Phaedo

Summary: Unlike in other dialogues the interlocutor in this one is Phaedo who recaps his witness of Socrates death. This is the final dialogue in the (unofficial) collection describing the death of Socrates. Phaedo tells his audience how in his final moments Socrates discussed the immortality and existence of the soul. Discussion also goes into the body and its material desires and how philosophers relate to desire and death with their quest for truth. We learn more of Plato's conception of the realm where ideas reside, timeless and unchanging, separate from the material. At the end Socrates drinks the cup of poison and passses away.

Observations:

Phaedo and his audience are pythagoreans, a philosophy that influenced Plato.

Plato/Socrates distinction problem: It is hinted that this dialogue does not reflect the real Socrates. Plato is stated to not have been present for Socrates death and the story is told from a witness and not Socrates himself.

The body and betrayal of the senses / pain and pleasure connection: The dialogue makes an opposition between the soul and the body as respectively belonging to the ideal and material worlds. The body deceives the soul from perceiving the truth and instead misleads it with desires. Since philosophers are in search of truth they want to distance their soul from the body, free it from the passions and deceptions. Therefore death, with the emancipation from the body, is to be welcomed, but not hastened. The first thing Socrates remarks is that pain and pleasure are connected through his chained leg, the pain from restriction has now given to pleasure as he is free to walk.

One interesting idea is that the body can pollute the soul when after death it will trap/impede the soul from moving to higher planes or reincarnating.

You can master some pleasure because of another pleasure, but only wisdom should be gained at the expense of the other pleasures.

The theory of recollection proves that the soul lasts beyond the body.

Theory of recollection: Knowledge comes from recollection, all knowledge in the soul is gathered before birth. We then spend our lives recollecting this knowledge we forgot at birth. You can learn that X is smaller than Y, but you cannot learn the concept of magnitude, it was within you from the start.

This is probably one idea that has not aged as well. With modern neuroscience and pedagogy studies I assume we have a much stronger idea on how humans gain knowledge and apply them. Its probably a very muddy process of learning, applying and fine-tuning ones internal model until it more or less stays consistent with the external world.

Materialism/Idealism: Ideas are immutable, material things are mutable and ever changing.

The invisible (such as ideas) remains the same, are all invisible things ideas? Or is it a category with other overlaps? The soul should be immortal and immutable since it is invisible.

Divine: Socrates received a dream to cultivate the arts and started making poetry. Socrates servant of Apollo, alongside swans. Suicide is immoral as it goes against the wishes of the gods, unless they would command it?

Dualism: Pain comes from pleasure and vice versa. The dead come from the living, and thus the living must come from the dead. Forms, opposites never approach each other, but can come from each other. The small comes from the large, but the large and small cannot coexist in the same space. Opposites and processes go in both directions, the small come from the big. Therefore the soul should come from death? If the processes were not circular and symmetric, then everything with time would eventually end up the same. Heat death of the universe, entrophy. Anaxagoras nous connection.

Successor of Socrates: Just like in Apology, the idea of a successor to Socrates is mentioned. Remarkably Socrates says that his followers would have to look all over Greece and even in the foreign countries for a successor. What kind of successor is envisioned? How did the resulting philosophical schools take this idea? Or was it just resolved as Plato being the sucessor, then Aristotle?