Socrates in the Apology

Essay by ParisCarrilloCollege, UndergraduateA, October 2014

download word file, 4 pages 0.0

Downloaded 1 times

At the beginning of the Apology when Socrates is sentenced to death, he welcomed the idea and not once did he try to withdrawal from the punishment. Socrates refused to change his way of living, and thinking, and the only way for everyone to get him to cease would be through death. During the time of the sentencing, Socrates remained cool, calm, and collected with courage. He declared that at his age of 70, he never once feared death. Socrates believed that death is just the end, in which case he felt was good, or better yet; an unending life.

Throughout the dialogue we found that his way of thinking began to develop into something much different than what he mentioned at the trial itself. In Phaedo's dialogue, Socrates conducts four arguments to fall back on his case. The case being that every philosopher spends his whole entire life guiding his soul to separate itself from the use of the body.

The first argument being that everything comes from its opposite, an example of this would be something hot would come from something cold and vice versa. Socrates used the example of life and death, by using this example it's implying that when we do die we don't stay dead we come back to life at a later time. His second argument in this dialogue was believed that everything we learned was recollected. By the questioning of any subject, we can recollect that information, hinting at the fact that we had the knowledge at birth and just forgot it throughout life, implying that our soul existed before our birth. Last but not least, the third argument. Our soul is parallel to being divine, it's immortal, intelligible, uniform, and indissoluble. By stating his ideas to Simmias and Cebes, they both have...