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Phaedo

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Next to Republic and Symposium, Phaedo is among Plato’s best known dialogues. Like three other Platonic dialogues, Phaedo also uses as framework the final days of Socrates, one of the founders of Western philosophy who was also Plato’s teacher.

Phaedo, like so many other works by Plato, discusses questions of life, death and afterlife. Socrates tells about his views on the last day before he is executed – he was sentenced to death through poisoning by hemlock because he refused to believe in the Gods imposed on the people by the state of Athens. The discussion is related to Echecrates of Phlius by Phaedo, a former student of Socrates who spent the day with Socrates in his prison cell and was also present at the execution.

The main idea that the dialogue revolves around is the immortality of the soul, and it also discusses the proposition that divinity and grace is not a privilege of gods, it can be attained by humans, too. Socrates presents four arguments in defense of his ideas:

• the Cyclical Argument, advocating the view that Forms are constant and eternal and as the soul is the agency that brings about life, it is also eternal; • the Theory of Recollection, explaining that we all possess knowledge that was passed on to us in a non-empirical way before we were born, proving that the soul has existed eternally, before humans; • the Affinity Argument, making the distinction between body and soul, defining the former as being visible and mortal, while the latter as invisible and immortal and arguing that our soul lives on even after our body dies.

The final argument takes the notion of eternal forms one step further by defining Forms as the origin of everything we see in our world – as the soul has a part in the world of Forms, it never dies.
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