Plato and the soul

-Plato suggests that the soul is distinct from the body; he was a substance dualist. He argued that the soul is immortal whereas the body is mortal. At the end of life the soul is set free from the body. In his work Phaedo, plato writes that the soul is "imprisoned" in a body. For plato the goal of the soul is the world of the forms, which can only be seen indirectly in the physical world. Plato argues that real knowledge of Forms comes from the soul; he argues that when we learn we are actually relearning what the soul knows from the world of forms before it was imprisoned in the body.

-Plato has a negative view on the body, as he believes that the body distracts the soul from finding the truth in the world of the Forms.

-The body is part of the physical world and subject to change

-the body gains opinion via senses whereas the soul gains knowledge 

-"the body is the source of endless trouble by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search for true being: it fills us of loves and lusts and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact as men say, takes away all power of thinking at all"

-One of the horses behaves and "is upright and cleanly made; he was a lofty neck andan aqueline nose; his colour is white and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only" but the other doesn't, he "is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat faced and of dark colour, with grey eyes and blood red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, ansd is full of pricklings of desire, the obidient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his comparison to the charioteer" Plato explains that the three aspects of the soul are reason, desire and spirit. The soul works best with the charioteer or reason in charge. The horses often pull in different directions. Our appetites can lead us to do things that aren't helpful. We need spirit to make us determined to do the right thing. Platos idea of a good person is someone whose soul is properly balanced with reason. 

-"Of the nature of the soul, through her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite; a pair of wings and a charioteer"

-"As I said at the beginning of this tale, I divided the soul into three; two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad: the division may remain, but i have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists. and to that i will proceed"

-Plato argued that the soul is more important than the body. The body is part of the empirical world and is subject to change. This is ome of the reasons why plato thought that the body and senses can't be trusted. The soul, however, lets us gain knowledge:

-"The body is the source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake us and impede us in the search for true being: it fills us full of loves, and lusts and fears and fancies of all kinds and endless foolery, and in fact as men say, takes away from us all power of thinking at all"

-Our bodies are always distracting us from philosophical thought

-The distinction between the body and soul is the idea of the soul being 'simple' (made up of one thing and unable to change), instead of consisting of multiple parts like the body does. The soul is also capable of other simple and pure ideas. 

-When discussing the soul in the body, he describes it as complex; there are different aspects to the soul. 

-All that comes to be comes from its opposite state and a number of processes is involved in transitioning from one thing to another. If there's no balance between these opposite states then everything would end in the same state.

-For example, life and death are opposite states, similarly to large and small, and thus we can reason that just as living becomes death, death must become living as they're in a cycle. This means that death can't be a permanent state.

Strengths:

-The idea that life and death are opposites means that its logically possible for them to be in a cycle when one causes the other.

Weaknesses:

-the notion of tall and large can't be applied to that of life and death

-we can't prove that something like the concepts of life and death can have opposites because they're so huge.

-we cant twist definitions to benefit an argument 

-The second argument, known as the Theory of Recollection, asserts that learning is essentially an act of recollecting things we knew before we were born but then forgot. True knowledge, argues Socrates, is knowledge of the eternal and unchanging Forms that underlie perceptible reality. For example, we are able to perceive that two sticks are equal in length but unequal in width only because we have an innate understanding of the Form of Equality. That is, we have an innate understanding of what it means for something to be equal even though no two things we encounter in experience are themselves perfectly equal. Since we can grasp this Form of Equality even though we never encounter it in experience, our grasping of it must be a recollection of immortal knowledge we had and forgot prior to birth. This argument implies that the soul must have existed prior to birth, which in turn implies that the soul’s life extends beyond that of the body’s.

--The soul has knowledge of eternal ideas and is able to recognise forms such as beauty. Plato uses the example of socrates testing a slave boy about geometrical problems he had never faced before. The slave demonstrated awareness of Pythagoras' theorem, which demonstrates that the soul has prior knowledge from its prior existence. Learning is therefore remembering

Strengths:

-explains how we can recognise concepts such as beauty from being young 

weaknesses:

-most of us understand learning as aquiring new skills and knowledge, not recollection...how can this actually be proved? 

-you have to believe in the world of the forms, which cannot be proven empirically. 

The third argument, known as the Argument from Affinity, distinguishes between those things that are immaterial, invisible, and immortal, and those things that are material, visible, and perishable. The soul belongs to the former category and the body to the latter. The soul, then, is immortal, although this immortality may take very different forms. A soul that is not properly detached from the body will become a ghost that will long to return to the flesh, while the philosopher’s detached soul will dwell free in the heavens.

Weaknesses: how can the disembodied soul see the different forms without the physical eyes? This contradicts the notion returns to the intelligble world. (geach)

-How can we have forms of anything? It leads to infinite regression(aristotle)

- A Form, unlike qualities in this world, is perfectly itself and does not admit its opposite. For example, the Form of Beauty does not possess any ugliness at all. In contrast, a beautiful person might be beautiful compared to other people but would not seem beautiful compared to a god and thus is not perfectly beautiful. The Form of Beauty, on the other hand, is always and absolutely beautiful.

-The soul is what animates us: we are alive because we have a soul. That concept suggests that the soul is intimately connected to the Form of Life. Since the Form of Life does not in any way include its opposite—death—the soul cannot in any way be tainted by death. Thus, Socrates concludes, the soul must be immortal.

Weaknesses: it involves infinite regression

ideas of forms are just thoughts and cant be proved

strengths:it makes sense that everything that is a perfect unchanging form cant be changed

Substance dualism: the body and soul are separate

Property dualism: the body and soul are together

Monism: human beings are made up of only one substance

Materialism: human beings consist of physical matter alone. 

The soul is simple; it cannot be split into parts or changed. It is also capable of knowledge of other simples and pure ideas (forms)