The Phaedo and the Foundations of Plato's Academy

The Phaedo is set on the day of Socrates' execution and presents his final conversation with his followers, built around a sustained argument for the immortality of the soul. Socrates offers several interlocking arguments: the cyclical argument, that opposites (such as sleeping and waking, or living and dying) generate one another in a continuous cycle, so that life must arise again from death; the recollection argument, that our knowledge of perfect equality, beauty, and other Forms could not derive from imperfect sensory experience alone and must therefore have been acquired by the soul before birth; the affinity argument, that the soul, being invisible and akin to the unchanging, intelligible Forms, is more likely to be indestructible than the visible, composite body; and a final argument concerning the soul as that which necessarily brings life and so cannot admit its opposite, death, without ceasing to be a soul at all.