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10 - Cebes’ Objection and the Final Argument

86e–88b, 102a–107b

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2023

David Ebrey
Affiliation:
Universitat de Barcelona
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Summary

Cebes’ cloakmaker objection presents an alternative model of the soul according to which it is ultimately destroyed in the process of providing life to the body. Socrates’ final argument rejects this model by arguing that the soul’s bringing life to the body, far from destroying the soul, is precisely what ensures that it must be immortal and imperishable. In doing so, the argument identifies a way in which the soul has a characteristic of the divine – immortality – thereby specifying one way in which it is akin to the divine, as Socrates claimed in the kinship argument. Thus, the final argument responds to Cebes’ cloak maker objection in a way that further fills in the kinship argument’s account of the soul. The final argument also includes an important discussion of forms and ordinary objects. I argue that Socrates here identifies the most basic reason why forms cannot be ordinary, perceptible things: ordinary objects are receptive of opposites, whereas forms cannot be.

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Plato's Phaedo
Forms, Death, and the Philosophical Life
, pp. 248 - 274
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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