how does socrates prove the immortality of the soul in phaedo?

Question

i've been readin phaedo, and i dont understand how socrates actually PROVES the immortality of the soul.

help?

Answer 1

Actually, it was Plato, but he chose to use his mentor Socrates in most of his dialectics, so I understand what you're saying. Its been a while since I've read Phaedo, but from what I remember part of how Plato asserts as proof of the immortality of the human soul (via Socrates) has to do with ethics. He asks if something is good because because the gods like them, or if good is good because of something else. In other words, just because the gods do something doesn't automatically make it good, so goodness must be something beyond the gods. Now, if ethics (or good behavior) is beyond the gods then it must be permanent and immortal, and if ethics is immortal then the human soul can be as well. Plato tacitly infers that since both the human soul and ethics are metaphysical objects they are infinite ... and, therefore, immortal.

There is a lot more to the argument in Phaedo, but I can't remember the specifics ... I hope what little I can remember helps.

Answer 2

Immortality Of The Soul Socrates

Answer 3

Wow. A question about actual philosophy in the philosophy section. Are you sure you don't just want to ask what the meaning of life is? Anyhow, just reading Phaedo now, so I'm hardly an expert. I guess I'm not seeing anything in the argument per se about a longing for spirituality. To me it just looks as though the argument is that our souls must have existed before they inhabited our bodies and must continue to persist after death as well. The others in the dialogue seem to have a longing for the endurance of the spirit because, as Socrates says, that idea is preferable to the fear that the soul dies with the body -- "like children, you are haunted with a fear that when the soul leaves the body, the wind may really blow her away and scatter her." But I don't see any proof or argument regarding this longing. The longing for a more comforting end is taken as a given, and the proofs are offered to demonstrate that the soul must exist before birth and after death. Am I missing something?

Answer 4

Robing the notion of mortal souls suavely, he takes that the cause of life, or the underworld or undercurrents of life, as never being dead, so the soul not ever dead, is immortal.

The soul, climaxing in modern science, would seem meaning genes, or flesh, eaten or rotten. Collectively, the food chain.