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The Phaedo is one of the most widely read dialogues written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. It claims to recount the events and conversations that occurred on the day that Platos teacher, Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.), was put to death by the state of Athens. It is the final episode in the series of dialogues recounting Socrates trial and death. The earlier Euthyphro dialogue portrayed Socrates in discussion outside the court where he was to be prosecuted on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth; the Apology described his defense before the Athenian jury; and the Crito described a conversation during his subsequent imprisonment. The Phaedo now brings things to a close by describing the moments in the prison cell leading up to Socrates death from poisoning by use of hemlock.

Among these trial and death dialogues, the Phaedo is unique in that it presents Platos own metaphysical, psychological, and epistemological views; thus it belongs to Platos middle period rather than with his earlier works detailing Socrates conversations regarding ethics. Known to ancient commentators by the title On the Soul, the dialogue presents no less than four arguments for the souls immortality. It also contains discussions of Platos doctrine of knowledge as recollection, his account of the souls relationship to the body, and his views about causality and scientific explanation. Most importantly of all, Plato sets forth his most distinctive philosophical theorythe theory of Formsfor what is arguably the first time. So, the Phaedo merges Platos own philosophical worldview with an enduring portrait of Socrates in the hours leading up to his death.

Plato wrote approximately thirty dialogues. The Phaedo is usually placed at the beginning of his middle period, which contains his own distinctive views about the nature of knowledge, reality, and the soul, as well as the implications of these views for human ethical and political life. Its middle-period classification puts it after early dialogues such as the Apology, Euthyphro, Crito, Protagoras, and others which present Socrates searchusually inconclusivefor ethical definitions, and before late dialogues like the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman. Within the middle dialogues, it is uncontroversial that the Phaedo was written before the Republic, and most scholars think it belongs before the Symposium as well. Thus, in addition to being an account of what Socrates said and did on the day he died, the Phaedo contains what is probably Platos first overall statement of his own philosophy. His most famous theory, the theory of Forms, is presented in four different places in the dialogue.

In addition to its central role in conveying Platos philosophy, the Phaedo is widely agreed to be a masterpiece of ancient Greek literature. Besides philosophical argumentation, it contains a narrative framing device that resembles the chorus in Greek tragedy, references to the Greek myth of Theseus and the fables of Aesop, Platos own original myth about the afterlife, and in its opening and closing pages, a moving portrait of Socrates in the hours leading up to his death. Plato draws attention (at 59b) to the fact that he himself was not present during the events retold, suggesting that he wants the dialogue to be seen as work of fiction.

Contemporary commentators have struggled to put together the dialogues dramatic components with its lengthy sections of philosophical argumentationmost importantly, with the four arguments for the souls immortality, which tend to strike even Platos charitable interpreters as being in need of further defense. (Socrates himself challenges his listeners to provide such defense at 84c-d.) How seriously does Plato take these arguments, and what does the surrounding context contribute to our understanding of them? While this article will concentrate on the philosophical aspects of the Phaedo, readers are advised to pay close attention to the interwoven dramatic features as well.

The dialogue revolves around the topic of death and immortality: how the philosopher is supposed to relate to death, and what we can expect to happen to our souls after we die. The text can be divided, rather unevenly, into five sections:

(1) an initial discussion of the philosopher and death (59c-69e)

(2) three arguments for the souls immortality (69e-84b)

(3) some objections to these arguments from Socrates interlocutors and his response, which includes a fourth argument (84c-107b)

(4) a myth about the afterlife (107c-115a)

(5) a description of the final moments of Socrates life (115a-118a)

The dialogue commences with a conversation (57a-59c) between two characters, Echecrates and Phaedo, occurring sometime after Socrates death in the Greek city of Phlius. The former asks the latter, who was present on that day, to recount what took place. Phaedo begins by explaining why some time had elapsed between Socrates trial and his execution: the Athenians had sent their annual religious mission to Delos the day before the trial, and executions are forbidden until the mission returns. He also lists the friends who were present and describes their mood as an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and pain, since Socrates appeared happy and without fear but his friends knew that he was going to die. He agrees to tell the whole story from the beginning; within this story the main interlocutors are Socrates, Simmias, and Cebes. Some commentators on the dialogue have taken the latter two characters to be followers of the philosopher Pythagoras (570-490 B.C).

Socrates friends learn that he will die on the present day, since the mission from Delos has returned. They go in to the prison to find Socrates with his wife Xanthippe and their baby, who are then sent away. Socrates, rubbing the place on his leg where his just removed bonds had been, remarks on how strange it is that a man cannot have both pleasure and pain at the same time, yet when he pursues and catches one, he is sure to meet with the other as well. Cebes asks Socrates about the poetry he is said to have begun writing, since Evenus (a Sophist teacher, not present) was wondering about this. Socrates relates how certain dreams have caused him to do so, and says that he is presently putting Aesops fables into verse. He then asks Cebes to convey to Evenus his farewell, and to tell him thateven though it would be wrong to take his own lifehe, like any philosopher, should be prepared to follow Socrates to his death.

Here the conversation turns toward an examination of the philosophers attitude toward death. The discussion starts with the question of suicide. If philosophers are so willing to die, asks Cebes, why is it wrong for them to kill themselves? Socrates initial answer is that the gods are our guardians, and that they will be angry if one of their possessions kills itself without permission. As Cebes and Simmias immediately point out, however, this appears to contradict his earlier claim that the philosopher should be willing to die: for what truly wise man would want to leave the service of the best of all masters, the gods?

In reply to their objection, Socrates offers to make a defense of his view, as if he were in court, and submits that he hopes this defense will be more convincing to them than it was to the jury. (He is referring here, of course, to his defense at his trial, which is recounted in Platos Apology.) The thesis to be supported is a generalized version of his earlier advice to Evenus: that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death (64a3-4).

Socrates begins his defense of this thesis, which takes up the remainder of the present section, by defining death as the separation of body and soul. This definition goes unchallenged by his interlocutors, as does its dualistic assumption that body and soul are two distinct entities. (The Greek word psuch is only roughly approximate to our word soul; the Greeks thought of psuch as what makes something alive, and Aristotle talks about non-human animals and even plants as having souls in this sense.) Granted that death is a soul/body separation, Socrates sets forth a number of reasons why philosophers are prepared for such an event. First, the true philosopher despises bodily pleasures such as food, drink, and sex, so he more than anyone else wants to free himself from his body (64d-65a). Additionally, since the bodily senses are inaccurate and deceptive, the philosophers search for knowledge is most successful when the soul is most by itself.

The latter point holds especially for the objects of philosophical knowledge that Plato later on in the dialogue (103e) refers to as Forms. Here Forms are mentioned for what is perhaps the first time in Platos dialogues: the Just itself, the Beautiful, and the Good; Bigness, Health, and Strength; and in a word, the reality of all other things, that which each of them essentially is (65d). They are best approached not by sense perception but by pure thought alone. These entities are granted again without argument by Simmias and Cebes, and are discussed in more detail later. .

All told, then, the body is a constant impediment to philosophers in their search for truth: It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body (66c). To have pure knowledge, therefore, philosophers must escape from the influence of the body as much as is possible in this life. Philosophy itself is, in fact, a kind of training for dying (67e), a purification of the philosophers soul from its bodily attachment.

Thus, Socrates concludes, it would be unreasonable for a philosopher to fear death, since upon dying he is most likely to obtain the wisdom which he has been seeking his whole life. Both the philosophers courage in the face of death and his moderation with respect to bodily pleasures which result from the pursuit of wisdom stand in stark contrast to the courage and moderation practiced by ordinary people. (Wisdom, courage, and moderation are key virtues in Platos writings, and are included in his definition of justice in the Republic.) Ordinary people are only brave in regard to some things because they fear even worse things happening, and only moderate in relation to some pleasures because they want to be immoderate with respect to others. But this is only an illusory appearance of virtuefor as it happens, moderation and courage and justice are a purging away of all such things, and wisdom itself is a kind of cleansing or purification (69b-c). Since Socrates counts himself among these philosophers, why wouldnt he be prepared to meet death? Thus ends his defense.

But what about those, says Cebes, who believe that the soul is destroyed when a person dies? To persuade them that it continues to exist on its own will require some compelling argument. Readers should note several important features of Cebes brief objection (70a-b). First, he presents the belief in the immortality of the soul as an uncommon belief (men find it hard to believe . . .). Secondly, he identifies two things which need to be demonstrated in order to convince those who are skeptical: (a) that the soul continues to exist after a persons death, and (b) that it still possesses intelligence. The first argument that Socrates deploys appears to be intended to respond to (a), and the second to (b).

Socrates mentions an ancient theory holding that just as the souls of the dead in the underworld come from those living in this world, the living souls come back from those of the dead (70c-d). He uses this theory as the inspiration for his first argument, which may be reconstructed as follows:

1. All things come to be from their opposite states: for example, something that comes to be larger must necessarily have been smaller before (70e-71a).

2. Between every pair of opposite states there are two opposite processes: for example, between the pair smaller and larger there are the processes increase and decrease (71b).

3. If the two opposite processes did not balance each other out, everything would eventually be in the same state: for example, if increase did not balance out decrease, everything would keep becoming smaller and smaller (72b).

4. Since being alive and being dead are opposite states, and dying and coming-to-life are the two opposite processes between these states, coming-to-life must balance out dying (71c-e).

5. Therefore, everything that dies must come back to life again (72a).

A main question that arises in regard to this argument is what Socrates means by opposites. We can see at least two different ways in which this term is used in reference to the opposed states he mentions. In a first sense, it is used for comparatives such as larger and smaller (and also the pairs weaker/stronger and swifter/slower at 71a), opposites which admit of various degrees and which even may be present in the same object at once (on this latter point, see 102b-c). However, Socrates also refers to being alive and being dead as oppositesbut this pair is rather different from comparative states such as larger and smaller, since something cant be deader, but only dead. Being alive and being dead are what logicians call contraries (as opposed to contradictories, such as alive and not-alive, which exclude any third possibility). With this terminology in mind, some contemporary commentators have maintained that the argument relies on covertly shifting between these different kinds of opposites.

Clever readers may notice other apparent difficulties as well. Does the principle about balance in (3), for instance, necessarily apply to living things? Couldnt all life simply cease to exist at some point, without returning? Moreover, how does Plato account for adding new living souls to the human population? While these questions are perhaps not unanswerable from the point of view of the present argument, we should keep in mind that Socrates has several arguments remaining, and he later suggests that this first one should be seen as complementing the second (77c-d).

Cebes mentions that the souls immortality also is supported by Socrates theory that learning is recollection (a theory which is, by most accounts, distinctively Platonic, and one that plays a role in his dialogues Meno and Phaedrus as well). As evidence of this theory he mentions instances in which people can recollect answers to questions they did not previously appear to possess when this knowledge is elicited from them using the proper methods. This is likely a reference to the Meno (82b ff.), where Socrates elicits knowledge about basic geometry from a slave-boy by asking the latter a series of questions to guide him in the right direction. Asked by Simmias to elaborate further upon this doctrine, Socrates explains that recollection occurs when a man sees or hears or in some other way perceives one thing and not only knows that thing but also thinks of another thing of which the knowledge is not the same but different . . . (73c). For example, when a lover sees his beloveds lyre, the image of his beloved comes into his mind as well, even though the lyre and the beloved are two distinct things.

Based on this theory, Socrates now commences a second proof for the souls immortalityone which is referred to with approval in later passages in the dialogue (77a-b, 87a, 91e-92a, and 92d-e). The argument may be reconstructed as follows:

1. Things in the world which appear to be equal in measurement are in fact deficient in the equality they possess (74b, d-e).

2. Therefore, they are not the same as true equality, that is, the Equal itself (74c).

3. When we see the deficiency of the examples of equality, it helps us to think of, or recollect, the Equal itself (74c-d).

4. In order to do this, we must have had some prior knowledge of the Equal itself (74d-e).

5. Since this knowledge does not come from sense-perception, we must have acquired it before we acquired sense-perception, that is, before we were born (75b ff.).

6. Therefore, our souls must have existed before we were born. (76d-e)

With regard to premise (1), in what respect are this-worldly instances of equality deficient? Socrates mentions that two apparently equal sticks, for example, fall short of true equality and are thus inferior to it (74e). Why? His reasoning at 74b8-9that the sticks sometimes, while remaining the same, appear to one to be equal and another to be unequalis notoriously ambiguous, and has been the subject of much scrutiny. He could mean that the sticks may appear as equal or unequal to different observers, or perhaps they appear as equal when measured against one thing but not another. In any case, the notion that the sensible world is imperfect is a standard view of the middle dialogues (see Republic 479b-c for a similar example), and is emphasized further in his next argument.

By true equality and the Equal itself in premises (2)-(4), Socrates is referring to the Form of Equality. It is this entity with respect to which the sensible instances of equality fall shortand indeed, Socrates says that the Form is something else beyond all these. His brief argument at 74a-c that true equality is something altogether distinct from any visible instances of equality is of considerable interest, since it is one of few places in the middle dialogues where he makes an explicit argument for why there must be Forms. The conclusion of the second argument for the souls immortality extends what has been said about equality to other Forms as well: If those realities we are always talking about exist, the Beautiful and the Good and all that kind of reality, and we refer all the things we perceive to that reality, discovering that it existed before and is ours, and we compare these things with it, then, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born (76d-e). The process of recollection is initiated not just when we see imperfectly equal things, then, but when we see things that appear to be beautiful or good as well; experience of all such things inspires us to recollect the relevant Forms. Moreover, if these Forms are never available to us in our sensory experience, we must have learned them even before we were capable of having such experience.

Simmias agrees with the argument so far, but says that this still does not prove that our souls exist after death, but only before birth. This difficulty, Socrates suggests, can be resolved by combining the present argument with the one from opposites: the soul comes to life from out of death, so it cannot avoid existing after death as well. He does not elaborate on this suggestion, however, and instead proceeds to offer a third argument.

The third argument for the souls immortality is referred to by commentators as the affinity argument, since it turns on the idea that the soul has a likeness to a higher level of reality:

1. There are two kinds of existences: (a) the visible world that we perceive with our senses, which is human, mortal, composite, unintelligible, and always changing, and (b) the invisible world of Forms that we can access solely with our minds, which is divine, deathless, intelligible, non-composite, and always the same (78c-79a, 80b).

2. The soul is more like world (b), whereas the body is more like world (a) (79b-e).

3. Therefore, supposing it has been freed of bodily influence through philosophical training, the soul is most likely to make its way to world (b) when the body dies (80d-81a). (If, however, the soul is polluted by bodily influence, it likely will stay bound to world (a) upon death (81b-82b).)

Note that this argument is intended to establish only the probability of the souls continued existence after the death of the bodywhat kind of thing, Socrates asks at the outset, is likely to be scattered [after the death of the body]? (78b; my italics) Further, premise (2) appears to rest on an analogy between the soul and body and the two kinds of realities mentioned in (1), a style of argument that Simmias will criticize later (85e ff.). Indeed, since Plato himself appends several pages of objections by Socrates interlocutors to this argument, one might wonder how authoritative he takes it to be.

Yet Socrates reasoning about the soul at 78c-79a states an important feature of Platos middle period metaphysics, sometimes referred to as his two-world theory. In this picture of reality, the world perceived by the senses is set against the world of Forms, with each world being populated by fundamentally different kinds of entities:

Since the body is like one world and the soul like the other, it would be strange to think that even though the body lasts for some time after a persons death, the soul immediately dissolves and exists no further. Given the respective affinities of the body and soul, Socrates spends the rest of the argument (roughly 80d-84b) expanding on the earlier point (from his defense) that philosophers should focus on the latter. This section has some similarities to the myth about the afterlife, which he narrates near the dialogues end; note that some of the details of the account here of what happens after death are characterized as merely likely. A soul which is purified of bodily things, Socrates says, will make its way to the divine when the body dies, whereas an impure soul retains its share in the visible after death, becoming a wandering phantom. Of the impure souls, those who have been immoderate will later become donkeys or similar animals, the unjust will become wolves or hawks, those with only ordinary non-philosophical virtue will become social creatures such as bees or ants.

The philosopher, on the other hand, will join the company of the gods. For philosophy brings deliverance from bodily imprisonment, persuading the soul to trust only itself and whatever reality, existing by itself, the soul by itself understands, and not to consider as true whatever it examines by other means, for this is different in different circumstances and is sensible and visible, whereas what the soul itself sees is intelligible and indivisible (83a6-b4). The philosopher thus avoids the greatest and most extreme evil that comes from the senses: that of violent pleasures and pains which deceive one into thinking that what causes them is genuine. Hence, after death, his soul will join with that to which it is akin, namely, the divine.

After a long silence, Socrates tells Simmias and Cebes not to worry about objecting to any of what he has just said. For he, like the swan that sings beautifully before it dies, is dedicated to the service of Apollo, and thus filled with a gift of prophecy that makes him hopeful for what death will bring.

Simmias prefaces his objection by making a remark about methodology. While certainty, he says, is either impossible or difficult, it would show a weak spirit not to make a complete investigation. If at the end of this investigation one fails to find the truth, one should adopt the best theory and cling to it like a raft, either until one dies or comes upon something sturdier.

This being said, he proceeds to challenge Socrates third argument. For one might put forth a similar argument which claims that the soul is like a harmony and the body is like a lyre and its strings. In fact, Simmias claims that we really do suppose the soul to be something of this kind, that is, a harmony or proper mixture of bodily elements like the hot and cold or dry and moist (86b-c). (Some commentators think the we here refers to followers of Pythagoras.) But even though a musical harmony is invisible and akin to the divine, it will cease to exist when the lyre is destroyed. Following the soul-as-harmony thesis, the same would be true of the soul when the body dies.

Next Socrates asks if Cebes has any objections. The latter says that he is convinced by Socrates argument that the soul exists before birth, but still doubts whether it continues to exist after death. In support of his doubt, he invokes a metaphor of his own. Suppose someone were to say that since a man lasts longer than his cloak, it follows that if the cloak is still there the man must be there too. We would certainly think this statement was nonsense. (He appears to be refering to Socrates argument at 80c-e here.) Just as a man might wear out many cloaks before he dies, the soul might use up many bodies before it dies. So even supposing everything else is granted, if one does not further agree that the soul is not damaged by its many births and is not, in the end, altogether destroyed in one of those deaths, he might say that no one knows which death and dissolution of the body brings about the destruction of the soul, since not one of us can be aware of this (88a-b). In light of this uncertainty, one should always face death with fear.

After a short exchange in the meta-dialogue in which Phaedo and Echecrates praise Socrates pleasant attitude throughout this discussion, Socrates begins his response with a warning that they not become misologues. Misology, he says, arises in much the same way that misanthropy does: when someone with little experience puts his trust in another person, but later finds him to be unreliable, his first reaction is to blame this on the depraved nature of people in general. If he had more knowledge and experience, however, he would not be so quick to make this leap, for he would realize that most people fall somewhere in between the extremes of good and bad, and he merely happened to encounter someone at one end of the spectrum. A similar caution applies to arguments. If someone thinks a particular argument is sound, but later finds out that it is not, his first inclination will be to think that all arguments are unsound; yet instead of blaming arguments in general and coming to hate reasonable discussion, we should blame our own lack of skill and experience.

Socrates then puts forth three counter-arguments to Simmias objection. To begin, he gets both Simmias and Cebes to agree that the theory of recollection is true. But if this is so, then Simmias is not able to harmonize his view that the soul is a harmony dependent on the body with the recollection view that the soul exists before birth. Simmias admits this inconsistency, and says that he in fact prefers the theory of recollection to the other view. Nonetheless, Socrates proceeds to make two additional points. First, if the soul is a harmony, he contends, it can have no share in the disharmony of wickedness. But this implies that all souls are equally good. Second, if the soul is never out of tune with its component parts (as shown at 93a), then it seems like it could never oppose these parts. But in fact it does the opposite, ruling over all the elements of which one says it is composed, opposing nearly all of them throughout life, directing all their ways, inflicting harsh and painful punishment on them, . . . holding converse with desires and passions and fears, as if it were one thing talking to a different one . . . (94c9-d5). A passage in Homer, wherein Odysseus beats his breast and orders his heart to endure, strengthens this picture of the opposition between soul and bodily emotions. Given these counter-arguments, Simmias agrees that the soul-as-harmony thesis cannot be correct.

After summarizing Cebes objection that the soul may outlast the body yet not be immortal, Socrates says that this problem requires a thorough investigation of the cause of generation and destruction (96a; the Greek word aitia, translated as cause, has the more general meaning of explanation). He now proceeds to relate his own examinations into this subject, recalling in turn his youthful puzzlement about the topic, his initial attraction to a solution given by the philosopher Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.), and finally his development of his own method of explanation involving Forms. It is debated whether this account is meant to describe Socrates intellectual autobiography or Platos own, since the theory of Forms generally is described as the latters distinctive contribution. (Some commentators have suggested that it may be neither, but instead just good storytelling on Platos part.)

When Socrates was young, he says, he was excited by natural science, and wanted to know the explanation of everything from how living things are nourished to how things occur in the heavens and on earth. But then he realized that he had no ability for such investigations, since they caused him to unlearn many of the things he thought he had previously known. He used to think, for instance, that people grew larger by various kinds of external nourishment combining with the appropriate parts of our bodies, for example, by food adding flesh to flesh. But what is it which makes one person larger than another? Or for that matter, which makes one and one add up to two? It seems like it cant be simply the two things coming near one another. Because of puzzles like these, Socrates is now forced to admit his ignorance: I do not any longer persuade myself that I know why a unit or anything else comes to be, or perishes or exists by the old method of investigation, and I do not accept it, but I have a confused method of my own (97b).

This method came about as follows. One day after his initial setbacks Socrates happened to hear of Anaxagoras view that Mind directs and causes all things. He took this to mean that everything was arranged for the best. Therefore, if one wanted to know the explanation of something, one only had to know what was best for that thing. Suppose, for instance, that Socrates wanted to know why the heavenly bodies move the way they do. Anaxagoras would show him how this was the best possible way for each of them to be. And once he had taught Socrates what the best was for each thing individually, he then would explain the overall good that they all share in common. Yet upon studying Anaxagoras further, Socrates found these expectations disappointed. It turned out that Anaxagoras did not talk about Mind as cause at all, but rather about air and ether and other mechanistic explanations. For Socrates, however, this sort of explanation was simply unacceptable:

To call those things causes is too absurd. If someone said that without bones and sinews and all such things, I should not be able to do what I decided, he would be right, but surely to say that they are the cause of what I do, and not that I have chosen the best course, even though I act with my mind, is to speak very lazily and carelessly. Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause. (99a-b)

Frustrated at finding a teacher who would provide a teleological explanation of these phenomena, Socrates settled for what he refers to as his second voyage (99d). This new method consists in taking what seems to him to be the most convincing theorythe theory of Formsas his basic hypothesis, and judging everything else in accordance with it. In other words, he assumes the existence of the Beautiful, the Good, and so on, and employs them as explanations for all the other things. If something is beautiful, for instance, the safe answer he now offers for what makes it such is the presence of, or sharing in, the Beautiful (100d). Socrates does not go into any detail here about the relationship between the Form and object that shares in it, but only claims that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful (100d). In regard to the phenomena that puzzled him as a young man, he offers the same answer. What makes a big thing big, or a bigger thing bigger, is the Form Bigness. Similarly, if one and one are said to be two, it is because they share in Twoness, whereas previously each shared in Oneness.

When Socrates has finished describing this method, both Simmias and Cebes agree that what he has said is true. Their accord with his view is echoed in another brief interlude by Echecrates and Phaedo, in which the former says that Socrates has made these things wonderfully clear to anyone of even the smallest intelligence, and Phaedo adds that all those present agreed with Socrates as well. Returning again to the prison scene, Socrates now uses this as the basis of a fourth argument that the soul is immortal. One may reconstruct this argument as follows:

1. Nothing can become its opposite while still being itself: it either flees away or is destroyed at the approach of its opposite. (For example, tallness cannot become shortness while still being hot.) (102d-103a)

2. This is true not only of opposites, but in a similar way of things that contain opposites. (For example, fire and snow are not themselves opposites, but fire always brings hot with it, and snow always brings cold with it. So fire will not become cold without ceasing to be fire, nor will snow become hot without ceasing to be snow.) (103c-105b)

3. The soul always brings life with it. (105c-d)

4. Therefore soul will never admit the opposite of life, that is, death, without ceasing to be soul. (105d-e)

5. But what does not admit death is also indestructible. (105e-106d)

6. Therefore, the soul is indestructible. (106e-107a)

When someone objects that premise (1) contradicts his earlier statement (at 70d-71a) about opposites arising from one another, Socrates responds that then he was speaking of things with opposite properties, whereas here is talking about the opposites themselves. Careful readers will distinguish three different ontological items at issue in this passage:

(a) the thing (for example, Simmias) that participates in a Form (for example, that of Tallness), but can come to participate in the opposite Form (of Shortness) without thereby changing that which it is (namely, Simmias)

(b) the Form (for example, of Tallness), which cannot admit its opposite (Shortness)

(c) the Form-in-the-thing (for example, the tallness in Simmias), which cannot admit its opposite (shortness) without fleeing away of being destroyed

Premise (2) introduces another item:

(d) a kind of entity (for example, fire) that, even though it does not share the same name as a Form, always participates in that Form (for example, Hotness), and therefore always excludes the opposite Form (Coldness) wherever it (fire) exists

This new kind of entity puts Socrates beyond the safe answer given before (at 100d) about how a thing participates in a Form. His new, more sophisticated answer is to say that what makes a body hot is not heatthe safe answerbut rather an entity such as fire. In like manner, what makes a body sick is not sickness but fever, and what makes a number odd is not oddness but oneness (105b-c). Premise (3) then states that the soul is this sort of entity with respect to the Form of Life. And just as fire always brings the Form of Hotness and excludes that of Coldness, the soul will always bring the Form of Life with it and exclude its opposite.

However, one might wonder about premise (5). Even though fire, to return to Socrates example, does not admit Coldness, it still may be destroyed in the presence of something coldindeed, this was one of the alternatives mentioned in premise (1). Similarly, might not the soul, while not admitting death, nonetheless be destroyed by its presence? Socrates tries to block this possibility by appealing to what he takes to be a widely shared assumption, namely, that what is deathless is also indestructible: All would agree . . . that the god, and the Form of Life itself, and anything that is deathless, are never destroyed (107d). For readers who do not agree that such items are deathless in the first place, however, this sort of appeal is unlikely to be acceptable.

Simmias, for his part, says he agrees with Socrates line of reasoning, although he admits that he may have misgivings about it later on. Socrates says that this is only because their hypotheses need clearer examinationbut upon examination they will be found convincing.

The issue of the immortality of the soul, Socrates says, has considerable implications for morality. If the soul is immortal, then we must worry about our souls not just in this life but for all time; if it is not, then there are no lasting consequences for those who are wicked. But in fact, the soul is immortal, as the previous arguments have shown, and Socrates now begins to describe what happens when it journeys to the underworld after the death of the body. The ensuing tale tells us of

(1) the judgment of the dead souls and their subsequent journey to the underworld (107d-108c)

(2) the shape of the earth and its regions (108c-113c)

(3) the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the pious philosophers (113d-114c)

Commentators commonly refer to this story as a myth, and Socrates himself describes it this way (using the Greek word muthos at 110b, which earlier on in the dialogue (61b) he has contrasted with logos, or argument.). Readers should be aware that for the Greeks myth did not have the negative connotations it often carries today, as when we say, for instance, that something is just a myth or when we distinguish myth from fact. While Platos relation to traditional Greek mythology is a complex onesee his critique of Homer and Hesiod in Republic Book II, for instancehe himself uses myths to bolster his doctrines not only in the Phaedo, but in dialogues such as the Gorgias, Republic, and Phaedrus as well.

At the end of his tale, Socrates says that what is important about his story is not its literal details, but rather that we risk the belief that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, and repeat such a tale to ourselves as though it were an incantation (114d). Doing so will keep us in good spirits as we work to improve our souls in this life. The myth thus reinforces the dialogues recommendation of the practice of philosophy as care for ones soul.

The depiction of Socrates death that closes the Phaedo is rich in dramatic detail. It also is complicated by a couple of difficult interpretative questions.

After Socrates has finished his tale about the afterlife, he says that it is time for him to prepare to take the hemlock poison required by his death sentence. When Crito asks him what his final instructions are for his burial, Socrates reminds him that what will remain with them after death is not Socrates himself, but rather just his body, and tells him that they can bury it however they want. Next he takes a bathso that his corpse will not have to be cleaned post-mortemand says farewell to his wife and three sons. Even the officer sent to carry out Socrates punishment is moved to tears at this point, and describes Socrates as the noblest, the gentlest and the best man who has ever been at the prison.

Crito tells Socrates that some condemned men put off taking the poison for as long as possible, in order to enjoy their last moments in feasting or sex. Socrates, however, asks for the poison to be brought immediately. He drinks it calmly and in good cheer, and chastises his friends for their weeping. When his legs begin to feel heavy, he lies down; the numbness in his body travels upward until eventually it reaches his heart.

Some contemporary scholars have challenged Platos description of hemlock-poisoning, arguing that in fact the symptoms would have been much more violent than the relatively gentle death he depicts. If these scholars are right, why does Plato depict the death scene the way he does? There is also a dispute about Socrates last words, which invoke a sacrificial offering made by the sick to the god of medicine: Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget. Did Socrates view life as a kind of sickness?

Tim Connolly Email: tconnolly@po-box.esu.edu East Stroudsburg University U. S. A.

Excerpt from:
Plato: Phaedo | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village is in the horsey part of western Los Angeles County, just off the 101 freeway past the exit youd take to go down to Malibu. It features all the elements typical of a Four Seasons: tasteful marble floors, guest suites with large bathrooms featuring deep tubs, obscenely soft sheets You get the picture.

I am experiencing none of this. Instead I am in a building adjacent to the Four Seasons, sitting in an airtight egg-shaped box about halfway in size between a regular refrigerator and a refrigerator in one of those guest suites next door, wearing only my underwear and a vermillion swim caplike thingy of uncertain material, surrounded by an organ-massaging whump-whump-whump sound somewhere below the vocal range of Barry White.

Death never made any sense to me. Larry Ellison

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The box Im in is called the Bod Pod, and its designed to tell me the percentage of my mass that is composed of fat. The building is the California Health & Longevity Institute (CHLI), a combination spa, medical clinic, fitness center, and research institution founded in 2006 by David Murdock, a 93-year-old billionaire who made a fortune in real estate and later bought the Dole Foods company, and who has something of an obsession with increasing his time on this earth through the combination of science and lifestyle choices. (He reportedly believes so fervently in the essentiality of consuming fruits and vegetables that he eats banana and orange peels, and thats just the beginning.) Murdock is a sort of god-father to a breed of California-based ultra-high-net-worth individuals who are focused on increasing lifespan and staving off disease.

Gabriela Hasbun

His successors are numerous. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who has said that death never made any sense to me, has spent $430 million on anti-aging research; Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched Calico, a secretive company thats seeking to extend lifespan through genetic research and drug development. Ex-financier and philanthropist Michael Milken is funneling money toward speeding up the development of drugs and other medical treatments for the chronic diseases associated with aging, and Jeff Bezos has just invested in a company called Unity Biotechnology that is targeting cellular mechanisms at the root of age-related diseases.

Meanwhile, PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiels Breakout Labs funds companies trying to extend the useful life of various body parts; Thiel himself has reportedly given millions to a foundation aiming to increase the human life-span.

The single-mindedness of the high-net-worth live-forever crew is not just theoretical. As they await the progress reports of their well-funded research projects, these people have adopted a long and quirky (to say the least) list of habits in their daily lives. My own experience at CHLIwhere the offerings include guided meditation in a thing called a Somadome, a fitness consultation, a nutrition consultation, and various spa-type treatmentsis rather quaint compared with what those engaged in this new space race to immortality are doing.

Take Dave Asprey, a former top executive in a company that operated Googles and Facebooks first computer servers and who later created Bulletproof Coffee. He now spends three minutes five to six days a week in a $50,000 tank of air chilled to 270 degrees Fahrenheit, which he says increases the density of his mitochondria (the power plants in all living cells). Asprey also enjoys doing cardio with various parts of his body strapped into plastic sleeves full of ice water in a machine called a Vasper, he breathes 100 percent oxygen, he sits in an infrared sauna, and he plays ping-pong against a robot. Rapid movement where youre crossing from one side of the body to the other re-patterns your brain, he says.

"We are going to crack this. Its not going to be simple. Theres a bunch of things that will need to be done to achieve lifespans into at least hundreds of years. But well get there." Brian Hanley

Or microbiologist Brian Hanley. In his modest ranch house in Davis, California, 90 minutes northeast of San Francisco, Hanley, who owns the biomedical company Butterfly Sciences, describes to me the way he spent years of research and more than half a million dollars: After receiving approval from an accredited independent board that evaluates clinical trials, he enlisted the assistance of a doctor colleague to (in what is clearly not a practice currently approved by the FDA) shove twin needles into his leg and, with a burst of electricity, install DNA of Hanleys own design that was supposed to encourage his organs to operate better. It proved to be very painful (though less so the second time, after they had modified the protocol), but to Hanley it was totally worth it. I just felt so fantastic, he says with a smile. Hanley's white blood cell counta measure not particularly susceptible to the placebo effectspiked and his "bad" cholesterol plummeted, while his diet was essentially unchanged.

Matt Kaeberlein, a biologist at the University of Washington who is testing the effects on aging dogs of a drug originally developed for human transplant patients, reveals that several -superrich live-forever types have called to ask him to give the drug to them. There are more people than youd guess who are self--experimenting, he says.

Over the past century medical science has made tremendous strides in increasing the lifespan of most humans. Antibiotics and reduced infant and childhood mortality were two arenas in which doctors had dramatic success in the early part of the 20th century. Advances in medical technology in the latter part are a big reason someone must still sing Happy Birthday to Dick Cheney every year. Weve been adding about two years to the average life expectancy every decade for the last hundred years. And if youre wealthy and educated and have access to decent healthcare, youre likely to live longer than someone without any one of those things, and much longer than the billion or so people who have none of them.

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Still, while humans have been living longer on average, the longest any individual has livedthe apparent maximum life-spanhas remained essentially unchanged. And to todays titans of cutting-edge industry, whose visions of the future are the very things on which they have built their fortunes, not being around for said future is simply unacceptable.

What people like Asprey and Hanley are after is an increase in the healthy lifespan far beyond anything we know about so far. Im going to live to 180-plus, Asprey tells me. Hanley is equally confident. We are going to crack this, he says. Its not going to be simple. Theres a bunch of things that will need to be done to achieve lifespans into at least hundreds of years. But well get there. The real question might be what the word we means. Hanleys treatment cost him well over $500,000. Aspreys regimen costs him more than $1 million.

Human Longevity Inc. is a La Jolla startup co-founded in 2015 by J. Craig Venter, who spent $100 million becoming, in 2000, the first person to sequence a human genome with private funding. At the companys clinic, Health Nucleus, you can get: your own genome sequenced; a full-body MRI to look for cancer; microbiomial and metabalomic profiles; a neurological exam; a bone-density scan; a body fat measurement more accurate than the Bod Pods; and a 4-D picture of the inside of your heart. It costs $25,000. It goes without saying that no health insurance covers it.

C. Flannigan

Still, such expenses pale in comparison with the moonshot-level funding that guys like Brin and Page are lavishing on labs like Calico. Such facilities also come with billion--dollar ethical questions. With simple healthcare still out of reach for much of the world, some people, including Bill and Melinda Gates, take issue with the longevity movement.

It seems pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer, Bill Gates told a Reddit audience in 2015.

Egocentric, perhaps, but it certainly displays a signature attitude of Silicon Valley. On my way to Palo Alto for an interview for this story, I had lunch at the Battery, a private club in downtown San Francisco, with Ty Ahmad-Taylor, who has worked at, launched, and sold various tech startups and is today CEO of the entertainment technology company THX Ltd.

I wondered aloud why anti-aging research is happening in such concentration around the city and why so much of it is funded with tech money. I think theres a fundamental optimism here that doesnt exist in other places, Ahmad-Taylor said. When he was looking for investors for a social sports site he founded, he recalled, I got turned down 43 times before selling Samsung on the project. Silicon Valley is full of the kind of people who think that being rejected 43 times is not a reflection of their likelihood of success. Thats precisely the attitude required to believe that death can be forestalled, or even foiled.

It seems pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer Bill Gates

The first hole was poked in the idea that aging equals an inevitable deterioration in 1983, when a mutant strain of a 1-millimeter-long worm called C. elegans was discovered to have a much greater lifespan than nonmutant strains. Then, in the early 90s, a young University of California San Francisco researcher named Cynthia Kenyon identified a specific mutation that doubled the lifespan in C. elegans; it turned out to be the first of more than 100 gene variants now known to affect longevity. Kenyon now works at Calico.

For the first time, people realized that there is a subset of genes that can regulate lifespan, says Eric Verdin, M.D., CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, in Marin County. That really changed everything. If you identify genes and pathways that control aging, this means that specific proteins can regulate it, and that means drug targets. People started to think, Maybe we can delay aging.

The Buck Institute occupies a modern building designed by I.M. Pei on a hilltop an hour north of San Francisco. Here, 180 scientists work to develop therapies to slow aging. One of them is Judith Campisi, a cancer researcher who, years back, began studying senescent cellscells that have stopped dividing. Initially senescence wasnt thought of as bad but rather as the alternative to cells becoming cancerous. When I started studying senescence it was as an anti-cancer mechanism, Campisi tells me.

But she started to think the people in her field had it all wrongthat senescent cells were dangerous because they were oozing yucky stuff that caused inflammation in the body. (One of the hallmarks of aging is that the body carries around more inflammation, which is a major factor in, if not the cause of, age-related diseases, including cancer and heart and liver disease.) Senescent cells, Campisi and colleagues found, were essentially polluting their neighbors, causing times ravages.

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Bruno Levy/Challenges-Rea/Redux

Last year Campisi helped found Unity Biotechnology, a lifespan-enhancing biotech firm in San Francisco that had received $20 million in financing even before Jeff Bezos jumped in. (As of October the tally was up to $116 million.) She also continues to work at the Buck Institute. As a storm that has pummeled the Bay Area breaks up outside, I look through her microscope at a culture of fibroblast cells from a human lung. They are of more or less uniform size and snuggled tightly together; two of them appear to be on the verge of dividing, as happy cells do.

Then I view senescent cells from the same tissue that have been artificially aged using ionizing radiation. These cells are grossly distorted, huge and spread out, and they secrete inflammatory factors, with much bigger nuclei.

Were trying to devise ways now to tame that secretory characteristic of the cell, Campisi explains. The other next step is to make them go away. (Apparently Kenyon had also been trying all sorts of methods of killing senescent cells before she joined Calico, according to Venter, who had been thinking of hiring Kenyon at the time for his company, Human Longevity Inc. The life extension world, being much smaller than the tech universe, is even more competitive than its primary benefactor, it turns out.)

The problem is that the idea Campisi started with 30 years agothat senescent cells are protective in some wayremains, in a sense, true. In very special circumstances theyre good, she says. So we have to be very intelligent about how to apply drugs designed to kill senescent cells.

Campisi is well aware of the scientific challenges of anti-aging research. But there are other challenges as well. Theres a misperception among people in other fields that research in this field isnt as rigorous, says the University of Washingtons Kaeberlein, the biologist who gets calls from live-forever types hoping hell inject them with his experimental drug, rapamycin, which in 2009 was discovered to increase the lifespan of mice. Kaeberlein calls it the most effective and reproducible drug for extending lifespan in mice at this time.

I think theres a fundamental optimism here that doesnt exist in other places. Silicon Valley is full of the kind of people who think that being rejected 43 times is not a reflection of their likelihood of success. Ty Ahmad-Taylor

Across the country, in New York, a former Israeli Defense Forces medical officer named Nir Barzilai, who is now director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is trying to raise $70 million from the National Institutes of Health and private funders to test the effectiveness in slowing disease formation of another existing drug, metformin, which is currently given to diabetics. Barzilai and a few other heavy hitters in aging research had to, as he puts it, cajole the FDA into letting him run the experiment, because the agency that approves medical treatments hasnt considered aging a treatable condition (an indication, in its jargon).

So Barzilai came up with a workaround. We are working with the FDA to have an indication that is similar to agingto delay the onset of certain diseases associated with aging, he tells me. The idea is that if aging is a major risk factor for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimers, preventing those diseases can be seen as a proxy for slowing aging.

This is going to be a breakthrough, he says. We have shown we can target aging in a variety of animal models. Thats not the question. The question is why pharmaceutical companies are not coming in and developing drugs to increase our lifespan. And the answer is because the FDA just hasnt had aging as an indication.

While many of the privately owned longevity labs are engaged in the search for anti-aging drugs, Venter is taking a different approach: using genomics to identify genes associated with heart disease, cancer, and other afflictions associated with aging. On the second floor of an undistinguished building in a sea of them in northern San Diego, past two security guards and a fingerprint scanner that restricts access to the lab even for employees of Human Longevity Inc., 33 DNA sequencing machines (each of which costs $1 million and is named after a Star Wars character) run 24/7, going through 55 to 60 terabytes of data per week. This work is part of a large-scale effort to gather as many human genome sequences as possible from subjects, who also provide clinical and phenotype samples.

Were trying to, through the genome, predict causes of premature death, says Venter, the companys chair. We spoke in his expansive office on the buildings top floor as his miniature poodle, Darwin, sat under his desk. We can predict your risk for many types of cancer from mutated genes in your genome.

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Reuters/Alamy

On the first floor of Human Longevitys headquarters is Health Nucleus, the companys consumer-oriented affiliate. It employs the most advanced diagnostic equipment and uses detailed biological samples to provide a comprehensive examination of an individuals health status. We look at the person as a whole and measure everything in the genome, and everything we can in the clinic, Venter explains.

Around 500 people have had the $25,000 service performed so far, and Venter says serious health issues undetectable by any other means have been found in about 40 percent of them. Two and a half percent had early-stage cancer. One 55-year-old customer learned he had a 5-centimeter tumor under his breastbone. If it hadnt been discovered until he started experiencing symptoms, he might have been dead within two years. Now he has as good a chance as anyone of making it to 95. Its a shock at first, but then you realize you just saved your life, Venter tells me.

Still, not everything Health Nucleus can detect presents as clear a course of action as removing a tumor. As with everything in science, from astronomy to microbiology, theres a difference between being able to detect something and being able to do something about it. Theres also the question of false positives generating risky, expensive interventions that turn out to be unnecessary. With some of the things we do now, Venter admits, the scientific community is at the 1 percent level of interpretation. Were trying to get better. In the future, for $1,000 well be able to tell you whether youre at increased risk for cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimers.

Health Nucleuss services, along with treatments like those at the California Health & Longevity Institute (never mind the kind of expensive equipment Dave Asprey personally surrounds himself with), are currently available only to the very rich. These are all huge accomplishments in terms of science, says Laura Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. But she allows that they present their own set of societal problems. If these medical interventions remain this expensive, we will see social class differences that pale in comparison to disparities today.

Since I began my research into longevity, my blueberry consumption has surged and Ive developed a high-intensity interval training habit. And when I walked out of my meeting with Venter I was seized with anxiety that lurking in my cells is a time bomb planted by my love-hate relationship with tobacco, which I still struggle with in my forties.

Everyone who quits says he has a moment when he realizes he is really, finally done with smoking, and my interview with Venter was mine. My great-grandfather died of oral cancer at 43though he did smoke fat black cigars from the moment he woke up in the morning to the moment he went to bed at night. Does that count as a family history? As I Ubered back to the Amtrak station for the trip home to my wife and two daughters, I thought that maybe I need to drop $25,000 at Health Nucleus.

I talked it over with my wife when I got home, and we decided I should wait for the price to come down. It turns out Im not quite in the live-forever tax bracket. But in the spirit of Silicon Valley, I try to remain optimistic. After all, I may be only one insanely successful startup away from immortality.

This story appears in the May 2017 issue of Town & Country.

Read more:
Are You Rich Enough To Live Forever? - TownandCountrymag.com (blog)