Below you will find a prompt and an essay written in response to the prompt. The prompt is about a portion of a dialogue by Plato that we have not read; I have posted that portion in the Files tab, under Readings. Please read through that first, then read this sample essay.
After reading through the essay twice, answer the following questions:
(1) What concepts does the author clarify? Does the author effectively use quotations in clarifying these concepts?
(2) Are there concepts the author should have clarified, but did not? Which concepts and why?
(3) What is the author’s explanation of Socrates’s reasoning? Does the author effectively use quotations in reconstructing Socrates’s reasoning?
(4) What grade would you give this essay and why?
Please email me your answers to these question
Prompt: At Phaedo 78b-81a, Socrates argues against Cebes that the soul is indivisible and so cannot be dissolved upon death. Carefully reconstruct his argument for this conclusion. Be sure to clarify all of the important concepts you use in reconstructing the argument. And be sure to quote the text to support your interpretation of the argument. (Finally, make an objection to Socrates’s argument.)
In this section of the Phaedo, Socrates concludes that if a soul is pure at death, it will not be destroyed and will instead join the divine and immortal. In drawing this conclusion, Socrates contradicts the preconception expressed in 70a, that the soul is “destroyed and dissolved on the day the man dies, as soon as it leaves the body; and that, on leaving it, it is dispersed like breath or smoke.” I argue that Socrates’ claim that the soul is indissoluble is valid once one clarifies his argument about the nature of invisible things.
Socrates initiates his argument for the deathlessness of the soul by asking Cebes what kinds of things can be “scattered”, maintaining that once they establish what types of things tend to dissipate, they can determine whether or not the soul is one of these things and, therefore, whether or not the soul will be destroyed upon death (78b). I will first discuss some of the background for Socrates’s argument, and then turn to discuss whether the soul can scatter.
Socrates operates on two important assumptions: first, in order to know whether something has a certain quality (e.g. whether the soul can break apart), one must have knowledge of that quality, and second, that once dissipated, the soul will then be destroyed forever. Although the second of these assumptions is not explicitly stated, the synonymity of dissolution and destruction was established in 70a, and Socrates implies that one should “fear for the soul” (78b) should it be dissolved upon death. Further, by “soul,” Socrates seems to mean a certain kind of consciousness: this is implied by his claim that the soul is what “makes use of the body” (79c) and brings life to the body (105c). When Socrates explains that the soul best grasps what is pure and unchanging in 79d, he implies that the soul is linked to one’s ability to reason, having established that the invisible “can be grasped only with the reasoning power of the mind” (79a). So, the soul is the conscious ability to reason.
With that background clarified, I turn to discuss the reason why Cebes might think the soul dissipates. To Cebes, upon death the soul “is no longer anything anywhere” (70a), as though the soul lacks integrity when it is not anchored to the body. This view seems appealing because on an individual level, death is unidirectional. A dead body does not come back to life, and the death of the soul appears to be a convincing explanation for this. If an individual consists of a soul and a body, and the body continues to exist for some amount of time after death, the disappearance of the soul would seem to be the ultimate cause of death.
In response, Socrates first clarifies what is involved in the dissipation of the soul on Cebes’s view: composite things, he clarifies, can be broken apart into individual parts, while noncomposite things cannot be broken apart because there are no smaller parts of the whole (cf. 78c). To dissipate is to break apart. So, Cebes assumes that the soul is a composite thing. If Socrates can prove that the soul is not a composite thing, then he will have disproven Cebes’s thought that, upon death, the soul is no longer anything anywhere. He tries to show this by showing that the Forms are noncomposite, and then showing that the soul is like the Forms.
Socrates describes the Forms as concepts that “remain the same and never in any way tolerate any change whatever” (78c). Because the Forms do not exist in a physical sense, they cannot be subjected to physical changes the way that composite, visible objects can. The existence of these Forms can be assumed as a result of the argument in 65e, which stipulates that when one assesses whether or not an object possesses a certain characteristic, one must have some concept of the quality that one is assessing, which Socrates labels as a Form. For example, when determining whether two things are equal, one must already know what Equality itself is in order to have a basis for comparison. Socrates then explains that physical “particulars” of the Forms are subject to change and contrasts them with the invisible, which “can be grasped only by the reasoning power of the mind” (79a). To Socrates, the term “invisible” goes beyond whether something can be seen in a literal sense. To Socrates, invisible things can never be perceived because they do not consist of anything to perceive. Truly invisible things lack physical substance; even if one could perceive everything made of matter, including things that would normally be considered too small to be seen, some things would still be invisible. By using the Forms as an example of what types of things are invisible, Socrates demonstrates that invisible things can only be understood through reason, whereas physical objects that possess the characteristics of multiple Forms are understood through the senses. Because Socrates has defined the soul as a conscious ability to reason, which lacks a physical component, the soul is one of these invisible things.
In response to this, one might object that the analogy between the Forms and the soul does not suffice to establish that the soul is noncomposite. When Socrates claims a Form is “uniform by itself” (78d), he essentially describes Forms as noncomposite; however, since the Forms are merely a specific type of invisible thing, which happen to be noncomposite, one cannot claim that all invisible things cannot change based off this singular example. The soul itself is not a Form, so one cannot claim the soul cannot be changed simply because a specific type of invisible thing cannot be changed. Thus, Socrates’s argument is incomplete.
Sample Solution
