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The Last Argument of Plato's Phaedo. II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

D. O'Brien
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Extract

At the end of the last section we anticipated the concluding page of the argument, where Plato makes the soul imperishable, as well as not-dead, and where he describes finally the soul's withdrawal at the approach of death. For the conclusion that the soul never admits death, and is in that sense was probably in Plato's eyes the heart of the argument. The final page, we shall argue, will have seemed to Plato in some ways less important, and even something of an embarrassment.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1968

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References

page 95 note 1 The meaning of etc., in this passage has been discussed above, C.Q. N.s. xvii (1967) 207.Google Scholar

page 95 note 2 Observe that for three and snow and fire the conditional sentences were in the ‘un real’ form with past tenses and av in the apodosis (cf. ibid. p. 208), whereas here for the soul the condition is in the ‘real’ form, with present and future tenses (106 b 2–4). For it will not prove possible for the soul to perish. (Later the condition for soul is partly in the ‘unreal’ form, 106c9-dI.)

page 95 note 3 This is the simpler interpretation, following Hackforth and Stallbaum. It is conceivable that Bluck is correct: ‘what is there to prevent (the odd)… becoming even?’ Strictly the idea is then inconsistent, for what perishes cannot itself become anything. As Socrates has explained at 103 b-c, what perishes is ‘the opposite in us’, i.e. the particularization of the opposite form, while what ‘becomes its opposite’, is the evavrlov Trpaypa, Socrates or Simmias. Applied to the present passage, what ‘becomes even’. would have to be a particular group of odd things, camps, or oxen, while what perishes would be the odd-ness in these groups of things. There is the further objection that as the subject of will have taken on the meaning of what is odd, i.e. the substantial use like not the attributive meaning, the character of odd-ness, which is how Socrates uses the word in the lines immediately before and after this, cf. C.Q. N.S. xvii, 207 above. If Bluck is correct, then the phrasing will have had to be almost deliberately blurred, possibly to simulate a puzzled objector.Google Scholar

page 97 note 1 Phaedrus 248c5, cf.Rep.619e and Politicus 271C2. On this question see Hall, R. W., Phronesis viii (1963), 6768.Google Scholar

page 97 note 2 In one way or another the two senses of deathless have been pointed out a number of times, though without the full implications being drawn for the addition: Schmidt ii, pp. 8688Google Scholar; Archer-Hind, note on 105c; briefly by Shorey, , op. cit., p. 41 n. 284Google Scholar, followed with more detail by Keyt, pp. 170 and 172. Aristotle made a somewhat similar distinction of meanings for using in the fullest sense, Top. 145b21–33. The restricted sense of deathless is implied by Strata's criticism (C.Q. N.s. xvii, 213Google Scholar) that the soul of the Phaedo is shown to be only Simplicius, De anima 247. 2326Google Scholar, points out that the limited sense of is overruled by the addition of . Simplicius' point is directed against Boethus, who had evidently shared Strata's view.

page 98 note 1 67d 4–11, and as part of the philosopher's preparation for death 64e8–65a8 and 66d-67d.

page 98 note 2 (91d6). This picks up from 88a 10-b2 and looks forward to 95 d 2, each passage with After the last argument, and before the description of the soul's journeyings in the underworld, there is appropriately a complementary expansion of the idea of life, 107C2–4. Cf. Rep. 608c6–7.

page 99 note 1 cI. Several terms are used for ‘withdraw’ (cf. C.Q. N.s. xvii, 203 n. 2)Google Scholar, but ‘perish’ is in every case

page 99 note 2 e.g. 106 b2–3: in the case of snow and fire in the lines immediately before this (106a3–6, a 8–10; cf. also 106 c 2–3).

page 100 note 1 pp. 163–4: at 105c ‘signifies no more than soul's immunity from that particular kind of extinction which might be supposed to befall it when it parts company with the body. The succeeding page (106 a-c), in which it is argued that the soul is starts from the implied assumption that there are other possible kinds of extinction. Nor is this an unreal assumption: it might well be that the soul survives and yet perishes later’. In this last sentence Hackforth of course uses in the earlier sense of the word. He has perhaps been misled by some remarks of Olympiodorus along these lines (227. 11–16 Norvin). The distinction is given in precisely Hackforth's sense by Schmidt, H., ‘Duorum Phaedonis Platonici locorum explicatio’, Memoriam … Lutheri (Vitebergae, 1846), p. 10.Google Scholar

page 100 note 2 Before Cebes' objection: 77b4–5, d7-e2, 80d9–10, 84b5–8, 86d3–4. After Cebes' objection: 87e1–5, 88a-b, d8, 91d5–6, 95d1–4. Cf. 107c5–8.

page 100 note 3 88a10-b2: of the earlier definition of death, where used of the separation of soul from body (65aI, 67dI, 67d 4–5). is used of the separation of soul and body in Gorgias 524 b 3, where there is a definition of death which corresponds closely to the first formal definition of death in Phaedo 64c2–9, translated above.

page 101 note 1 It is intresting to observe that in the Republic Plato introduces the notion of full immortality, but again supposes that if the soul were to die it would do so at the time of separation from the body: for the notion of full immortality cf. 608 d 3–4 and 611 a 1–2; for death as separation from the body cf. 609 d 4–7.

page 101 note 2 An appreciation of die redefinition of death is also essential to the understanding of at 106 b4- In the first argument we might say that the soul would be ‘dead’ in die sense that it would exist apart from the body. (In fact Plato soul will not be ‘dead’ in the new sense, for it will not cease to exist.

Archer-Hind has a perceptive note on this point, that has come to have a different meaning from at 71 d; see his note on 106 b. Archer-Hind's remarks on are less fortunate (106 e 6), since there it is the death of the body, which depends, as in effect it did before (though Plato's language at 64 c had perhaps not made it very clear), on a single separation from the body. It is interesting to note the tangle which Williamson, , p. 215, gets into by trying to apply the earlier idea of life to the last argument.Google Scholar

page 103 note 1 Thus Schmidt, ii, pp. 7481Google Scholar, speaks of death as a species of destruction. A similar idea is to argue, as does Bluck, (p. 25 and Appendix 9, pp. 188–9, 4)Google Scholar, that the only way for the soul to perish is to die; and therefore that if the soul cannot die it cannot perish. This to some extent corresponds to Proclus' view ap. Olympiodorus, (227. 6–11, Norvin).

page 104 note 1 The ontological argument, that we can think of a being whose nature it is to exist, and that such an idea, since it is simple, can have been derived only from reality, is to be found in Anselm's Proslogion and in his Responsio to Gaunilo's Pro insipiente, and in Descartes's Quinta meditatio and in his Discours de la milhode. Recent sympathetic expositions will be found in Dom Mark Pontifex and Trethowan, Dom Illtyd, The meaning of existence, a metaphysical enquiry (London, 1953)Google Scholar, in Malcom, N., ‘Anselm's Ontological Arguments’, Philos. Rev. Ixix (1960), 4162CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in Charlesworth, M. J., St. Anselm's Proslogion etc., translated with an introduction and philosophical commentary (Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar

Professor A. H. Armstrong points out to me die relevance of mis ontological view of the soul to the difference between pagan and Christian Platonists of die fourth and fifth centuries over the ‘divinity’ of the soul. For the former all ‘gods’, die whole complex of beings in Intellect and Soul, are implicidy necessary; for the Christians only God is, not angels or souls.

page 104 note 2 The notion of sheer non-being is in fact excluded in the Sophist; see especially 258 b 2–3.

page 105 note 1 Rev. Philos. cxxvii (1947), 320–43.Google Scholar Moreau follows a hint of Robin, L., La Pensée grecque, p. 230Google Scholar, cf. his Budé edition, p. 82, n. 1. There has also been an attempt to identify Plato's description of the in the Republic as an example of the ontological argument, by Johnson, J. Prescott, The Personalist 44 (1963), 2434.Google Scholar

page 105 note 2 On this passage see Peck, A. L.C.Q. N.s. ii (1952), 134–8Google Scholar and Philos. Rev. lxxi (1962), 174–7.Google Scholar Cf. Booth, N. B., ‘Assumptions involved in the Third Man Argument’, Phronesism (1958), 148.Google Scholar When is taken to mean ‘an act of thinking, it is still objectified; so that the act of thinking is attributed, finally, to what is thought of.

page 106 note 1 It is interesting to observe that the quasi-unique nature of the soul is seen again in the argument of the Republic for the immortality of soul, 608c-611a. There again Plato considers the soul in relation to opposites that destroy things; and again he concludes that soul is distinctive in having no opposite of the kind which other things have, no which will destroy the soul.