dialogue Phaedo, and what I started doing last

time was sketching the basic outlines of Plato's

metaphysics--not so much to give a full investigation of

that--clearly we're not going to do that here--but just to

provide enough of the essential outlines of Plato's metaphysical

views so that we can understand the arguments that come up later

in the Phaedo, basically all of which or many

of which presuppose something--certain central

aspects about Plato's metaphysical views.

The key point behind his metaphysics then was the thought

that, in addition to the ordinary empirical physical

world that we're all familiar with,

we have to posit the existence of a kind of second realm,

in which exist the Platonic--as they're nowadays called--the

Platonic forms or Platonic ideas.

The sort of thing that perhaps we might call or think of as

abstract objects or abstract properties.

And the reason for positing these things is because we're

clearly able to think about these ideas,

and yet, we recognize that the ordinary physical

world--although things may participate in them to varying

degrees--we don't actually come across these objects or entities

in the physical world. So that we can talk about

things being beautiful to varying degrees,

but we never come across beauty itself in the actual empirical

world. We are able to talk about the

fact that two plus one equals three, but it's not as though we

ever come across numbers--number three itself--anywhere in the

empirical world. A further point that

distinguishes the empirical world from this--this realm of

Platonic ideal objects--is that indeed they--there's something

perfect about them. They don't change.

In contrast, physical objects are constantly

changing. Something might be short at one

point and become tall at another point, ugly at one point and

become beautiful--like the ugly duckling.

It starts out ugly and becomes a beautiful swan.

In contrast, justice itself never changes.

Beauty itself never changes. We have the thought that these

things are eternal, and indeed, beyond change,

in contrast to the empirical world.

In fact, if you start thinking more about the world from this

perspective, the world we live in is crazy.

It's almost insanely contradictory.

Plato thinks of it as crazy in the way that a dream is.

When you're caught up in the dream, you don't notice just how

insane it all is. But if you step back and

reflect on it, "Well, let's see,

I was eating a sandwich and suddenly the sandwich was the

Statue of Liberty, except the Statue of Liberty

was my mother. And she's flying over the

ocean, except she's really a piece of spaghetti."

That's how dreams are. And when you're in it,

it sort of all makes sense. Right?

You're kind of caught up, but you step back and say,

"That's just insane." Well, Plato thinks that the

empirical world has something of that kind of insanity,

something of that kind contradictoriness,

built into it that we don't ordinarily notice.

"He's a basketball player, so he's really,

really tall, except he's only six feet.

So he's really, really short for a basketball

player. This is a baby elephant,

so it's really, really big--except it's a baby

elephant, so it's really, really small."

The world is constantly rolling--this is a Platonic

expression--rolling between one form and the other.

And it's hard to make sense of. In contrast,

the mind is able to grasp the Platonic ideas,

the Platonic forms; and they're stable,

they're reliable, they are--they're law-like and

we can grasp them. They don't change;

they're eternal. That's, as I say,

the Platonic picture. Now, it's not my purpose here

to try to argue for or against Platonism with regard to

abstract entities. As I suggested in talking about

the example of math last time, it's not a silly view,

even if it's not a view that we all take automatically.

But in thinking about math, most of us are inclined to be

Platonists. We all do believe something

makes it true that two plus one equals three,

but it's not the fact that empirical objects--We don't do

empirical experiments to see whether two plus one equals

three. Rather, we think our mind can

grasp the truths about numbers. Plato thought everything was

like that. Well, I'm not going to argue

for and against that view--just wanted to sketch it,

so as to understand the arguments that turn on it.

So for our purposes, let's suppose Plato was right

about that and ask, what follows?

Well, Plato thinks what's going to follow is that we have some

reason to believe in the immortality of the soul as,

again, as we indicated last time, the picture is that the

mind--the soul--is able to grasp these eternal Platonic forms,

the ideas. Typically, we're distracted

from thinking about them by the distractions provided by the

body--the desire for food, drink, sex, what have you,

sleep. But by distancing itself from

the body, the mind, the soul, is able to better

concentrate on the forms. And if you're good at that,

if you practice while you're alive, separating yourself from

the body, then when your body dies,

the mind is able to go up to this Platonic heavenly realm and

commune with gods and other immortal souls and think about

the forms. But if you've not separated

yourself from the body while in life, if you're too enmeshed in

its concerns, then upon the death of your

body your soul will get sucked back in, reincarnated perhaps,

in another body. If you're lucky,

as another person; if you're not so lucky,

as a pig or a donkey or an ant or what have you.

So your goal, Plato says, your goal should

be, in life, to practice death--to separate yourself from

your body. And because of this,

Socrates, who's facing death, isn't distressed at the

prospect, but happy. He's happy that the final

separation will take place and he'll be able to go to heaven.

The dialogue ends, of course, with the death

scene--Socrates has been condemned to death by the

Athenians, and it ends with his drinking

the hemlock, not distressed but rather sort of joyful.

And the dialogue ends with one of the great moving death scenes

in western civilization and as Plato says--let's get the quote

here exactly right--"Of all those we have known,

he was the best and also the wisest and the most upright."

Just before the death scene, there's a long myth,

which I draw your attention to but I don't want to discuss in

any kind of detail. Plato says it's a story;

it's a myth. He's trying to indicate that

there are things that we can't really know in a scientific way

but we can glimpse. And the myth has to do with

these sort of pictures I was just describing where we don't

actually live on the surface of the Earth of in the light,

but rather live in certain hollows in the dark where we're

mistaken about the nature of reality.

Some of you who are maybe familiar with Plato's later

dialogue The Republic may recognize at least what seems to

me, what we have here,

is a foreshadowing of the myth of the cave, or the allegory of

the cave, which Plato describes there as

well. Our concern is going to be the

arguments that make up the center of the dialogue.

Because in the center of the dialogue, before he dies,

Socrates is arguing with his friends.

Socrates is saying, "Look, I'm not worried.

I'm going to live forever." And his disciples and friends

are worried whether this is true or not.

And so the heart of the dialogue consists of a series of

arguments in which Socrates attempts to lay out his reasons

for believing in the immortality of the soul.

And that's going to be our concern.

What I'm going to do is basically run through my attempt

to reconstruct--my attempt to lay out the basic ideas from

this series of four or five arguments that Plato gives us.

I'm going to criticize them. I don't think they work,

though I want to remark before I turn to them that in saying

this I'm not necessarily criticizing Plato.

As we'll see, some of the later arguments

seem to be deliberately aimed at answering objections that we can

raise to some of the earlier arguments.

And so it might well be that Plato himself recognized that

the initial arguments aren't as strong as they need to be.

Plato wrote the dialogues as a kind of learning device,

as a tool to help the reader get better at doing philosophy.

They don't necessarily represent in a systematic

fashion Plato's worked out axiomatic views about the nature

of philosophy. It could be that Plato's

deliberately putting mistakes in earlier arguments so as to

encourage you to think for yourself,

"Oh, this is--here's a problem with this argument.

There's an objection with that argument."

Some of these, Plato then may address later

on. But whether or not he does

address them--we're not doing Plato any honor,

we're not doing him any service,

if we limit ourselves to simply trying to grasp,

here's what Plato thought. We could do the history of

ideas and say, "Here's Plato's views.

Aren't they interesting? Notice how they differ from

Aristotle's views. Aren't they interesting?"

and move on like that. But that's not what the

philosophers wanted us to do. The great philosophers had

arguments that they were putting forward to try to persuade us of

the truths of their positions. And the way you show respect

for a philosopher is by taking those arguments seriously and

asking yourself, do they work or not?

So whether or not the views that are being put forward in

Socrates' mouth are the considered,

reflective judgments of Plato or not, for our purposes we can

just act as though they were the arguments being put forward by

Plato, and we can ask ourselves,

"Do these arguments work or don't they?"

So I'm going to run through a series of these arguments.

I'm going to, as I've mentioned before,

be a bit more exegetical than is normally the case for our

readings. I'm going to actually pause,

periodically look at my notes and make sure I'm remembering

how I think Plato understands the arguments.

Of course, since the dialogue is indeed a dialogue,

we don't always have the arguments laid out with a series

or premises and conclusions. And so it's always a matter of

interpretation, what's the best reconstruction

of the argument he's gesturing towards.

How can we turn it into an argument with premises and

conclusions? Well, that's what I'm going to

try to do for us. Also going to give the

arguments names. These are not names that Plato

gives, but it will make it easy for us to get a fix,

roughly, on the different arguments as we move from one to

the next. So the first argument,

and the worry that gets the whole things going,

is this. So, we've got this nice

Platonic picture where Plato says, "All right.

So the mind can grasp the eternal forms,

but it has to free itself from the body to do that."

And so, the philosopher, who has sort of trained himself

to separate his mind from his body,

to disregard his bodily cravings and desires--the

philosopher will welcome death because at that point he'll

truly, finally, make the final break

from the body. And the obvious worry that gets

raised in the dialogue at this point is this:

How do we know that when the death of the body occurs the

soul doesn't get destroyed as well?