I argue that, according to Plato, the body is the sole cause of psychic disorders. This view is expressed at Timaeus 86b in an ambiguous sentence that has been widely misunderstood by translators and commentators. The goal of this article is to offer a new understanding of Plato’s text and view. In the first section, I argue that although the body is the result of the gods’ best efforts, their sub-optimal materials meant that the soul is constantly vulnerable to the (...) body’s influences. In the second section, I argue that every psychic disorder is a disruption of the motions of the inner psychic circles by the body; moreover, I defend my translation of 86b. In the final section, I argue that the goal of education is to restore the circles to their original orbits, and I disarm a possible objection that bad education is also a cause of psychic disorder. (shrink)

I argue that in the Phaedo, Plato maintains that the soul is located in space and is capable of locomotion and of interacting with the body through contact. Numerous interpreters have dismissed these claims as merely metaphorical, since they assume that as an incorporeal substance, the soul cannot possess spatial attributes. But careful examination of how Plato conceives of the body throughout his corpus reveals that he does not distinguish it from the soul in terms of spatiality. Furthermore, assigning spatial (...) attributes to the soul plays an important role in Plato’s account of the relation of body and soul. (shrink)

This paper examines whether Socrates provides his interlocutors with good reasons to seek knowledge of what virtue is, reasons that they are in a position to appreciate. I argue that in the Laches he does provide such reasons, but they are not the reasons that are most commonly identified as Socratic. Socrates thinks his interlocutors should be motivated not by the idea that virtue is knowledge nor by the idea that knowledge is good for its own sake, but rather by (...) the idea that knowledge is needed to recognize what to aim at. His argument reaches the potentially life-altering conclusion that we should all seek knowledge of what virtue is. It is powerful precisely because it relies on uncontroversial premises that his interlocutors could be expected to accept. In laying out this argument, I distinguish different ways in which someone could count as a teacher of virtue. At the end of the article, I situate the argument within the debate about whether virtue is teachable. (shrink)

Although one can find a robust philosophical tradition supporting asceticism in the West, from ancient Greece to at least early modernity, very little attention has been paid to what motivated this broad support. Instead, following criticism from figures such as Hume, Voltaire, Bentham, and Nietzsche, asceticism has been largely disregarded as either eccentric or uniquely religious. In this paper, I provide what I take to be the core moral argument that motivated many philosophical ascetics. In brief, acts of deliberate self-denial (...) are practice in an important part of acting ethically and are thus practically rational as a means to acquiring virtue. And if this argument has been a core motivation for asceticism in the West then arguably philosophical ascetics have been on to something, especially given contemporary empirical research on self-control. (shrink)

8000 Word annotated bibliography on the Phaedo, with roughly 70 entries. Note that the subscription version is a bit easier to navigate. The hyperlinks work in this pdf, but you can not as easily jump to the different sections.

This article argues that the Phaedo is written as a new sort of story of how a hero faces death; this story provides an alternative to existing tragedy, as understood by Plato. The opening of the Phaedo makes clear that two features that Plato closely associates with tragedy, pity and lamentation, are inappropriate responses to Socrates’ impending death, and that tuchē (chance) did not affect his happiness. This is the first step in the dialogue’s sustained engagement with tragedy. Tragedy for (...) Plato falls under the category of stories about heroes and gods. Plato wrote the Phaedo so that we would see Socrates as a philosophical hero, a replacement for traditional heroes such as Theseus or Heracles. I argue that in fact the Phaedo meets every requirement in Republic Books 2–3 for how to tell stories about heroes and gods and so belongs to the same broad category as tragedy. Within this framework, it tells its new story of how the true hero faces death. (shrink)

There is a wide consensus among scholars that Plato’s Socrates is wrong to trust in reason and argument as capable of converting people to the life of philosophy. In this paper, I argue for the opposite. I show that Socrates employs a more sophisticated strategy than is typically supposed. Its key component is the use of philosophical argument not to lead an interlocutor to rationally conclude that he must change his way of life but rather to cause a certain affective (...) experience, one that can be effective at changing his beliefs about how best to live. (shrink)

I argue that Plato, in theTimaeus, draws deep theoretical distinctions between sensation and affect, which comprises pleasure, pain, desire and emotion. Sensation (but not affect) is both ‘fine-grained’ (having orderly causal connections with its fundamental explanatory items) and ‘immediate’ (being provoked absent any mediating psychological state). Emotions, by contrast, are mediated and coarse-grained. Pleasure and pain are coarse-grained but, in a range of important cases, immediate. TheTheaetetusassimilates affect to sensation in a way theTimaeusdoes not. Smell frustrates Timaeus because it is (...) coarse-grained, although unlike pleasure and pain it is so by accident of physiology. (shrink)

In the Phaedo, Socrates leads us to expect that his final argument will address the details of Cebes’ cloakmaker objection. Nonetheless, almost all commentators treat the final argument as unconnected to these details. This paper argues that close attention to Cebes’ objection, Socrates’ restatement of it, and Socrates’ final argument shows that the final argument does offer a detailed response. According to the objection, the soul suffers as it brings life to the body, which ultimately leads to its destruction. Socrates (...) argues that, on the contrary, bringing life to the body is precisely what ensures the soul’s immortality and indestructability. Cebes’ objection targets Socrates’ so-called ‘affinity argument’. In responding to Cebes’ objection, the final argument fills in the account of the soul that Socrates put forward in the affinity argument. In doing so, it identifies one precise way in which the soul is akin to the divine. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the moral psychology of the Phaedo and argue that the philosophical life in this dialogue is a temperate life, and that temperance consists in exercising epistemic discernment by actively withdrawing assent from incorrect evaluations the body inclines us to make. Philosophers deal with bodily affections by taking a correct epistemic stance. Exercising temperance thus understood is a necessary condition both for developing and strengthening rational capacities, and for fixing accurate beliefs about value. The purification philosophers (...) strive for, and the purifying role of philosophy, should then be understood as a clarificatory act consisting in making one’s thoughts clear and withdrawing assent from erroneous evaluative content in our desires and pleasures. Along the way, I argue that philosophers must neither avoid situations and activities that cause bodily affections as much as possible, nor ignore or care little about them. (shrink)

In the Phaedo, to explain why the philosopher lives in the unusually ascetic way he does, Socrates explains what someone realizes when philosophy takes possession of his soul and how he changes his behavior on the basis of this information. This paper considers the conception of belief the character uses in this explanation and whether it is the same as the conception Michael Frede thinks the historical Socrates is likely to have held and that the Stoics much later incorporated into (...) their doctrine of practice. (shrink)

This paper offers a fresh examination of a salient distinction located at the beginning of the Affinity Argument between the composite (τὸ σύνθετον) and the incomposite (τὸ ἀσύνθετον). I offer reasons for why Plato may have intended for us to assume that the soul is an incomposite unity in its essential nature. I then substantiate this claim by reviving an ancient interpretation to the Affinity Argument according to which the soul is of the same metaphysical kind as the Forms. I (...) thus suggest that the argument may be seen as supporting the basic indestructibility cum immortality of all souls. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Rhizomata Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 113-147.

An abiding puzzle in the Phaedo is the transition in the text from initial pessimism about the possibility of wisdom during human life to a more optimistic view. Prominent interpretations posit different kinds or degrees of wisdom at issue in the two sets of passages. By contrast, I argue that the pessimistic view rests on the implicit premise that the soul cannot be completely purified during human life—a premise which arises from an initial conception of impurity and its cause. In (...) developing his eschatology, Socrates refines this conception and rejects the implicit premise. Because the embodied soul can be completely purified, it can achieve philosophical wisdom as well. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Socrates’ hopeful and confident attitude in the Phaedo in order to show, on the one hand, that the ascetic interpretation of the Socratic doc-trine of the purification of affections must be under-stood in a restricted sense and, on the other, that a dra-matic reading of the dialogue – that is, one that recog-nizes the emotional effects the author seeks to awake in the reader – must primarily take into account Socrates’ intention to communicate to his (...) friends his own affec-tive disposition, and, only secondarily, the emotional reaction the audience in fact holds. To prove this, I will argue that Socrates’ success in calming down his friends’ discouragement does not depend exclusively on the compelling character of his arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul, but also on his friends’ being capable of experiencing by themselves an attrac-tion for wisdom. Socrates looks for this effect through the same experience of the conversation, by trying to awaken in the others the anticipatory pleasure of the hope in post-mortem life. Plato would thus aim to prompt in the reader affections that do not disrupt the intellectual activity and that, alongside his arguments, are capable of counteracting the affections that reduce the horizon of expectations to the corporeal world. (shrink)