Three Arguments For Life After Death In Plato's Phadeo

In this essay I will consider the three arguments for life after death that are raised in Plato’s Phadeo. All three arguments that Plato presents aim to verify the existence for the immortality of the soul. Such arguments include: The Argument from Opposites, The Argument from Recollection and The Affinity Argument. In Phaedo, Plato portrays the persona of Socrates, whilst depicting the philosopher’s final moments before death. Due to Phaedo arguably being Plato’s most famous dialogue (Dorter, 1920: 3) there is much discussion to whether or not his arguments for life after death are at all convincing. Consequently, I will analyse each argument individually by discussing different scholarly critiques and views on Plato’s work, however I will

Here, Socrates suggest that every entity must come from its opposite. He uses the example of large and small by illustrating that when something grows larger, it must have previously been small, for otherwise it would not be large, stating “when a thing becomes bigger, it must, I suppose, have been smaller before it became bigger?”(69E – 71A) (Tredennick, 1959: 117). Phaedo describes being alive and being dead as opposites and that the process of life and death must work in a circular movement, thus we can only be alive if we have already been dead. For Socrates, each pair of opposites must have processes between them, for instance the processes of increase and decrease come between the pair smaller and larger, and therefore as being alive and being dead are opposites, coming-to-life and dying must be the their two processes. (http://www.iep.utm.edu/phaedo/#SH3c). The choice to compare the opposites of dying and being alive to opposites that we are exposed to everyday, such as large and small and sleeping and being awake (Trednnick, 1959: 177-118) essentially helps us to understand what Plato is trying to prove, nevertheless, as there no empirical evidence to suggest that human beings actually change between states of life and death, like there is for someone waking up and going back to sleep we cannot truly make a link between the two pairs of opposites and thus we may doubt this first