Platos View On The Soul Philosophy Essay

Platos View On The Soul Philosophy EssayPlato was a Greek philosopher. He had galore(postnominal) views on life and existence. Platos views on the mind organic structure differention have been the target of many criticisms since his time. In the republic, he chassisulated reports on the allegory of the cave and the possible action of the forms. He believed that our existence on earth was merely a shadow of a higher spiritual plane, our bodies provided a vessel, or even looked upon as a cage trapping the mortal and restricting it from this higher plain. Plato was a dualist and so believed that when the material proboscis dies the intellect lives on. Platos views, be best described in his analogy of the cave in which it depicts a prisoner that escapes the cave metaphorical for this life- and goes on to discover e actuallything he once believed in was save a fraction of the truth Platos main philosophy stemmed from the cave and was active knowing the theory of the forms. Here, he thought that the soul is a substance and is immortal, how forever the body- being physical- could be doubted as it was protrude of the empirical world.On the one hand, Platos ideas about the soul were revolutionary and extremely advanced for his time, as with closely of Platos philosophies, yet on the some other hand they appear to be both self-conflicting and flawed.Platos idea of the soul is his dualist position, believe that body and soul are fundamentally distinct. His theory on the soul was produced in his book Phaedrus. In it Plato was intimately concerned with demonstrating the immortality of the soul and its ability to stretch out bodily death. He proposed the idea that, like Aristotles idea of motion, whatever is the source of its feature motion or animation moldiness be immortal. Plato was writing at a time in Greek philosophy where popular opinion believed that the soul did not survive death, and that it dispersed into nothing, like breath or smoke. Plato b elieved that the soul must be immortal by the very nature of being the source of its own animation, for it is only through a psyche that things butt be living rather than dead. The souls are both animated and at the same time the source of its own animation. Plato also states that the soul is an intelligible and non-tangible article that cannot be destroyed or dispersed, much like his ideas about forms of non-tangible realities such as beauty or courage.The financial statement from affinity, as Plato posited in Phaedrus, states that because the soul is an invisible and impalpable entity, as opposed to a complex and tangible body the cardinal must be distinct and separate. Plato believed that which is composite must be divisible, sensible and transient and that which is simple must be invisible, indivisible and immutable. Forms give a resemblance to the simple, immutable entities, such as beauty however a beautiful paint is transient and palpable. The body shows an affinity to the composite by nature of its mortality and mutability just as the soul shows a correspondent affinity to immortality and indivisibleness. To further emphasise the point, Plato writes when the soul investigates by itself it passes into the realm of what is pure, ever existing, immortal and unchanging. He argues that just as the bodys prime function is to understand the material and transient world, the process of the soul as an entity of rational and self-reflective thought demonstrates its affiliation with a simple and immutable world display that the two are distinct. However Plato does not explore the criticisms of this argument that just because an entity portrays an affiliation, does not necessarily adopt it to be as that which it affiliates.Plato believed that the soul, if it were to be the animator of all living things, must be responsible for a person s mental or psychological activities and responses. For the soul cannot be the reason for life, yet at the same time lim ited in its influence over the bodies in which it animates. However this provides one of the most serious and potentially defeating criticisms of Platos views on the soul. He fails to address the issue of the interrelationship between body and soul, if they are indeed distinct. He doesnt mention if the soul act as controller of a dead body, or is there more to the body than simply the material. Moreover the argument from affiliation would suggest that the body is concerned with the material, composite world whilst the soul is concerned with the invisible and simple world. If this is the case thence the soul cannot, following from Platos argument, have any interaction with the material, bodily world for then it ceases to be simple and immutable.An argument from recollection, which Plato first put forward when discussing his theory of the world of the forms, also serves his theory of the soul. Perfect forms, such as equality, are knowable a priori we have no need for experience to te ll us whether two lines are equal length. We must, therefore, know these things through recollection of these perfect forms. Therefore, the soul must have pre-existed the body to know these facts a priori.Platos argument from reversals was found on his idea that everything in the observable world has an opposite effect. As Plato writes in his work Phaedo If something smaller comes to be it will come from something larger before, which became smaller. In other words everything we can know has an opposite asleep and awake hot and frigidness. Similarly they are reversible, just as one goes from a state of sleep to a state of being awake, one can do the opposite. Plato argued that if this were the case, then the same should apply to life and death. Just as one can go from life to death, one must be able to go from death to life and if this statement is correct, then the soul must survive this transition and as a consequence possess immortality and separation from the body. He believe d that animation and life was integral to the very notion of the soul, just like heat is a cave in of fire thus it cannot be destroyed and is eternal.A separate argument from his theory of opposites was that of a similar theory of the forms and their opposites. He stated that no entity can consist of contradictory forms, and thus one form must necessarily exist and the other not in any particular entity. The number fivesome cannot possess both the form of even and shady by adding or subtracting one the form of odd is displaced by even. Plato wrote so fire as the cold approaches will either go away or be destroyed it will never venture to admit coldness and remain what it was, fire and cold The soul must share in the form of life, for we know that those living have a soul. Therefore, it cannot transport the form of death also, for this would be in direct conflict of life. The soul must ontologically necessarily exist, and must therefore be immortal.Contemporary analysis of Platos views on the soul produces many criticisms there is a go by chronological confusion as his work progresses with the soul starting as an unintelligible and non-tangible item, yet progressing to where the soul becomes a complex tripartite entity that is trapped in the material body, yet still longing to lay the world of the forms. Plato demonstrates a contradictory and muddled thought process that attempts to find resolutions for flaws in his thinking. The idea of an watery entity entering the perfect realm of the forms is one such logical fallacy in his argument and he does this by seeking to find reason and justification for his conclusion, rather than seeking a conclusion based on all of his own logic.