soul as a fully individual agent, akin to that of a person. To highlight the immortality of this agent, it is more opportune for Plato to start from various facets of the soul’s natural self-motion, while leaving aside possible arguments in favor of the soul’s full ontological bodilessness. In any case, the Platonic soul is introduced as a fundamental part of reality. Its natural agency can therefore be tackled separately from its explicit ontology. By this means, the agency—akin to human agency—that is attributed to the soul can retain its provisional ontological neutrality.

In this paper I argue that the conversation in Plato's Phaedo operates on two levels, and appeals to two different kinds of considerations in arguing that the soul is immortal. On the one hand, Socrates and his friends are interested in whether there will be a survival of the soul after the present life, and whether it has existed before. This appears to focus on temporal survival. But, at the same time, as I shall argue, Plato the author is pressing the argument towards a recognition of another kind of immortality, which belongs to the soul as something outside time, to which before and after do not apply. By examining exactly what is meant by its immunity to death (in a number of senses of " death ") and its association with life (in one sense of " life "), we shall discover in what sense it can properly be said to have no times or changes, no beginnings and no endings, no life or lives of any duration, and no capacity for alteration, having a kind of atemporal being that is akin to the being that is proper to the Forms that are its object of study. Understandably, given the dramatic setting of the Phaedo, Socrates and his disciples tend to think of immortality in terms of whether something continues after death. Socrates is shortly scheduled to die, and from that perspective the chronology of " life after death " seems crucial. He needs to know whether there will be a tomorrow for him, while his companions seek reassurance that though they see him no more, their beloved Socrates will still be somewhere, doing what he loves best. Furthermore, the Phaedo can also be read as a dialogue about methods of proof, such that it asks, among other things, whether it is possible to prove things about the future without needing to wait and see. To discover whether there is life after death, an empirical enquiry involving trial-and-error is not the best method. So the futurity of the future life is important to this issue too, because we are considering what kind of proof could provide certainty about this matter. Those temporal thoughts about survival beyond death prompt Socrates to begin his discussion with theories of reincarnation, in which souls persist through birth and death, undergoing serial embodiments. Socrates explicitly borrows the idea of oscillating between life-states and death

The main thesis of the article is the affirmation that the notion of “soul’s death”, developed in Philo of Alexandria’s exegetical works (the vicious soul binds itself to the body and thus dies), has its source in Plato’s Phaedo. According to the Socrates of this dialogue, the “anti-philosophical” soul which yields to corporal pleasures is penetrated by a corporal element. It is imprisoned in the body and therefore cannot liberate itself from it in order to live the soul’s true life after “physical” death; nor can it live this true life already during this life. The soul is thus dead (although Socrates does not use the word) for the life unbound in the divine world. This happens not because the soul is in the body but because it becomes its friend (philosōmatos).

Bu hazırlanan dosyada Homeros'un Sokrates'in ve Platon'un ruh kavramı açıklanmaya çalışılmış , Homeros'un Ilias ve Odysseia destanlarından ve Platon'un 'Apologia Sokratous' , 'Phaidon' , 'Phaidros' diyaloglarından örnekler vererek ve alıntılar da dahil edilmiş, Perseus Tufts ve Diogenes arşivlerinden de yararlanılmıştır.

I argue that according to Socrates in the Phaedo we should not merely evaluate bodily pleasures and desires as worthless or bad, but actively avoid them. We need to avoid them because they change our values and make us believe falsehoods. This change in values and acceptance of falsehoods undermines the soul’s proper activity, making virtue and happiness impossible for us. I situate this account of why we should avoid bodily pleasures within Plato’s project in the Phaedo of providing Pythagorean and Orphic ideas with clearer meanings and better justifications.

Publisher's blurb:  _The People of Plato_ is the first study since 1823 devoted exclusively to the identification of, and relationships among, the individuals represented in the complete Platonic corpus.  It provides details of their lives, and it enables one to consider the persons of Plato's works, and those of other Socratics, within a nexus of important political, social, and familial relationships. Debra Nails makes a broad spectrum of scholarship accessible to the non-specialist.  She distinguishes what can be stated confidently from what remains controversial and—with full references to ancient and contemporary sources—advances our knowledge of the men and women of the Socratic milieu.  Bringing the results of modern epigraphical and papyrological research to bear on long-standing questions, _The People of Plato_ is a fascinating resource and valuable research tool for the field of ancient Greek philosophy and for literary, political, and historical studies more generally.  In discrete sections, Nails discusses systems of Athenian affiliation, significant historical episodes that link lives and careers of the late fifth century, and their implications for the dramatic dates of the dialogues.  The volume includes a rich array of maps, stemmata, and diagrams, plus a glossary, chronology, plan of the agora in 399 B.C.E., bibliography, and indices.

Partendo dall'ipotesi che la scrittura platonica possa essere assimilata alla scrittura drammaturgica o teatrale, il presente studio esamina il ruolo filosofico, dialettico e/o protrettico che il silenzio assume all'interno di alcuni dialoghi di Platone. Si analizzano, a tal fine, alcuni esempi desunti dal "Liside", dall'"Eutidemo", dal "Fedone".

The aim of the present paper is to show how Plato suggested demarcating between knowledge and other kinds of human intellectual
activities. The article proposes to distinguish between two ways of such
a demarcation. The first, called ‘the external demarcation’, takes place when one differentiates between knowledge and non-knowledge, the rational and non-rational or the reasonable and non-reasonable. The second, called ‘intemal’, marks the difference within knowledge itself and could be illustrated by the difference between the so-called hard and soft sciences. The analyses lead to the following conclusions. Plato refers to the whole of human intellectual activity as doxa, which is divided into two spheres. The first of them is knowledge proper whose criterion is phronesis. Three other kinds of doxa are derived from knowledge proper: 1) the traditional peri phuseos investigation (called also sophia); 2) popular doxai conceming virtues; 3) wisdom of the antilogikoi. The difference represents the external demarcation. There may be, however, a difference in the scope of knowledge proper (the internal demarcation). If the peri phuseos investigators were able to explain the field of vałues, the result of their investigation could be acknowledged as knowledge, although it would still be characterized
as inferior due to its being based on senses. What is interesting about
knowledge proper is that it is not firm and reliable but only hypothetical. It does not determine the sceptical reading of the Phaedo but it indicates that Plato has just begun his own philosophical project (which is still in progress) and the knowledge presented in the dialogue is his first positive suggestion how to solve the problem of demarcation.

This book is a quest for the real Plato, forever hiding behind the veil of drama. The quest, as the subtitle indicates, is Cartesian in that it looks for Plato independently of the prevailing paradigms on where we are supposed to find him. The result of the quest is a complete pedagogical platform on Plato. This does not mean that the book leaves nothing out, covering all the dialogues and all the themes, but that it provides the full intellectual apparatus for doing just that. It consists of two parts. The first is a general orientation in three chapters, one each pertaining to the life, thought, and works of Plato. The second is a dialogic companion covering the four dialogues built around the last days of Socrates, with a separate chapter devoted to each: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

This paper argues that Plato's engagement with Anaxagoras in the Phaedo is more extensive than exclusive concentration on "Socrates' Autobiography" would suggest.  Plato takes Anaxagoras' notions of Nous, separation, and mixture and refashions them for his own ends, particularly to describe the proper role of an individual's mind or soul in effecting a separation of her soul from her body.  It is argued that the post-mortem incorporeality of the soul is, according to the Phaedo, a contingent matter depending on how one has lived one's life and not a simple metaphysical fact about the nature of soul. The paper provides detailed readings of "Socrates' Defense", the "Cyclical Argument", and the "Affinity Argument" in support of these claims.

The chapter seeks to find out if and how the Stoics have taken arguments from Phaedo. Phaedo is, among the Platonic dialogues, the farthest from stoic doctrines. Several topics, metaphors, images used in this dialogue, are recalled in the testimonies of Aristo of Chios, Chrysippus, Panaetius of Rhodes, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Tra i dialoghi di Platone, alcuni sono narrati ed altri direttamente drammatizzati. Tra quelli narrati, alcuni sono narrati da Socrate, altri da altri personaggi. Ma, in tutti i casi, la narrazione è di quelle che consentono all'ascoltatore di vedere la scena narrata come se fosse direttamente rappresentata. L'aspetto più interessante di questa circostanza è che in questi casi noi lettori sperimentiamo, allo stesso modo degli ascoltatori della narrazione, la visualizzazione della scena. Io credo che il fine di Platone narratore fosse proprio quello di far sì che i lettori del testo potessero approssimarsi quanto più è possibile alla condizione degli ascoltatori della narrazione che si incontrano nei dialoghi (Blondell, 2002, p. 41). Nelle pagine che seguono proverò ad accennare ai dispositivi retorici con i quali il lettore del Fedone viene invitato, per così dire, a sedere accanto a Echecrate, per ascoltare le discussioni avvenute nel giorno della morte di Socrate.

Abstract: The article addresses various approaches to the interpretation of Socrates’ last words in Plato’s Phaedo 118a7-8. Some of the traditional interpretations read his final statement literally and understand it as being about an unfulfilled debt to Asclepius. The majority of modern interpretations, however, give his last words an allegorical meaning, but each understands them differently. The article shows that, on the basis of linguistic analysis and the overall context into which they are inserted, we can see them as being a demand to have an unceasing concern for oneself and others, which relates not only to Socrates and his closest students, but also to us, the readers of Plato’s dialogue.
Key words: Socrates – Plato’s Phaedo – care for the self and others – care for the soul.

This paper revisits Plato's and Aristotle's views on mimesis with a special emphasis on mythos as an integral part of it. I argue that the Republic's notorious " mirror argument " is in fact ad hominem: first, Plato likely has in mind Agathon's mirror in Aristophanes' Thesmoforiazusae, where tragedy is construed as mimesis; second, the tongue-in-cheek claim that mirrors can reproduce invisible Hades, when read in combination with the following eschatological myth, suggests that Plato was not committed to a mirror-like view of art; third, the very omission of mythos shows that the argument is a self-consciously one-sided one, designed to caricature the artists' own pretensions of mirror-like realism. These points reinforce Stephen Halliwell's claim that Western aesthetics has been haunted by a «ghostly misapprehension» of Plato's mirror. Further evidence comes from Aristotle's " literary " (as opposed to Plato's " sociological ") discussion: rather than to the " mirror argument " , the beginning of the Poetics points to the Phaedo as the best source of information about Plato's views on poetry.

In the so-called "erotic dialogues", especially the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato explained why erotic desire can play an epistemic function, establishing a strong connection between erotic desire and beauty, "the most clearly visible and the most loved" (Phaedr. 250e1) among the Ideas. Taking the erotic dialogues as a background, in this paper I elucidate Plato's explanation in another context, the one of the Phaedo (72e3-77a5), for discussing the epistemic function of erotic desire in relation to the deficiency argument and the affinity argument. My claim is that the erotic desire of the philosopher is activated by the recognition of traces of the Ideas as something that the material world lacks and that, nevertheless, his soul is familiar with. This desire for the Ideas triggers the process of recollection, and thus erotic desire acquires a decisive role in the acquisition of knowledge in the Phaedo. In the final section of the paper, I highlight the contemporary relevance of Plato's epistemology of erotic desire.

L’expression αὐτὸ καθ’αὑτό, « même que soi-même » ou « en soi et par soi », est l’une des expressions dont Platon fait usage pour caractériser l’identité à soi des Formes intelligibles. En examinant les origines non platoniciennes de cette expression ainsi que certains passages des Dialogues où elle est utilisée indépendamment des Formes intelligibles, cet article montre que c’est le Phédon qui transforme cette expression en véritable philosophème caractéristique de l’ontologie platonicienne, et soutient que c’est la partie centrale du Sophiste qui démontre que chaque Forme est « même qu’elle-même » par la participation à la Forme du Même.

In teaching an introductory philosophy course, one faces the following dilemma. One must be honest with students about the diverse and contradictory array of positions philosophers have taken and still take on every basic philosophical question. Yet one must also somehow motivate students not to give up in discouragement over this cacophony of contradictory voices. An introductory course in philosophy must try to induce students to embark on and persevere in their own search for truth, but this is hard to do when the depth and breath of philosophical disagreement becomes evident as the semester progresses.

Plato’s literary conceptions of the Beyond of the human soul integrate the entire space of the cosmos and move the eschatological space of traditional Hades up to heaven. Astronomy is now combined in an idiosyncratic way with Platonic psychology, ethics, religion, and theology. Two strategies can be observed: the philosophical rationalization of ancient mythotopoi and a new religious conception of astronomy. Plato’s students in the Academy, such as the author of the Epinomis, Xenocrates, or Heraclides, place a much stronger emphasis on the religious aspects (astral gods) and undertake – and this is the reverse of Plato’s – a decidedly religious conception of Platonic philosophical concepts.

Meine Hauptthese ist, dass wir es im Kontext von philosophischen Seelenreisen bei Platon mit zwei, eng miteinander verbundenen, Strategien zu tun haben: zum einen der philosophischen Rationalisierung und Kontrafaktur alter Mythotopoi,4 zum anderen mit einer neuartigen religiösen Semantisierung nicht nur der Astronomie, sondern des Philosophie-Begriffs bei Platon und in der alten Akademie überhaupt, um die es im vorliegenden Beitrag vorrangig gehen soll. In jedem Fall werden wir mit einer literarischen, aber platonisch semantisierten neuen Jenseits- und Hadeskonzeption konfrontiert, die nun den Kosmos miteinbezieht.

For this presentation, I will answer the questions contained at the end of the article in the Phaedo Canvass Files. But before I do so I must preface that the theme of privilege, position and status continue to take form when we attempt to study Socrates and Plato as we delve into the Phaedo and their other projects. It would seem as if Plato could not escape this human condition/nature described by Kant, and this (special interest) “intellectualism” eschewed by Gramsci. Unlike all the previous Greek poets and the putative historians before, Plato downplayed hearsay and was more methodical; utilizing reason and his brand of logic to tell and arrive at Greek “truth”.

RESUMO: O homem ocidental, desde sua origem mais remota, começa a questionar o que vem a se
constituir esse “eu” que nos consolidaria como pessoas. Por mais anacrônico que sejam os termos, “eu”,
“subjetividade” e “consciência”, acreditamos que, de certa maneira, quando os primeiros pensadores
identificaram a psykhé como fonte de vida ou mesmo como a verdadeira parte do homem, eles já estavam
refletindo sobre a mesma problemática que a filosofia da mente na contemporaneidade. O primeiro a
elaborar de forma mais concisa o que seria a psykhé foi Platão, que por meio dos seus diálogos, procurou
entender e refletir sobre essa parte do ser humano tão misteriosa e difusa e que continua até hoje sendo
alvo de várias interpretações. Platão não elaborou uma única maneira de pensar a psykhé e, no decorrer
de sua obra apresentou várias perspectivas sobre o mesmo problema. No fluir dessa comunicação
buscaremos apresentar duas concepções distintas e radicalmente diferentes que encontramos nos diálogos
de Platão. A primeira concepção se apresenta em seu diálogo Fédon, diálogo no qual, Platão reflete sobre
a imortalidade da alma e estipula umas das principais teses da psykhé, sendo está apresentada como
oposta ao corpo. Em contrapartida, notamos no diálogo Cármides, a tese de um psykhé que não mais é
diferente do corpo, mas se apresenta como parte dele e assim, como o corpo fica doente, a psykhé também
ficaria, sendo que uma poderia influenciar a outra.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: psykhé; mente; Cármides; Fédon; Platão.


ABSTRACT: Since the very beginning, Western people have questioned what, after all, constitutes this
‘Self’ that makes us persons. Though it may sound anachronic, we believe that terms like ‘Self’,
‘subjectivity’, or ‘consciousness’, capture partly what the first thinkers meant by psykhé: when they used
it to identify the source of life or the true part of man, they were already discussing the same problems
now discussed in contemporary philosophy of mind. The first one to elaborate, in a more concise way, the
notion of psykhé was Plato, who, by means of his dialogues, tried to understand and reflect upon this
mysterious and diffuse part of human being which is still today a source of multiple interpretations. Plato
did not elaborate a unique approach on psykhé. Along his works, he presented various perspectives on the
same topic. We will try here to present two radically distinct conceptions that can be found in Plato’s
dialogues. The first one appears in Phaedo, which is a dialogue in which Plato reflects upon the
immortality of the soul and stipulates one of the main thesis of psykhé: i.e. it is distinct from the body. On
the other hand, in Charmides, the favored thesis says that the psykhé is not distinct from the body, but a
part of it, and when the body is sick, the psykhé is equally sick, showing that one can influence the other.
KEYWORDS: psykhé; mind; Charmides; Phaedo; Plato.

In his 1924 paper, Paul Shorey has quite convincingly demonstrated that the fourth argument for the soul's immortality in the Phaedo (95e-107b) had probably been a source for Aristotle's Prior Analytics' doctrine of syllogism. In what follows I would like in turn to show that one can establish an even stronger thesis - that the Phaedo's method of hypothesis (in its two versions), which is described and used in 95e-107b, had been a source not only (and perhaps not mainly) of the Prior Analytics' doctrine of syllogism simpliciter, but also (and perhaps chiefly) of the Posterior Analytics' doctrine of demonstrative syllogism. Apart from numerous thematic and lexical parallels between the two texts, this is evidenced by the fact that a series of deductive arguments in Ph. 105a-106e in which Shorey was right to recognise valid syllogisms according to the standards of the Prior Analytics, satisfies almost all of the complex technical conditions that syllogisms have to satisfy to count as demonstrative syllogisms according to the standards of the Posterior Analytics; furthermore, the syllogisms in the Phaedo have certain traits, which although highly unusual and even idiosyncratic considered by themselves, are precisely characteristic of demonstrations in the Posterior Analytics.

Bu yazı, Phaidon diyaloğunda Sokrates'in ruhun ölümsüzlüğünü ispatlamak için öne sürdüğü argümanlardan biri olan Karşıtların Döngüselliği argümanını değerlendirmektedir. Argümanın merkez terimleri olan "yaşıyor olma" ve "ölü olma"nın argüman boyunca aldığı ya da alabileceği çeşitli anlamlar göz önüne alınarak dört itiraz öne sürülmektedir. Bu iki terimin alabileceği farklı anlamlar, öznenin "beden" ya da "ruh" olarak alınmasına göre farklılık göstermektedir. Yazıda, bu terimlerin alabileceği anlamların hiçbirinde Karşıtların Döngüselliği argümanının başarılı sayılamayacağı yani ruhun ölümsüzlüğünü ispatlayamadığı ileri sürülmüştür. Argümandaki temel sorun, ruhun yaşıyor olması ve ölü olmasının döngüselliğe izin veren bir karşıtlık oluşturacak şekilde kullanılamamasıdır.

Abstract: This paper evaluates the so-called Cyclical Argument for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo. The Cyclical Argument turns around the concepts of "being alive" and "being dead" as opposites. However, throughout the argument these central concepts seem to assume different meanings according to whether they have "the body" or "the soul" as their subjects. This paper develops four objections to Socrates' Cyclical Argument on the grounds of its ambiguous use of these central concepts; and it argues that in none of their uses as opposites, Socrates can prove the immortality of the soul. The main problem with the argument is its inability to establish "being alive" and "being dead" as cyclical opposites for the soul.

Plato’s ideas on the practice of philosophers had highly influenced the way of doing philosophy in the West. Many scholars, ancient and modern alike, have explored Plato’s conception of philosophy. This article is yet another attempt to understand the correct manner of doing philosophy for Plato. To this end, I examine Plato’s Phaedo to contribute the growing body of literature on Plato’s metaphilosophy. This study fund identifies that the attitude of true philosophers towards body and
its pleasures together with their care of the soul separate them from other wise humans, and that true philosophers are aware of the limits of human cognition and epistemic access. I conclude that the practice of philosophers is partly shaped by their recognition of the value of human knowledge and the deficiencies of this sort of knowledge.