In the Republic, Plato gives an argument saying the soul is immortal. In this paper I will present his argument and show that his argument is invalid. I will show why the conclusion is not true and restate the argument to make it valid to help with Socrates’ claim. Plato’s argument on why the soul is immortal:
1. Something can only be destroyed by the thing that is bad for it.
2. Injustice, licentiousness, cowardice, and lack of learning are bad for the soul.
3. Injustice or other vices do not destroy the soul.
4. Therefore, the soul is immortal. This argument is invalid because the conclusion does not agree with the premises. The premises all follow one another and make sense. The conclusion does not agree with the
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By including what immortality covers the argument makes sense talking about nonliving things and living things. As stated before, for nonliving things the argument would not would very well. I think just by including premise number two the argument became stronger and is now valid. In the Republic Socrates’ explained how injustice and other vices are bad for a soul, so I do not believe an argument could be made against how they could not destroy the soul. I think adding this premise makes the argument valid and sound. Socrates’ original argument was not valid or sound. The premises were corrected but the argument needed another premise to make the conclusion true. Adding premise two takes away any confusion there was to what immortality meant. Since Socrates’ spent almost the entire book creating a just person and a just city the information about what is good and bad for a soul makes sense. It also makes sense that those things cannot destroy the soul because injustice and other vices could only lead the body to make poor choices and possibly get sick or die from those poor choices. The soul would not get affected by those choices or by the death of the
Death taking a being's life is no different than breathing is for a
Socrates in the dialogue Alcibiades written by Plato provides an argument as to why the self is the soul rather than the body. In this dialogue Alcibiades and Socrates get into a discussion on how to cultivate the self which they both mutually agree is the soul, and how to make the soul better by properly taking care of it. One way Socrates describes the relationship between the soul and the body is by analogy of user and instrument, the former being the entity which has the power to affect the latter. In this paper I will explain Socrates’ arguments on why the self is the soul and I will comment on what it means to cultivate it.
I do believe that the soul is immortal, in the sense that it can live on within the universe but the soul can not truly live on without a body to possess. The only argument of Socrates’ that I do believe to be true is the Argument of Opposites. Socrates’ implied that once we die, we don’t often stay dead infant we come back to life after a period of time. Which this goes hand and hand with the theory of reincarnation. Reincarnation comes from the religion of Buddhism and its the belief that the soul, when the body once dies comes back to earth as another body or form.
The just person’s soul entails motive for certain kinds of objects the most important of which is knowledge. Socrates describes the hardship and extreme effort required to gain knowledge of the forms and the form of the good, thus the just person will seek learning and not spend time to take care of the satisfaction of desires that typically lead to unjust actions. This approach to unite the gap between a just soul and just actions may have some drawbacks. One negative aspect may be that several unjust actions may be motivated by desires that are compatible with the desire for knowledge. For example, why wouldn’t a person with a great fascination for knowledge steal a book if it would contribute to their
Plato’s view on death According to Plato, Socrates didn’t fear death. He stopped fearing death when God ordered him to live the life of a philosopher. “No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils.” He says that this is just as bad as thinking that you’re wise, when you’re actually not.
I would also says that since the friends are on that level of uncertainty as to what exactly will happen to a human's soul after death, I don't think they feel
In response to the long-standing philosophical question of immorality, many philosophers have posited the soul criterion, which asserts the soul constitutes personal identity and survives physical death. In The Myth of the Soul, Clarence Darrow rejects the existence of the soul in his case against the notion of immortality and an afterlife. His primary argument against the soul criterion is that no good explanation exists for how a soul enters a body, or when its beginning might occur. (Darrow 43) After first explicating Darrow 's view, I will present what I believe is its greatest shortcoming, an inconsistent use of the term soul, and argue that this weakness impacts the overall strength of his argument.
Discussing the existence of a soul and an afterlife can be a controversial subject, because frankly, as humans we do not know what lies beyond the body’s material form. Materialists argue that once the body is dead, it is the end. Everything we know is material and we are material beings, therefore there is nothing to move on to an afterlife. Dualists, however, take on a different perspective. Although our bodies are material, there is something else that lies within us.
Then, it follows that a just soul and a just man will live well, and an unjust one badly. The argument at first glance seems to be valid and sound. But not all of the premises appear to be true, and given that all the
If the body is the one that dies then his argument becomes logically invalid and it would ultimately fail because that would mean that living bodies come from dead
This is an example of false dilemma because he only stated there were only two options when one will die. Although this may not be true, explains about going to another world to live the life he never had. The other part of the theory justifies if one dies and is in a state of unconsciousness
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates is put into trial because he is accused of corrupting the youth with his teachings that deviate from the established beliefs of the Greek society. Although he justifies that he is only doing what he believes is his duty, he reasons that even if he is given a death penalty, death is nothing to be feared. He raises multiple strong and effective arguments that explain to his audience that it is illogical to fear death. All of these arguments revolves around the central idea that death is not evil and that “no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death” (Apology, 41c). The first argument that Socrates presents during his trial is the idea that death is not the most important thing to worry about in
The final argument of Plato’s Phaedo was created to prove souls cannot perish. Plato does so by arguing how a soul cannot die nor cease to exist on the same fundamental grounds of how the number three can never be even. For the number three holds the essence of being odd, without being odd entirely. Similarly, a soul holds the essence of life through immortality, however the soul is not immortal itself and only participates in immortality, just as the number three participates in being odd. Additionally, an essence or form cannot admit to the opposite of itself just as small cannot be large simultaneously, and hot cannot be cold.
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, he explains the soul and comes to the conclusion that the soul is immortal. Through describing the last hours of Socrates life before his execution, he lays out three arguments in support of the idea that while the body may cease to exist the soul cannot perish. In this paper, I will explicate Socrates three arguments for the immortality of the soul and their objections. Then I will argue on the presupposition of the Law of Conservation of Mass, that the universe, entailing the soul, must be cyclical. The Law of Conservation of Mass
From Hinduism point of view, the soul is a part of jiva. The limited being, who is subject to the impurities of attachment, delusion, and laws of karma. Therefore, death for them is not a calamity but a natural process in the existence of a jiva or a being as a separate entity, a resting period for it to recuperates, reassembles its resources, adjust its course and returns to the earth to continue its