An account of the trial and death of Socrates. The first three dialogues (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito) were good, but the major one is Phaedo, which is more complicated at times. It was interesting to think myself of how the arguments presented may be flawed — this makes me think actively and deeply of the work and draw connections between concepts — which when Socrates speaks of the soul, there are some I found. For instance, I believe the concept of the soul developed in Phaedo comes not from any fundamental truth, but they developed from existing notions of the soul, confirmed by analogy. That is, nothing they say really confirms it’s existence, and many arguments have their base on an analogy we can only suppose holds. Analogy can be faulty, as Socrates himself demonstrates by showing that the analogy of soul to attunement is a faulty idea. Why is the analogy of opposites better? I think this can be shown to not quite work, and here is my own argument. Socrate’s says that life be viewed as an opposite of death. I point to a rock and declare it is ’not alive’; the statement makes sense yet does not imply the rock is dead (it can’t be as it never died). If I declare that rock to be ’not dead’, this implies it is alive when it is not alive. What I mean is, ’not alive’ doesn’t always mean ‘dead’ but ’not dead’ implies ‘alive’, and also that ’not dead’ and ’not alive’ can both be true at the same time, so they are not perfect opposites. I don’t believe this holds for the examples given by Socrates, except the sleeping one, and only because it inherits the trait of not being a perfect opposite from it only being an activity of certain living things. I wonder what he would say to this. There are some more, such as when Socrates implies all living things must have souls; would he agree that a blade of grass has a soul, I wonder?
Overall, an interesting and accessible work, that along the way tells the story of the unfortunate death of Socrates.