- Length
- 128 pagesGrube, Hackett, in Five Dialogues, 2nd ed. 2002
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Phaedo
A man about to be executed spends his last morning arguing that he is not about to be harmed, and invites his friends to take the argument apart. The Phaedo is where the soul becomes a philosophical subject in the West, where the theory of Forms is first laid out at length, and where philosophy acquires its most enduring self-description: preparation for death.
- Date
- c. 360 BC
- Author
- Plato
- Region
- Athens
- Language
- Ancient Greek
- 1675 English, anonymous Earliest English version Consensus
- 1871 English, Benjamin Jowett Public domain Attested
- 1977 English, David Gallop With philosophical commentary; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Dialogue
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
The arguments are no longer defended in the form given; the account of what philosophy is for, and the death scene, are read as widely as ever.
What the book says
The last day of Socrates' life, reported by someone who was in the room. His friends arrive at the prison in the morning and find him cheerful, which they cannot understand, and he spends the day explaining why. A philosopher, he says, has been practising for death all along, because philosophy is the business of separating thinking from the distractions of the body, and death completes the separation. His friends are not convinced, and the dialogue is largely their objections. Four arguments for the soul's survival are offered in turn: that opposites come from opposites, so the living come from the dead; that learning is really recollection of what we knew before birth; that the soul resembles the changeless things it thinks about rather than the body that decays; and finally that the soul brings life with it and so cannot admit its opposite. Two friends push back hard - one suggesting the soul might be a tuning of the body, gone when the instrument breaks, another that it might outlast several bodies and still perish at the end. Socrates takes both seriously. The talk ends, the cup is brought, and he drinks it and dies while his friends fail to keep their composure.
What it argues
That what thinks is not the body and does not share its fate. The arguments run through recollection - that we recognise perfect equality though no two things we see are perfectly equal, so we must have met it before we had eyes - and through affinity, that the soul is like the changeless objects it grasps. The final argument turns on the claim that soul brings life to whatever it occupies and so can no more admit death than fire can admit cold. Underneath all four sits the doctrine the dialogue introduces: that there are perfect, unchanging Forms, and that thinking is the soul's contact with them.
How it argues
As a deathbed conversation, and the setting is not decoration. The objections come from friends who do not want to be rude to a man with hours to live and who make them anyway, and Socrates' reception of the strongest one - a pause, an admission that the argument is in trouble, a warning against becoming a hater of arguments as people become haters of men - is the most human passage in Plato. The philosophical content and the scene cannot be separated: the claim that a philosopher does not fear death is being demonstrated, not asserted.
The moment
Athens, 399 BC, the end of a trial the city held in the ordinary way and the philosophical tradition has never accepted. Plato writes it perhaps forty years later, and states through the narrator that he was not present - one of the very few personal notes in the whole corpus. The dialogue is doing two things at once: arguing a case about the soul, and fixing the memory of a death, and the second is what has kept it read.
How it travelled
With the rest of Plato, unbroken. In late antiquity it was among the dialogues most read in the Neoplatonic schools, and its account of the soul entered Christian thought early and deeply, largely through Augustine, which is why a specifically philosophical argument became for centuries a background assumption about human nature. It reached Latin Europe entire in Ficino's translation, and its death scene became one of the standard subjects of European painting.
The strongest objection
That every argument in it fails, and that the objections raised inside the dialogue are the ones that do the damage. If the soul is a tuning of the body, then everything said about its affinity with the changeless is beside the point, and Socrates' reply to that suggestion is the weakest stretch of the work. The deeper problem is that the arguments prove different things - pre-existence, indestructibility, immortality - and are treated as reinforcing each other when they do not. It is possible to admire the dialogue entirely and think it establishes nothing, and many careful readers do.
Why read it
Because it is the most readable thing Plato wrote and one of the few philosophical works that is also unforgettable as a scene. The arguments are laid out plainly enough for a reader with no training to see where they are weak, which is unusual, and the dialogue positively invites that. And whatever one concludes about the soul, the account of what philosophy is for has never been put better or more briefly.
- First printed
- 1513
- First in English
- 1675
- Digitised
- Yes
Transmitted with the rest of the Platonic corpus; Duke and others' Oxford Classical Text of 1995 is standard.
Jowett is public domain. Grube, Gallop and Sedley-Long are in copyright.
Where it stands
Historical as argument, live as a text. No contemporary philosopher of mind defends the affinity argument, and the recollection argument survives only as a distant ancestor of nativism. What continues is the description of philosophy as a discipline practised against the pull of the body, and the scene itself.
On quoting this book
Greek public domain; the English versions that render the closing pages well are in copyright. No passage is quoted.
Contested
How far the Socrates of the Phaedo is the historical man is the central question, and the usual answer is: not far. The theory of Forms presented here is Plato's, and the historical Socrates is not thought to have held it. The dying words about a debt owed to Asclepius have been read as gratitude for a recovery, as a comment on life as an illness, and as a simple instruction; there is no agreement. Whether Plato himself was convinced by the arguments, or whether the dialogue is testing them, is also disputed - he takes care to note that he was not present.