Phaedo
Phaidon
The soul is immortal and akin to the unchanging Forms it can know through reason, so death, properly understood by a philosopher who has spent life detaching from bodily concerns, is not to be feared but welcomed as liberation.
- arguments for the immortality of the soul
- recollection (anamnesis) as the nature of learning
- the soul's kinship with unchanging Forms
- philosophy as preparation for death
- Socrates's calm death by hemlock
Set on the day of Socrates's execution and narrated by his student Phaedo to those who missed it, the dialogue presents Socrates spending his last hours arguing for the soul's immortality: opposites generate each other, so life must come from and return to death; learning is really recollection of truths the soul knew before birth; and the soul, being akin to the unchanging, invisible Forms rather than the changing body, must itself be indestructible. Socrates presents the philosopher's whole life as preparation for death, a practiced detachment from bodily pleasure and pain in favor of pure reasoning. The dialogue closes with a famously calm account of his death by hemlock, and Phaedo's verdict that Socrates was the best, wisest, and most just man of his time. Its date, like other Platonic dialogues, is inferred from style, not external record.
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