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Reading group: Plato’s Phaedo, weeks 1–3

Giulia Ferrante Fellow
· 5 replies · 180 views
DeathGreek & RomanPlatonismPlato#immortality#soul
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I'd like to read the Phaedo slowly with anyone who is interested. It is the dialogue I return to most, and it reads differently every decade.

Proposed plan:

  • Week 1: the frame story and Socrates' claim that philosophers spend their lives practising for death (57a–69e)
  • Week 2: the cyclical argument and the argument from recollection (70c–77d)
  • Week 3: the affinity argument and the two great objections from Simmias and Cebes (78b–88b)

Any translation is fine. I'll be using Grube's in the Hackett edition, with the Greek open beside it when I get stuck.

A question to start us off: does Socrates' calm come from the arguments, or do the arguments come after a calm he already has? Read the opening pages with that in mind and see what you think.

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5 replies

  1. Elin Lindqvist

    Fellow

    I'm in. I read the first section on a break during a night shift, which felt appropriate. What struck me is how honest the dialogue is about the people around the bed. Xanthippe is sent home in tears, Apollodorus can't stop crying. Plato doesn't pretend the dying is easy for anyone except Socrates.

  2. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    Joining too. It's interesting to read this next to Ibn Sina, who also argued that the rational soul does not perish with the body, but on very different grounds. He has no need for recollection and in fact denies that the soul exists before the body at all. So the one argument that does most of the work for Plato's pre-existence is exactly the one he drops.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Giulia Ferrante

      Fellow

      That's a lovely contrast, Layla. And it shows how much weight recollection carries here. Simmias and Cebes notice it themselves around 77b–c: recollection at best proves the soul existed before birth, not that it survives death. Socrates has to staple it to the cyclical argument to get what he wants.

      Helpful · 2
  3. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    A worry from a newcomer to the dialogue: isn't "practice for dying" a little world-denying? Nietzsche read Socrates' last words about owing a cock to Asclepius as a confession that life itself had been a long sickness. I can't quite shake that reading.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Giulia Ferrante

      Fellow

      Nietzsche's reading is famous for good reason, Henrike, but it isn't the only one. Some take the offering as gratitude for being cured of false belief, others as plain piety from a man who never stopped observing the rituals. I lean towards the second, partly because Socrates spends so much of the dialogue being careful about the gods.