Phaedo Reading Response

“Phaedo” Reading Response

From reading “Phaedo” and listening to what was discussed in class, it really got me thinking about Socrates’s opposites arguments and his theory of recollection. I feel that the opposites arguments concept is very relatable to our daily lives. In class, we went through some examples such as Katy Perry “hot and cold” song lyrics, the product Icy-Hot, Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” lyrics etc. and saw that the usage of duality is everywhere around us even after thousands of years after Socrates’s death. Though Socrates and Plato may have inspired many, I do not believe much of their argument to be valid.

An opposite that I could think of that could strengthen the arguments that Socrates made is the state of being hungry and full. Socrates began his argument by saying “And that which becomes less must have been once greater and have become less” and I think it is fair to say that which becomes hungry must have once been full and have become hungry again. This example is identical to Socrates' assessment of opposites. They contain an element of reversibility just like something worse came to be better, and something sleeping awoke and fell back asleep again. But some processes in this life are not reversible.

However, I do not quite see how living and dying are reversible processes. When my pet dies, it ceases to be in this world. Its corpse exists, for a limited time, but soon barely a carcass will remain. Death is a final process of the body. Death cannot simply resurrect a person to reverse the process. Thus, because life and death have not been shown to be reversible, I do not see how a soul can spring back to this life again. What I believe is that our soul lives after we die, in a dimension called heaven or hell but not back into human forms again. For that reason, I have no objections on Socrates’s beliefs in the duality of the complete separation of the mental world and the physical world when we die. That is when our souls...