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DIR Return to: Greek Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics and Plato
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#Post#: 38--------------------------------------------------
Sample Essay: Immortality of the Soul
DIR By: CaseyEnos
Date: May 10, 2012, 8:18 am
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Just trying to get the ball rolling on this topic...
Analyze and Assess JUST ONE of Plato’s proofs of the immortality
of the soul.
The immortality of the soul a constant preoccupation of Plato’s
Socrates, especially, naturally enough, in the dialogues dealing
with the events immediately surrounding his death. The arguments
can be roughly grouped into three major categories based on the
main premise of the argument: that of the various actions of
casual agents on the soul; arguments from recollection; and
technical arguments based on the nature of the Platonic Forms
and their interactions within the body and soul. This paper will
focus on an argument of the first type, the “Argument from
Opposites” which is presented in the middle part of the Phaedo.
Under close examination, the argument holds an apparently valid
form, but is based on premises which are dubious, and in some
cases at odds with other Platonic theories.
The most important premise of the argument focuses on the
generation of what would today be termed relative predicates,
but which in Plato’s era would have been viewed as casual agents
more akin to substances. Socrates, possibly inspired by
Anaximander or Heraclitus, noting that heat takes the place of
cold and the moist of the dry, presents the general formula that
in the case of opposites X and Y, X varies in inverse
correlation with the presence of Y.
Socrates then moves from this formula to the observation that X
and Y will always succeed one another, and indeed one cannot
exist without the other. It makes no sense to speak of heat
without cold, or moist without dry. He then applies his formula
to the case of life and death, noting that they also form a
relationship which can be subsumed under the same formula and
concludes that life must come from death, and vice versa, in a
similar pattern of the alternation of opposites that holds
elsewhere in nature.
The argument thus far consists simply of the premises:
1.
2.
˫ 3. Life is generated from death
Socrates continues his argument by pointing out that if what
died remained dead, then the stock of live things would be
depleted over time and eventually the entire universe would
become lifeless. Since obviously living things exist, death
cannot be a permanent state. Therefore the following premises
are added to the argument:
4. If the dead remained dead, everything would become dead
5. Everything is not dead
˫6. Death is not a permanent state
What has been presented so far could well be an argument for
reincarnation, rather than for the immortality of the soul.
However, another argument in the Phaedo presented at length in
the Meno, provides the necessary additional premise to establish
the survival of the soul between the succession of life and
death.
*7. Learning is really a recollection of knowledge
learned by the disembodied soul prior to birth
Several problems with the premises emerge under examination.
Premise 2, while sound as stated in isolation, is dubious as a
support for the argument from opposites because the nature of
the relationship is dramatically different from the ones which
Socrates uses as examples. The relationship of heat and cold,
and of moist and dry are both matters of degree. It is possible,
for instance, for any object or system, including the universe
as a whole, to vary in temperature by degree as heat and absence
of heat (cold, an agent equivalent to heat in Greek thought
rather than an indicator of absence), alternate by degree. It
makes no sense to speak of an individual human soul-the object
for whom Plato is trying to prove immortality-as being a certain
degree of dead and a certain degree of alive. Clearly what is
being dealt with here is a pair of opposites which are
completely different in nature from the ones admitting of the
formula which Socrates attempts to apply to them.
The mechanisms which generate the alternations of other
opposites can be empirically established. The application of
heat causes heat to replace cold, its dissipation brings the
return of cold; liquid substances and their evaporation cause
the alternation of moist and dry. While the emergence of new
life is apparently a concept the Greeks understood imperfectly,
how it can be said to constitute a replacement of death by life
rather than an emergence of living from non-living, is never
actually explained.
Another problem is contained in Premise 4. Assuming that the
rest of the argument is in fact accurate, it could still be
postulated that the universe contained a stock of life which
simply had not yet run out, in the way that the modern
conception of a universe subject to entropy postulates an
initial stock of heat. In order to counter this possibility, it
must be postulated that the universe is eternal, thus allowing
sufficient time for the life in the universe to be completely
depleted regardless of how extensive it is. However, Plato
several times elsewhere in his work makes a case for a universe
with a finite age, including the creator god in the Timereaus
and the argument for immortality which postulates a living agent
as the initiator of movement in the universe in the Phaedrus.
#Post#: 39--------------------------------------------------
Re: Sample Essay: Immortality of the Soul
DIR By: CaseyEnos
Date: May 11, 2012, 3:08 pm
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Well, I just put this essay down about line for line on the
exam....maybe not a good choice in retrospect, since I couldn't
remember well enough to quote even one line of the original
literature in support. Hopefully my answer on Zeno will balance
it out!
#Post#: 102--------------------------------------------------
Re: Sample Essay: Immortality of the Soul
DIR By: CaseyEnos
Date: August 4, 2012, 2:25 pm
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This isn't a question that I have seen every year on the
reports, but it was asked last year and I reproduced this essay
almost line for line and recieved a 73.
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