Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T09:16:50.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Socrates on life and death (Plato, Apology 40C5–41C7)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2012

Alice Van Harten
Alice Van Harten
Affiliation:
Ghent University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In a familiar passage at the end of Plato's Apology, Socrates offers an account of what he believes will happen to us when we die. As in the Phaedo, it is his impending death that prompts Socrates to speculate about the nature of the afterlife: as soon as his verdict is announced, Socrates turns to the jury to gloss on his sentencing. It was unprecedented, as far as we know, for a defendant in the Athenian court to end his trial by addressing the members of the jury, but the Apology has Socrates doing just that. While his defence in the Apology was already audacious, Socrates' closing speech appears even more provocative. Among other things, he declares that he has no reason to fear death, but that, on the contrary, the death penalty he received only moments before may well be considered a blessing. Socrates supports this claim with an argument in the form of a constructive dilemma: either death involves the cessation of consciousness, in which case our afterlife existence will resemble a single night of dreamless sleep, or after our death we will go to a place where all the dead are ruled over by just judges. Since either scenario constitutes a good state, death should be considered something good (40C5–41C7). This article will examine Socrates' argument in detail and discuss a number of salient problems that arise from it. Commentators have typically attempted to tackle the interpretative problems one by one, but I shall argue that they resist satisfactory resolution and instead alert us to an ironic reading of this passage.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 57 , December 2011 , pp. 165 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2011

References

WORKS CITED

Armleder, P. (1966), ‘Death in Plato's Apologia’, CB 42, 46.Google Scholar
Brickhouse, T. C., and Smith, N. D. (1990) Socrates on trial, Oxford.Google Scholar
Brickhouse, T. C., and Smith, N. D. (1994) Plato's Socrates, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brickhouse, T. C., and Smith, N. D. (2004) Plato and the trial of socrates, London.Google Scholar
Burnet, J. (1924) Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of socrates and Crito, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Strycker, E., Slings, S. R. (1994) Plato's Apology of socrates [Apology], edited and completed from the papers of the late Strycker, E. De, Leiden.Google Scholar
Fahr, W. (1969) Theous nomizein, New York.Google Scholar
Hobbs, A. (2000) Plato and the hero: courage, manliness, and the impersonal good, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patrick, D. L. et al. , (1995) ‘Measuring preferences for health states worse than death’, Medical Decision Making 14.1, 9–18.Google Scholar
McPherran, M. L. (1996) The religion of socrates, University Park, Pa.Google Scholar
Nagel, T. (1986) The view from nowhere, Oxford.Google Scholar
Ober, J. (1999) Political dissent in democratic Athens, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Roochnik, D.L. (1985) ‘Apology 40c4–41e7: Is death really a gain?’, CJ 80, 212–20.Google Scholar
Rowe, C.J. (2007) Plato and the art of philosophical writing, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudebusch, G. (1999) Socrates, pleasure, and value, Oxford.Google Scholar
Schofield, M. (2006) Plato: political philosophy, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedley, D. N. (2009) ‘Myth, politics and punishment in the Gorgias’, in Partenie, C. (ed.), Plato's myths, Cambridge, 51–76.Google Scholar
Stokes, M. C. (1997) Plato: Apology, Warminster.Google Scholar
Vermeule, E. (1979) Aspects of death in early Greek art and poetry, Berkeley, Calif.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, J. (2004) Facing death: Epicurus and his critics, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar