First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The earliest -- c.1446-7 --complete translation of an authentic dialogue of Plato into a Western vernacular language.

Plato's Phaedo is a literary gem that develops many of his most famous ideas. David Ebrey's careful reinterpretation argues that the many debates about the dialogue cannot be resolved so long as we consider its passages in relative isolation from one another, separated from their intellectual background. His book shows how Plato responds to his literary, religious, scientific, and philosophical context, and argues that we can only understand the dialogue's central ideas and arguments in light of its overall (...) structure. This approach yields new interpretations of the dialogue's key ideas, including the nature and existence of 'Platonic' forms, the existence of the soul after death, the method of hypothesis, and the contemplative ethical ideal. Moreover, this comprehensive approach shows how the characters play an integral role in the Phaedo's development and how its literary structure complements Socrates' views while making its own distinctive contribution to the dialogue's drama and ideas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: -/- [99] JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:1 JANUARY 198 5 Book Reviews Kenneth Dorter. Plato's 'Phaedo': An Interpretation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Pp. xi + 233. $28.50. Kenneth Dorter of the University of Guelph has given us a useful and unusual study of the Phaedo, which will attract the interest of a variety of Plato's readers. He provides the careful (...) studies of the dialogue's arguments for immortality to be expected in a sound commentary, paying close attention to the text as well as to recent scholarship, and displaying a good sense of argument. What gives the book additional interest, however, are its features as an interpretation of the Phaedo. Two stand out. First, Dorter wishes to give full weight not only to the logic of the arguments but also to the dramatic details of Plato's writing, believing these to be important in disclosing Plato's intentions. Secondly, he reads the Phaedo in light of a more general understanding of Plato's philosophy, especially the nature of the soul in its cosmic as well as individual aspects. Much of this is set out in a final speculative chapter, where Dorter seeks to make intelligible Plato's developing conception of soul by means of such notions as energy and poles of consciousness. Not every reader will be persuaded; but Dorter is to be commended for an attempt to move the discussion beyond the Phaedo and Plato's own vocabulary. The study gains its coherence from Dorter's belief that Plato's view of soul cannot support the ostensible aim of the dialogue, to provide reassurance of personal immortality. Although he has no doubt that for the Platonic Socrates there is "a meaningful sense in which we may be called immortal" (94, cf. 159), Dorter's analysis must be stretched to provide that sense. In part this is a result of his assessment of the arguments. The first, from reciprocity in nature, can at most show that, given the eternal nature of the world, soul and corporeality in general must continue to exist. The argument from recollection can point only to a non-empirical element in our knowledge ; that from the soul's kinship with the divine is best seen as an analogy developed to awaken within us a sense of eternity. The final argument, though containing fallacies (157), will support the conclusion that immortal soul is imperishable as long as soul is regarded as motive force in the universe, in the first argument's sense. In none of these discussions, then, can Plato's reasoning yield up personal survival. But there is another part to Dorter's case, underlying this conclusion. For Plato the individual human being is a composite of soul and body; so even if Plato were to prove the immortality of the soul he could never establish personal survival (63-64). It is not surprising then that Dorter is left with a doctrine of immortality either reduced to a "discovery of eternity within ourselves" (77), or else dissolved into a principle of enduring cosmic energy. So in neither case does it seem meaningful for Plato to say that we are immortal: the eternal which we sense is no more us than it is anything else. Although it is of course possible that Plato did not intend this consequence of his arguments, Dorter thinks otherwise. In support he invokes literary features of the dialogue to argue that Plato operates on one level for the less sophisticated (who wish to be persuaded of personal survival) and on another for the philosophically reflective reader. Dorter treats the textual evidence for this claim with an appropriate modesty, and tries to justify Plato's apparent duplicity as an attempt to convince the weak by a 'noble lie' (95-97). Nevertheless this leads Dorter to mix together too quickly for this reader popular religion, myth, and metaphor. To the fact that Plato does not espouse the language of popular religion literally, Dorter adds his own view of myth as an imaginative appeal to emotion that can be translated without loss into rational discourse (7, 165, a95). So the accounts of the afterlife at 8oc-84 b... (shrink)

Though Plato's Phaedo does not focus on pleasure, some considerable talk on pleasure takes place in it. Socrates argues for the soul's immortality and, while doing so, hopes to highlight to his companions how important it is to take care of our soul by focussing on the intellect and by neglecting the bodily realm as far as is possible in this life. Doing philosophy, so his argument goes, is something like dying, if we grant that death is the (...) separation of the soul from the body and notice that genuine philosophers wish nothing else than to be detached from the bodily realm. For indulging into bodily pleasures has detrimental consequences on the soul, impeding the search of truth and distorting reality, and so philosophers should undertake to purify themselves from all bodily concerns and gratifications and love the objects of learning and knowledge without deviation and distraction. On the contrary, ordinary people fall for the bodily realm as the only real domain that should therefore be of priority and of their earnest concern. (shrink)

The author of this article maintains that there is a progression in plato's "phaedo" from argument and myth to action. In the dialogue, socrates is portrayed as a believer in immortality. How is that belief conveyed to skeptics like simmias? it is argued here that plato deliberately employs a variety of methods because men are not convinced by rational argument. Plato's depiction of socrates' own death is itself the final demonstration.

In a 1985 article entitled “The Art of Glaukos,” Diskin Clay suggested that the enigmatic passage at the beginning of the geological myth in Phaedoreferred toRepublic10, where the soul is likened to the sea-creature Glaucus whose true nature, like the soul’s, is obscured by the distortions imposed by underwater life. Starting with a defense of Clay’s ingenious suggestion, my purpose is to compare Phaedoto Glaucus, with its true nature obscured by traditional assumptions about the order in which Plato composed his (...) dialogues, and thus how they should be read. At least part of the reason that Clay’s thesis has not been embraced is because it clashes with the dogma that Phaedocannot refer back to Republic; I want to challenge that dogma. Borrowing from Catherine Zuckert the notion that, since Phaedocomes at the end of Socrates’ story, it can usefully be read as the culmination of the Platonic dialogues, I will show how a “late” Phaedo—i.e., a reading of the dialogue that is open to the possibility that it refers to more than one dialogue generally considered to be later than it with respect to composition—recovers its true nature, presently encrusted with the oysters and seaweed of an outdated developmentalism that has obscured this culminating masterpiece of Plato’s dramatic and philosophical art. (shrink)

These dramatized, unabridged versions of Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo present the trial, imprisonment, and execution of Socrates, who Phaedo said was the "wisest, best, and most righteous person I have ever known."In the Euthyphro Socrates approaches the court where he will be tried on charges of atheism and corrupting the young. On the way he meets Euthyphro, an expert in religious matters. Socrates challenges Euthyphro's claim that ethics should be based on religion.In the Apology Socrates (...) presents his own defense. He explains why he has devoted his life to challenging the most powerful and important people, a process that has generated great resentment and has led to his indictment. He insists that instead of being punished he should be rewarded for his services to his fellow citizens. Socrates fails in his attempt to avoid the death sentence, but his friend Crito has bribed the guards offers him a way to escape. In the third dialogue Crito tries to persuade Socrates that it is right to flee from the unjust sentence imposed on him. In the course of their conversations they probe the foundations of civil and moral law, and treat issues that are as relevant to our time as to theirs.The Phaedo presents Socrates' final conversation. What will become of him once he drinks the poison prescribed for his execution? Socrates and his friends examine several arguments to prove that the death of the body does not kill the soul. (shrink)

David Bostock examines the theories and arguments put forward by Plato in his Phaedo, in which he attempts to show that the soul is immortal. This excellent introduction to Plato's often difficult arguments discusses such important philosophical problems as the nature of the mind, the idea of personal identity, the question of how we understand language, and the concept of cause, reason, and explanation.

Recent studies suggest that the form and style of Plato's dialogues have significant associations with their philosophical contents. Few scholars, however, have focused on the role of disagreements in epistemic improvement within the context of Plato's Phaedo. This paper seeks to unearth a ‘theory of disagreement’ underpinning the Phaedo by examining the conversation between Socrates and his interlocutors. In doing so, I will highlight the epistemic importance of recognizing disagreements. It is shown that there is a (...) positive relationship between the correct method of philosophical argument and epistemic modesty, which plays a crucial role in solving disagreements and facilitating epistemic improvement. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show that Plato’s Phaedo makes an important contribution to the development of ideas about the commensuration in value of heterogeneous items that is needed for practical reasoning and rational choice. Because the passage I focus on, the so-called ‘right exchange’ passage at 69a-c, has not usually been read this way, I motivate the reading by showing how it resolves some puzzles local to the Phaedo concerning the stark contrast Socrates develops between (...) the virtues of philosophers and nonphilosophers, ordinary people who do not pursue wisdom single-mindedly, applying to the latter labels like ‘strange’, ‘unreasonable’, ‘illusory’ and ‘slavish’. Socrates says that one should, and suggests that philosophers do, use wisdom as their currency whereas nonphilosophers use pleasure (and perhaps also pains, fears, etc., or bodily conditions in general) as their currency (or currencies). Although it has been generally understood that the basis for this contrast lies in how the two groups evaluate, the details have remained murky. I argue that it’s due to the properties of pleasure (or bodily conditions in general) qua measure of value, in particular pleasure’s context-dependence, that nonphilosophers’ judgements about virtue, e.g. the courage and moderation of particular acts or people, are defective in the ways Socrates says they are. (shrink)

Plato's striking figure of the ‘child in us’ at Phaedo 77e5 takes on an added lustre when viewed in the light of the theory of explanation Socrates develops between lOObl and 105c7.Socrates' theory aims to explain why certain objects have certain properties: why something is beautiful or tall, or when a body will be sick or alive. Explanation is called for, Socrates thinks, when an object has a property its title to which is insecure, in the sense that (...) the object's having the property is not guaranteed by its being what it is. Thus Socrates wants an explanation, for example, of a person's being tall or – the case of especial interest in the Phaedo – of a body's being alive. (shrink)

I am pleased to have been able to vindicate Plato from the oft-rehearsed charge of not having distinguished relations from qualities. Not only does Phaedo 102B7-C4 show quite clearly that he did make the proper distinction, but the theory of relations he adumbrated there is logically sound and ontologically viable. Furthermore, it is refreshing to think of relations not as Forms or universals, but as chains of ontologically tied universals.Naturally, now that we have a clear understanding of Plato's (...) Phaedo theory of relations and relational facts there is plenty of work to do. We must examine the other dialogues for alterations or even preservation of that theory. Moreover, there are those arguments of Aristotle that purport to reduce Plato's Theory of Forms to absurdity on account of relations. But of this I shall say more at some other time. (shrink)

A welcome addition to the series of translation-commentaries initiated by the late F. M. Cornford. Mr. Bluck's English Phaedo reads smoothly and naturally; it is, like the original, a work of literature as well as of philosophy. The running commentary is clear, well-informed and helpful, being mainly designed to get the reader through the text. More detailed pieces of analysis and interpretation are placed in an Appendix; here Mr. Bluck argues that Plato's Forms are not merely abstract logical (...) universals, but substantial "things," which "cause" the appearances in the material world. He also defends, in opposition to the majority view, the validity of the crucial proof of the soul's indestructibility at 105E ff.--V. C. C. (shrink)

The paper deals with the "deuteros plous", literally ‘the second voyage’, proverbially ‘the next best way’, discussed in Plato’s "Phaedo", the key passage being Phd. 99e4–100a3. The second voyage refers to what Plato’s Socrates calls his “flight into the logoi”. Elaborating on the subject, the author first (I) provides a non-standard interpretation of the passage in question, and then (II) outlines the philosophical problem that it seems to imply, and, finally, (III) tries to apply this philosophical problem to the (...) "ultimate final proof" of immortality and to draw an analogy with the ontological argument for the existence of God, as proposed by Descartes in his 5th "Meditation". The main points are as follows: (a) the “flight into the logoi” can have two different interpretations, a common one and an astonishing one, and (b) there is a structural analogy between Descartes’s ontological argument for the existence of God in his 5th "Meditation" and the "ultimate final proof" for the immortality of the soul in the "Phaedo". (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In Socrates' account of his earlier investigations into the nature of causation in the "Phaedo", he describes a method that uses hypotheses. He posited as true those propositions that appeared to harmonize ("sumphonein") with his hypothesis and as false those propositions that failed to harmonize with his hypothesis. Earlier commentators on this passage have maintained that it is impossible to give a univocal reading of the occurrences of "sumphonein"' such that the method that Socrates describes is at all reasonable. (...) It is argued in this paper that such a reading is possible. (shrink)

At the close of Plato’s Apology, Socrates argues that death is a benefit regardless of whether it results in annihilation or an afterlife. According to the standard interpretation, Socrates of the Phaedo rejects the idea that annihilation is a benefit, instead arguing that the soul is immortal and that annihilation would harm a philosopher. Socrates certainly suggests in a few passages that he would resent annihilation. In this paper, however, I argue that the Phaedo does not mark a (...) significant shift in Socrates’ views about whether annihilation benefits. In both dialogues, he recognizes that if the gods choose to annihilate humans, they signal that human life is bad overall and that deprivation of a bad state is a benefit, albeit a benefit without an existing beneficiary. I contend that for Socrates, the possibility that humans benefit from annihilation entails neither the rationality of suicide nor the view that philosophers live miserable lives. (shrink)

The ending of the Phaedo is one of the most powerful and memorable moments in the entire Platonic corpus. It is not simply the end of a single dialogue, but a depiction of the end of the life of the man (Socrates) who is a looming presence in nearly everything that Plato wrote. In this article I offer an in-depth analysis of the final scene of the Phaedo. I argue that Plato very carefully constructs the scene for the (...) sake of specific philosophical, dramatic, and political ends. Plato uses it to unify the Phaedo as a singular text, while also provoking us to reflect on the nature of our lives, our deaths, and the possibilities and limits of philosophy itself. (shrink)

This essay offers an interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo, which proceeds in two parts: (1) methodological interpretation of myth and (2) application of the method to the analysis of the soul. The paper claims that the myths in this dialogue are not limited to the explicitly mythical sections but that the entirety of the Phaedo—including the arguments that it presents—is saturated with myth. Through this interpretive lens, the soul, as it appears in the Phaedo, ceases to be characterized (...) as a mere thing and gains an ontological dimension. (shrink)

Unlike the _Phaedo_ itself, its reception in Antiquity remains little studied. By examining the extant commentaries, their sources, and the dialogue’s presence in the reflections of ancient thinkers both inside and outside the Platonic tradition, this volume aims to reconstruct its ancient history.

The paper argues that the role of ἀριθμός (i.e., a limited multitude) is important for understanding the logical form of the final proof for the immortality of the soul. Along the way, it rejects the notion that soul is a form or the particularity of a form and suggests instead that it is something like an intermediate object. It is the first paper from a set of papers in progress that analyze Plato's metaphysics with respect to the ancient Greek (...) conception of number. (shrink)

A new story is abroad that plato possessed two redundant devices in the "phaedo" to explain why some sensible "f" (a drift of snow, say) is "g" but never not-"g" (cold, say): (i) "f" participates in a special way in the (upper world) forms "f" and "g"; (ii) "f" is essentially "g" in its own (lower world) right. Were there such genuinely redundant devices, this would tidily explain both plato's coming to reject essential properties for sensibles in the (...) "republic" and aristotle's coming to reject forms for sensibles in the "categories". Now it is true in the "phaedo" that sensible "f" particulars can indeed by "g" and never not-"g", yet no redundant "essentialist" doctrine occurs there. Plato's reasoning is through and through form-ist: an "f" particular has a "participation" relation to the form "f", which form "f" has an "invariable accompaniment" relation to the form "g", which form "g" can never itself be not-"g"; the form "g"'s own never-not-"g" constraints thence get percolated back down the line of these canonical two worlds relations, by a still little-noticed "back-passing principle.". (shrink)

These dramatized, unabridged versions of Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo present the trial, imprisonment, and execution of Socrates, who Phaedo said was the "wisest, best, and most righteous person I have ever known."In the Euthyphro Socrates approaches the court where he will be tried on charges of atheism and corrupting the young. On the way he meets Euthyphro, an expert in religious matters. Socrates challenges Euthyphro's claim that ethics should be based on religion.In the Apology Socrates (...) presents his own defense. He explains why he has devoted his life to challenging the most powerful and important people, a process that has generated great resentment and has led to his indictment. He insists that instead of being punished he should be rewarded for his services to his fellow citizens. Socrates fails in his attempt to avoid the death sentence, but his friend Crito has bribed the guards offers him a way to escape. In the third dialogue Crito tries to persuade Socrates that it is right to flee from the unjust sentence imposed on him. In the course of their conversations they probe the foundations of civil and moral law, and treat issues that are as relevant to our time as to theirs.The Phaedo presents Socrates' final conversation. What will become of him once he drinks the poison prescribed for his execution? Socrates and his friends examine several arguments to prove that the death of the body does not kill the soul. (shrink)

In my dissertation I examine Plato's ontology. As is well-known, Plato accepts the existence of two different kinds of entities: sensible particulars, such as Socrates, and Forms, such as the Form of Beauty. Moreover, according to the standard understanding of Plato, he thinks that there are entities of no other kind. I argue that this is an incorrect understanding. Specifically, I argue that Plato assumes the existence of entities of a third kind in the Phaedo. ;The dissertation has (...) developed from my attempts to clarify Plato's conception of the human soul. By examining the Phaedo, the dialogue in which Plato gives his most elaborate discussions of the ontological status of the soul while attempting to prove its immortality, I conclude that Plato conceives the soul as an entity whose ontological status is intermediate between those of Forms and sensible particulars: It has some of the features used to characterize forms and some of the contrary features used to characterize sensible particulars. ;In the dissertation, I first examine the features characterizing forms and those characterizing sensible particulars. Second, I discuss the first group of intermediate entities, the opposites in us, and argue that they are intermediate in the sense in question. Third, I discuss the group of entities that I call the occupiers, such as fire or the number three, and show that they are also seen as intermediates. Finally, I discuss the human soul as an intermediate entity belonging to this second group of intermediates, and show that the Final Argument for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo can be best understood with reference to the framework including the intermediates as well as forms and sensible particulars. (shrink)

Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

A distressing number of philosophers and classicists think that the deuteros plous or “second best” mentioned at Phaedo 99c9-dl is the hypothetical method. Many of them will even tell you that Plato says the hypothetical method is the deuteros plous, and that they are not merely interpreting his meaning. They usually back off, however, when challenged on this point, for there jus isn’t any such statement by Plato. Nor, I think, does Plato give us any justification at all for (...) taking the deuteros plous as the hypothetical method. I will argue in this paper that he is referring rather to the explanation of things in terms of their formal causes, and that this sort of explanation is “second best” when compared to a teleological explanation in terms of final causes. The hypothetical method of the dialectician is simply the logical device or apparatus by means of which the theory of ideas and the attendant notion of formal causation are introduced into the discussion; it is not a “second best” method and is not inferior to anything else. (shrink)