Online research in philosophy

To unravel the intricacies of the last argument of the Phaedo for the immortality of the soul, the reader has to peel away successive presuppositions, his own, Plato's and not least the presupposition that Plato very skilfully portrays as being shared by Socrates and his friends.A first presupposition is the reader's own. According to our modern ways of thinking, a soul that is immortal, if there is such a thing, is a soul that lives forever. That presupposition is not shared (...) by Socrates and Cebes (Socrates' interlocutor in the final argument). A soul that survives separation from the body, once or a number of times, is held to have survived death and therefore to be immortal. But it does not follow that it will live forever. For a soul to live forever, it must be shown to be not only immortal, but imperishable. Only if the soul is both immortal and imperishable can the assembled company be sure that the Socrates who is talking to them now will still be living when, after sunset, he has drunk the hemlock and can talk to them no more.The modern reader who has divested himself of the presupposition that immortal and imperishable are mere synonyms, and therefore appreciates the need for an argument designed specifically to prove that the soul is imperishable and not merely immortal, has nonetheless to be aware of a second presupposition, a presupposition shared by Socrates and his friends which restricts the meaning that the modern reader might otherwise suppose to be conveyed by the word 'imperishable'. Both Socrates and Cebes, as portrayed in the Phaedo, take it for granted that the only time when the soul might perish is the moment of her separation from the body. Provided it can be shown that the soul will survive separation from the body, no matter how often the body is taken from her, the soul, so they are happy to assume, will have shown herself to be both immortal and imperishable.We do not have to suppose that this second presupposition is shared by the author of the dialogue. Plato's subtle but insistent restriction of the moment when the soul might be threatened with extinction to the moment of her separation from the body has been deliberately designed to alert the reader to a way of thinking which Socrates, Cebes and Echecrates all take for granted, but which Plato does not necessarily invite the reader of the dialogue to share.The restriction is nonetheless essential to the structure of the argument. It is because Socrates does not envisage a possible extinction of the soul at any moment other than the moment of separation from the body that he is able to present a soul that is essentially alive as immune to the death which separates soul from body, however often such a separation may occur, and as therefore (so he claims) not only immortal but imperishable.In presenting that argument, how far has Plato deliberately foregone any attempt to prove that the soul is imperishable subsequently to the moment of her separation from the body? Socrates argues that the soul is unaffected by the death of the body because she is essentially alive. He does not argue that she is immune to destruction or extinction because she is essentially existent. In the face of Plato's silence, in the Phaedo and elsewhere, the modern reader has to hold in abeyance a third and final presupposition, that only a being whose essence it is to exist can of its nature never not exist.To understand the dialogue is therefore no easy matter. The reader needs to distinguish Socrates as the mouthpiece of Plato from Plato as the author of the dialogue. At the same time the modern reader has to distinguish the Plato of history from a fictional Plato who shares our own ideas and our own preconceptions, including the concept of a being cuius essentia est esse. An intricate double task, which other modern readers of the dialogue have so far not even attempted. (shrink)

Stobaeus records a placitum where Empedocles says that the world is destroyed by the domination in turn of Love and of Strife. The placitum makes perfectly good sense in the context of Empedocles' belief that Love and Strife produce, in turn, a non-cosmic state of total unity (Love) and of total separation (Strife). But for over two hundred years scholars have been unable to hear that simple message. Sturz (1805) emended the text so as to make it fit the non-cyclical (...) interpretation of Empedocles that he had taken over from the pages of Tiedemann (1791). When Diels included Stobaeus' text in his edition of Aetius, in the "Doxographi graeci" (1879), he failed to remove the emendation, although his own reconstruction of the chapter heading in Aetius made the emendation impossible. Twenty years later, Diels saw the light, and printed Stobaeus' placitum, unemended, in his "Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta" (1901) and in successive editions of his "Fragmente der Vorsokratiker" (from 1903 onwards). But Kranz resurrected the emendation in the "Nachträge" to his sixth edition of the "Fragmente der Vorsokratiker" (1951). The emended placitum is used again by Uvo Hölscher (1965) to support a non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles and is repeated in the latest collection of the fragments and testimonia (Brad Inwood, 1992). Hölscher fails to appreciate that the text that he uses to support his reconstruction is merely Sturz's translation into Greek of the non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles proposed by Tiedemann at the end of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The origin of matter is one of the last and greatest unsolved mysteries bedevilling modern attempts at understanding the philosophy of the "Enneads." There are two stages in the production of Intellect and of soul. The One or Intellect produces an undifferentiated other, which becomes Intellect or soul by itself turning towards and looking towards the prior principle, with no possibility of the One's "turning towards" or "seeing" itself. But where does matter come from? To arrive at his conception of (...) matter, Plotinus has radically altered the definitions of non-being given by Plato and Aristotle in their refutation of Parmenides. Matter, for Plotinus, is a non-being opposed, not to "the being of each thing", as in Plato's "Sophist," but to all "the beings properly so-called", i.e. to all the forms. It is then further identified with Aristotle's definition of non-being as privation, with the crucial difference that privation, for Plotinus, is made a permanent substratum of change. This re-formulation of ideas from the "Sophist" and the "Physics" proves unmistakably that it is matter which is generated when soul produces a "non-being" which is also a "total lack of definition". The production of matter by soul does not, however, follow the model of the production of Intellect from the One or of soul from Intellect. Since matter is lifeless, it cannot turn towards its source. Soul therefore has to be herself directly responsible both for the production of matter and for the covering of matter with form. Matter is therefore included among the products which stem ultimately from the One. But the origin and the nature of matter have to be understood as very different from the double process of emanation which lies at the origin of Intellect and of soul. (shrink)