Plato’s Phaedo Final Argument
Shelia Reynolds
PHI103: Informal Logic
Week 5: Final Project
Steven Mathews
December 8, 2014
Plato’s Phaedo Final Argument In the final argument of Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates concludes with “Then, Cebes, beyond question, the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will truly exist in another world” (Plato, 1689). I believe this argument is the most convincing of his arguments regarding the afterlife, however, the way in which he concludes that the soul is indestructible and immortal is flawed. With this regard, I find Plato’s final argument to be unsound and lacking in validity. I believe this argument to be considered an unsound deductive argument. In this paper, I will show evidence of this by evaluating…show more content… To further validate premise one, he relates the soul to other opposite examples. One opposite example he uses is fire and ice. Snow is always cold and it can’t admit to heat, the opposite of cold, without disappearing or perishing. As true with cold, fire is always hot and can’t admit to cold, the opposite of heat, without also disappearing or perishing completely. Referencing the above examples, Plato makes the argument that a burning log becomes hot when it possesses the form heat. The log can’t become hot from something that admits that opposite of heat, such as snow, because it became hot because of fire which admits the form of heat. This particular argument supports premise two as true. Plato makes the idea of the burning log possessing the form of heat parallel, because the log brought upon by the admitting of the form of heat, to the idea that the living body possesses the form of life, because it’s brought upon by the soul, which only admits the form of life and never the opposite of the form of death. Up to this point, premises one through five all seem to make