Socrates Argument Analysis

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After Socrates states that the soul is immortal, Cebes objects Socrates theory “Men find it very hard to believe what you said about the soul. They think that after it has left the body it no longer exists anywhere, but that it 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, has flown away and gone and is no longer anything anywhere” (70a). Cebes two main questions are, can a man still withheld life after death? and if so, can he still withheld his intelligence?. Believing such a hypothesis that Socrates has implied requires men to have “faith” and a “persuasive argument” (70b). As the Philosopher that Socrates is, he welcomes any objections to…show more content…
This argument consist of Socrates answering back to Cebes statement that there is still no factual proof of Socrates theory of recollection. The argument distinguishes the body and soul as being those things that a are immaterial, visible, and immortal, and those things that are material, visible, and perishable, “the second half of the proof” in Socrates argument of proving the immortality of the soul after the body is dead. The soul belongs to the former category and the body to the latter. The soul then is immortal, although this immortality may take very different forms. A soul that is not properly detached from the body will become a ghost that will long to return to the flesh, while the philosopher’s detached soul will dwell free in the heavens. “ the soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself, whereas the body is most like the which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble, and never consistently the same” (80b). The proof here does not seem to be persuasive. If one is persuaded by Socrates’ conclusion, the argument, of course, will seem plausible. The Argument from Affinity rests in tension, then, between a logically invalid form argument and a question form

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