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If Alexander brought Greek ideas to India, this says nothing about previous commerce between the two cultures. Socrates' ideas about karma and reincarnation are not characteristically Greek, and these are the ideas at issue. The Hindu myth about Lord Krishna being born a prince, threatened by his uncle, raised by peasants, and returning to claim his birthright is a motif that Herodotus (Book One) uses to give the background of Cyrus the Conqueror (600's BCE). Research about ancient cultural commerce between Greece and India is still in progress. The chair at Berkely classics dept. is working on a book on it.
The Hindu ideas should be taken out. I don't know if a person from India wrote that part, but it is clear that Alexander the Great's conquest brought Greek ideas TO India, not the other way around. Besides, Alexander the Great wasn't even born when Socrates died. As it is, chariots existed in both ancient Greece and India, so the metaphors could simply be coincidence.
I don't have any problems with the content of this article. However, the main section of the article, "Detailed Summary", could perhaps benefit from some subdivisions. This might be accomplished by providing a background section, a section that deals with the beginning of the text before the arguments begin, a section of the cyclical argument, a section on the recollection argument, a section on the affinity argument, and then a section on his final argument. These divisions already exist within the text and subtitles that draw attention to them may make the article more user friendly. Robitussin 17:25, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
As I understand it, scholars have classified the dialogues of Plato into early, middle and late works; and have tried with limited success to determine the order he wrote them in. Where in the chronology of Plato's authorship does this work exist? RJFJR 16:54, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
From school days, I remember this as being near the divide between the early and middle periods, but don't quote me on that.-- Andymussell 04:14, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
Almost total rewrite of this article Nov 10 Brenda maverick 01:35, 11 November 2006 (UTC), 2006.
This seems like a thorough article, except for the fact that it does not include any narrative, or any chronological order of the arguments as the appear in the text. I was thinking that would be helpful and maybe all of these specific topics discussed in the dialogue (which make up the entire entry) could come after a general overview of the work. Thoughts? Jhawk1024 19:21, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
>> Hi, in this article I saw there was a reference to the "doctrine of the forms" without any link, but I've just found another article right here on Wikipedia that explains that doctrine, referring to it as "theory of forms"; I only edited that. (Marko - November 23, 2006)
The idiosyncratic claim that Plato was concerned about "karma" and other Indic ideas requires citations. --Akhilleus ( talk) 05:27, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
User:80.235.34.74 put this comment in the article, but it really belongs here:
I don't think we can call Plato an Orphic, but as has already been pointed out, Orphism is a more proximate source for the idea of reincarnation than Hinduism, so I'd have to agree with 80.235.34.74 that Hinduism has no place in this article--unless, of course, we can find some reliable sources that tell us about Hinduism's influence in 5th/4th century Athens. I'm going to remove the bit that the IP user was complaining about. --Akhilleus ( talk) 01:57, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I rephrased the sentences in question to accomodate the objections of Achilleus. However, I do believe that Hindi texts were circulationing in Athens during Plato's lifetime. Plato's Phaedrus uses the charioteer image that is the main metaphorical trope of the Bhagavad Gita, and the dialogs themselves are similar to the Upanishads. The legends about Krishna are similar beyond co-incidence to Sophocles' Oedipus tale. Herodotus also uses folk motifs from Hindu literature. ( I attended a lecture at Berkeley two summers ago by the classics chair about this very subject. So the research is new, but being done. I think the real hazard here is to underestimate the worldliness of the Greeks! I think leaving out the international connection does weaken the article.
No less important here is the fact that if you don't see Socrates' religious ideas as "foreign" to the Greeks, you fail to recognize the main rhetorical strategy of the dialog, which is to parallel the human setting to the ideological content. When you see Plato as adding these foreign disciples in a foreign land details for NO (?) reason, you can't see the genius of the piece.
Am I still getting nowhere with you, my friend, Achilles? Brenda maverick 17:07, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, someone's supplied a citation to an article by A.N. Marlow that contends Plato was influenced by Indian philosophy. I don't think Marlow is very convincing--the resemblances seem superficial. Furthermore, as the author himself says, he doesn't have an answer as to how Plato became familiar with Indian philosophy--on p. 45, Marlow says "As to the problem of the way by which Indian influence reached Greece I have no new solution to offer and fall back with others on Persia as the intermediary."
Marlow's argument is not popular. His article is never cited in subsequent literature on Plato, according to the ISI Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. The Cambridge Companion to Plato has no entries in its index for Buddhism, Hinduism, or India, and the Oxford Classical Dictionary mentions nothing about India in its entry on Plato. I believe that keeping this view in the article is giving undue weight to a minority view, and I favor deleting the Marlow reference entirely. On the other hand, if the view that Plato was influenced by Indian philosophy is in common in the scholarly literature, then we could probably find a better article to cite. What do others think? --Akhilleus ( talk) 19:29, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Let's not fail to notice that Socrates attributes the soulful ideas he kicks around variously to 1)legends, 2)hearsay, and 3)an unnamed friend. Plato is deliberately vague about Socrates' "sources" for his unpopular and unempirical ideas about the supposed immortality of the soul. So in the gusto to name and cite the "experts", lets not outshout Plato himself, and not fail to hear his hints and allegations. Do you guys think Plato is recommending Socrates' hodge-pode of speculations? Notice too, that they are impossible to accept altogether, because they are logically inconsistent. Brenda maverick 16:55, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Socrates says that all souls are equally souls (as in "pure" and unmixed with the corporeal) AND that souls "carry with them" their moral/educational achievements. Souls cannot be reborn into appropriate animal forms AND yet assemble after death in order to be divided up into good and wicked. This seems to be Greek myth folded together with Hindu mysticism and sprinked with philosophical flakes (e.g. Pythagorean harmonics).
The karma bit (rebirth into animal forms) shows up nowhere else in any dialog. Even Socrates drops it later. This is to say nothing of logic, like the idea that the living come from the dead. That sounds like more Hindu "reasoning", which was fueled by mushrooms. I believe Plato was no fool when it came to logic, and that he knew better than we do the sounds of silliness.
I am skeptical of experts only when they pose as authorities. Like Descartes (who withheld publication of one of his books when he got wind of Galileo's imprisonment), I feel like I've spent much of my life learning- and what's worse, teaching - things that turned out not to be true. Philosophers, least of all, practice the critical open-mindedness that they recommend to others. The Greeks were the first to see this, that the physician needs to heal himself. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brenda maverick ( talk • contribs).
I do not mean to be impolite, either, but I still cannot understand why you want to impoverish rather than enrich the article. The karma-reincarnation stuff cries out for some explanation. You don't have one yourself. (Or are you holding it back?) So we should just pretend Plato didn't say this? How does this advance the cause of knowledge? The material needs to be factored into an interpretation of the dialog. To selectively supress material that does not fit your preconception is NOT helpful to any cause. And when someone does offer a printed source, as you asked, you slam it. Brenda maverick 20:39, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
In the original sentence, I did not claim that we know that Socrates religious ideas have direct Hindu sources. I said only that his religious ideas are "foreign to the Greek mind" and "sound Hindu". (This is not a strong or controversial claim, in my mind.) Socrates himself says that most people (oi polloi) think that death is the end of human life. Plato goes on about this a bit, emphasizing that if one were to be empirical about it, he would say that it is bodies that outlive souls, at least for a time. Homer and Greek mythology make no mention of such ideas as karma and reincarnation, and neither do any of the playwrights, or even Herodotus. This passage is odd. I choose my words very carefully, but somehow, they still get twisted into a caricature of my meaning. I think you have made a straw man of my point, and minority and majority opinions in scholarship do not have much bearing on this. Even someone with superficial acquaintance with Hinduism would be struck by how Hindu Socrates ideas sound. Brenda maverick 02:13, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I guess we're beating a dead horse here, but I did not think when I said Socrates was giving mouth to some Hindu-ish ideas that this is something one needs persmission from the experts to say. To me, its like saying the sky is blue. Do we need Richard Dawkins to hold our hands for that? I'm sorry. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brenda maverick ( talk • contribs).
The article rewrite has not improved this article, but has left it in such a poor state that I am seriously considering reverting to a Jan. 2006 version. I don't know who is responsible for this, but the article is worse than it was a year ago. — Viriditas | Talk 10:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Ok, done. I would like to encourage all editors who work on this article to ensure that their edits are based in mainstream, reliable secondary sources rather than their own idiosyncratic personal interpretations. --Akhilleus ( talk) 04:54, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
If I'm not mistaken this particular work played an important part in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. There is a particular scene in the book where he is a bright young (yet overconfident) student and shocks his professor by exclaiming that Phaedrus is "THE WOLF!" He gets a shock value, etc, but one important fact is that Phaedrus means I think light (is it the same root as photon???), and it is Lysias who was the wolf.
Mr. Pirsig knows his mistake and expected the reader to see, but I wasn't privy to his knowledge and didn't get it until I re-read his latest edition of the book with the introduction stating this fact. I went through 20 years thinking Phaedrus meant Wolf. (-:
So mayhap this fits in somehow, maybe not. -- Eurlim 10:40, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone else think the "summary" section is way too long?
--Jacobwilliamson 16:25, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
This article mentions early on that the Phaedo is the last of the dialogues Plato wrote about Socrates' final days, naming the Euthrypho, Crito, Apology, and Meno as the others. Having recently re-read the Meno, I cannot recall where any reference is made to it taking place during the end of Socrates' life. It ties into Socrates' last days through the appearance of Anytus, but it's relatively clear that, at most, the Meno depicts the point at which Socrates lost Anytus' favor, rather than any event definitively close to his trial and execution. Since it doesn't really contribute anything to the article and since the bit about Anytus can be dealt with in the Meno article, I'm going to remove it, for the moment.
If anyone remembers something about the dialogue that connects it more clearly to Socrates' final days, they can feel free to correct me.
-- N.Type
In response to the template, I began going over the article. I removed some repetition and original research. There was some quotes from the Apology and the Meno that I removed because I don't think they belong in the summary section. Although they are relevant. I'll see if I can put them back in a commentary section.-- Jonathan Harking ( talk) 19:37, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
There is no discussion at all in the present article of the speculative-mythological section near the end of the dialogue, concerning the "oceans of air", the subterranean rivers, etc. If you can add something on this, it would be welcome. -- 77.7.149.205 ( talk) 16:16, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
As noted above, This article completely ignores an important part of the dialog: the Socrates’ version of a myth about the soul’s journey after death, with which he concludes his argument. See a critique of the tendency to dismiss this part of the dialog by Radcliffe Edmonds here: https://www.academia.edu/26186372/The_Upward_Path_of_Philosophy_The_Myth_in_Platos_Phaedo
“Many modern scholarly philosophical treatments of the dialogue simply ignore the final myth, treating it as a kind of optional extra, devoid of serious philosophical content…[this approach does not do] justice to the function of the myth within the dialogue, since [it] neglects the important ideas embedded in the myth.” — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cockeyed ( talk • contribs) 02:55, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Why should this be pronounced as Feedoh? Surely it should be Faydoh or Fydoh. Myrvin ( talk) 08:02, 3 March 2011 (UTC)
The last paragraph in this section does not refer to the argument in Phaedo, but the other form of this argument in Meno. The argument in Meno involves the interrogation of the slave and focuses on innate mathematical knowledge, Phaedo differs in that it discusses our understanding of the forms and other conceptual things in terms of recollection.
Would it not be wise to also include which line in the text certain quotes appear? Or is it better to only cite the pages at the end of paragraphs? I'm sure I could add these citations if everyone would prefer my prior suggestion. CJMcKenna98 ( talk) 04:00, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
In the sentence about Socrates' trial and death, this bit in parentheses is quite wrong: '(though some scholars think it was more for his support of "philosopher kings" as opposed to democracy)'.
The idea of philosopher kings is from Plato's Republic, which is one of his late works, written long after Socrates' death. There is no evidence from the early dialogues that Socrates was even aware of this idea, let alone a supporter of it. We have two accounts of Socrates' defence in court (usually but misleadingly entitled Apology, from the Latin apologia), one by Plato and one by Xenophon. Neither is a verbatim record, but there is no reason to think they paint a misleading picture.
It's true that there was a political dimension to the trial, but it was most likely based on the notorious fact that Socrates had associated with Alcibiades, who had gone over to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, and with several of the leaders of the murderous and tyrannical oligarchy that had briefly held power in Athens after the city's defeat by Sparta – including Critias, the vicious leader of the oligarchy. People wrongly thought that his teaching was responsible for their evil acts. Democracy had only been restored a few years previously at the time of Socrates' trial in 399BCE, and people were still bitter and angry about their suffering under the Thirty's reign of terror.
The nature of the charges against Socrates and the resulting trial is only marginally relevant to this article, and is in any case covered in the article on his trial. I suggest that the entire sentence should be drastically reduced to something like this: 'Socrates had been tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of the city; he was convicted by the jury, imprisoned and sentenced to death.'
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If Alexander brought Greek ideas to India, this says nothing about previous commerce between the two cultures. Socrates' ideas about karma and reincarnation are not characteristically Greek, and these are the ideas at issue. The Hindu myth about Lord Krishna being born a prince, threatened by his uncle, raised by peasants, and returning to claim his birthright is a motif that Herodotus (Book One) uses to give the background of Cyrus the Conqueror (600's BCE). Research about ancient cultural commerce between Greece and India is still in progress. The chair at Berkely classics dept. is working on a book on it.
The Hindu ideas should be taken out. I don't know if a person from India wrote that part, but it is clear that Alexander the Great's conquest brought Greek ideas TO India, not the other way around. Besides, Alexander the Great wasn't even born when Socrates died. As it is, chariots existed in both ancient Greece and India, so the metaphors could simply be coincidence.
I don't have any problems with the content of this article. However, the main section of the article, "Detailed Summary", could perhaps benefit from some subdivisions. This might be accomplished by providing a background section, a section that deals with the beginning of the text before the arguments begin, a section of the cyclical argument, a section on the recollection argument, a section on the affinity argument, and then a section on his final argument. These divisions already exist within the text and subtitles that draw attention to them may make the article more user friendly. Robitussin 17:25, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
As I understand it, scholars have classified the dialogues of Plato into early, middle and late works; and have tried with limited success to determine the order he wrote them in. Where in the chronology of Plato's authorship does this work exist? RJFJR 16:54, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
From school days, I remember this as being near the divide between the early and middle periods, but don't quote me on that.-- Andymussell 04:14, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
Almost total rewrite of this article Nov 10 Brenda maverick 01:35, 11 November 2006 (UTC), 2006.
This seems like a thorough article, except for the fact that it does not include any narrative, or any chronological order of the arguments as the appear in the text. I was thinking that would be helpful and maybe all of these specific topics discussed in the dialogue (which make up the entire entry) could come after a general overview of the work. Thoughts? Jhawk1024 19:21, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
>> Hi, in this article I saw there was a reference to the "doctrine of the forms" without any link, but I've just found another article right here on Wikipedia that explains that doctrine, referring to it as "theory of forms"; I only edited that. (Marko - November 23, 2006)
The idiosyncratic claim that Plato was concerned about "karma" and other Indic ideas requires citations. --Akhilleus ( talk) 05:27, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
User:80.235.34.74 put this comment in the article, but it really belongs here:
I don't think we can call Plato an Orphic, but as has already been pointed out, Orphism is a more proximate source for the idea of reincarnation than Hinduism, so I'd have to agree with 80.235.34.74 that Hinduism has no place in this article--unless, of course, we can find some reliable sources that tell us about Hinduism's influence in 5th/4th century Athens. I'm going to remove the bit that the IP user was complaining about. --Akhilleus ( talk) 01:57, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I rephrased the sentences in question to accomodate the objections of Achilleus. However, I do believe that Hindi texts were circulationing in Athens during Plato's lifetime. Plato's Phaedrus uses the charioteer image that is the main metaphorical trope of the Bhagavad Gita, and the dialogs themselves are similar to the Upanishads. The legends about Krishna are similar beyond co-incidence to Sophocles' Oedipus tale. Herodotus also uses folk motifs from Hindu literature. ( I attended a lecture at Berkeley two summers ago by the classics chair about this very subject. So the research is new, but being done. I think the real hazard here is to underestimate the worldliness of the Greeks! I think leaving out the international connection does weaken the article.
No less important here is the fact that if you don't see Socrates' religious ideas as "foreign" to the Greeks, you fail to recognize the main rhetorical strategy of the dialog, which is to parallel the human setting to the ideological content. When you see Plato as adding these foreign disciples in a foreign land details for NO (?) reason, you can't see the genius of the piece.
Am I still getting nowhere with you, my friend, Achilles? Brenda maverick 17:07, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, someone's supplied a citation to an article by A.N. Marlow that contends Plato was influenced by Indian philosophy. I don't think Marlow is very convincing--the resemblances seem superficial. Furthermore, as the author himself says, he doesn't have an answer as to how Plato became familiar with Indian philosophy--on p. 45, Marlow says "As to the problem of the way by which Indian influence reached Greece I have no new solution to offer and fall back with others on Persia as the intermediary."
Marlow's argument is not popular. His article is never cited in subsequent literature on Plato, according to the ISI Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. The Cambridge Companion to Plato has no entries in its index for Buddhism, Hinduism, or India, and the Oxford Classical Dictionary mentions nothing about India in its entry on Plato. I believe that keeping this view in the article is giving undue weight to a minority view, and I favor deleting the Marlow reference entirely. On the other hand, if the view that Plato was influenced by Indian philosophy is in common in the scholarly literature, then we could probably find a better article to cite. What do others think? --Akhilleus ( talk) 19:29, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Let's not fail to notice that Socrates attributes the soulful ideas he kicks around variously to 1)legends, 2)hearsay, and 3)an unnamed friend. Plato is deliberately vague about Socrates' "sources" for his unpopular and unempirical ideas about the supposed immortality of the soul. So in the gusto to name and cite the "experts", lets not outshout Plato himself, and not fail to hear his hints and allegations. Do you guys think Plato is recommending Socrates' hodge-pode of speculations? Notice too, that they are impossible to accept altogether, because they are logically inconsistent. Brenda maverick 16:55, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Socrates says that all souls are equally souls (as in "pure" and unmixed with the corporeal) AND that souls "carry with them" their moral/educational achievements. Souls cannot be reborn into appropriate animal forms AND yet assemble after death in order to be divided up into good and wicked. This seems to be Greek myth folded together with Hindu mysticism and sprinked with philosophical flakes (e.g. Pythagorean harmonics).
The karma bit (rebirth into animal forms) shows up nowhere else in any dialog. Even Socrates drops it later. This is to say nothing of logic, like the idea that the living come from the dead. That sounds like more Hindu "reasoning", which was fueled by mushrooms. I believe Plato was no fool when it came to logic, and that he knew better than we do the sounds of silliness.
I am skeptical of experts only when they pose as authorities. Like Descartes (who withheld publication of one of his books when he got wind of Galileo's imprisonment), I feel like I've spent much of my life learning- and what's worse, teaching - things that turned out not to be true. Philosophers, least of all, practice the critical open-mindedness that they recommend to others. The Greeks were the first to see this, that the physician needs to heal himself. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brenda maverick ( talk • contribs).
I do not mean to be impolite, either, but I still cannot understand why you want to impoverish rather than enrich the article. The karma-reincarnation stuff cries out for some explanation. You don't have one yourself. (Or are you holding it back?) So we should just pretend Plato didn't say this? How does this advance the cause of knowledge? The material needs to be factored into an interpretation of the dialog. To selectively supress material that does not fit your preconception is NOT helpful to any cause. And when someone does offer a printed source, as you asked, you slam it. Brenda maverick 20:39, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
In the original sentence, I did not claim that we know that Socrates religious ideas have direct Hindu sources. I said only that his religious ideas are "foreign to the Greek mind" and "sound Hindu". (This is not a strong or controversial claim, in my mind.) Socrates himself says that most people (oi polloi) think that death is the end of human life. Plato goes on about this a bit, emphasizing that if one were to be empirical about it, he would say that it is bodies that outlive souls, at least for a time. Homer and Greek mythology make no mention of such ideas as karma and reincarnation, and neither do any of the playwrights, or even Herodotus. This passage is odd. I choose my words very carefully, but somehow, they still get twisted into a caricature of my meaning. I think you have made a straw man of my point, and minority and majority opinions in scholarship do not have much bearing on this. Even someone with superficial acquaintance with Hinduism would be struck by how Hindu Socrates ideas sound. Brenda maverick 02:13, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I guess we're beating a dead horse here, but I did not think when I said Socrates was giving mouth to some Hindu-ish ideas that this is something one needs persmission from the experts to say. To me, its like saying the sky is blue. Do we need Richard Dawkins to hold our hands for that? I'm sorry. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brenda maverick ( talk • contribs).
The article rewrite has not improved this article, but has left it in such a poor state that I am seriously considering reverting to a Jan. 2006 version. I don't know who is responsible for this, but the article is worse than it was a year ago. — Viriditas | Talk 10:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Ok, done. I would like to encourage all editors who work on this article to ensure that their edits are based in mainstream, reliable secondary sources rather than their own idiosyncratic personal interpretations. --Akhilleus ( talk) 04:54, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
If I'm not mistaken this particular work played an important part in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. There is a particular scene in the book where he is a bright young (yet overconfident) student and shocks his professor by exclaiming that Phaedrus is "THE WOLF!" He gets a shock value, etc, but one important fact is that Phaedrus means I think light (is it the same root as photon???), and it is Lysias who was the wolf.
Mr. Pirsig knows his mistake and expected the reader to see, but I wasn't privy to his knowledge and didn't get it until I re-read his latest edition of the book with the introduction stating this fact. I went through 20 years thinking Phaedrus meant Wolf. (-:
So mayhap this fits in somehow, maybe not. -- Eurlim 10:40, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone else think the "summary" section is way too long?
--Jacobwilliamson 16:25, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
This article mentions early on that the Phaedo is the last of the dialogues Plato wrote about Socrates' final days, naming the Euthrypho, Crito, Apology, and Meno as the others. Having recently re-read the Meno, I cannot recall where any reference is made to it taking place during the end of Socrates' life. It ties into Socrates' last days through the appearance of Anytus, but it's relatively clear that, at most, the Meno depicts the point at which Socrates lost Anytus' favor, rather than any event definitively close to his trial and execution. Since it doesn't really contribute anything to the article and since the bit about Anytus can be dealt with in the Meno article, I'm going to remove it, for the moment.
If anyone remembers something about the dialogue that connects it more clearly to Socrates' final days, they can feel free to correct me.
-- N.Type
In response to the template, I began going over the article. I removed some repetition and original research. There was some quotes from the Apology and the Meno that I removed because I don't think they belong in the summary section. Although they are relevant. I'll see if I can put them back in a commentary section.-- Jonathan Harking ( talk) 19:37, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
There is no discussion at all in the present article of the speculative-mythological section near the end of the dialogue, concerning the "oceans of air", the subterranean rivers, etc. If you can add something on this, it would be welcome. -- 77.7.149.205 ( talk) 16:16, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
As noted above, This article completely ignores an important part of the dialog: the Socrates’ version of a myth about the soul’s journey after death, with which he concludes his argument. See a critique of the tendency to dismiss this part of the dialog by Radcliffe Edmonds here: https://www.academia.edu/26186372/The_Upward_Path_of_Philosophy_The_Myth_in_Platos_Phaedo
“Many modern scholarly philosophical treatments of the dialogue simply ignore the final myth, treating it as a kind of optional extra, devoid of serious philosophical content…[this approach does not do] justice to the function of the myth within the dialogue, since [it] neglects the important ideas embedded in the myth.” — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cockeyed ( talk • contribs) 02:55, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Why should this be pronounced as Feedoh? Surely it should be Faydoh or Fydoh. Myrvin ( talk) 08:02, 3 March 2011 (UTC)
The last paragraph in this section does not refer to the argument in Phaedo, but the other form of this argument in Meno. The argument in Meno involves the interrogation of the slave and focuses on innate mathematical knowledge, Phaedo differs in that it discusses our understanding of the forms and other conceptual things in terms of recollection.
Would it not be wise to also include which line in the text certain quotes appear? Or is it better to only cite the pages at the end of paragraphs? I'm sure I could add these citations if everyone would prefer my prior suggestion. CJMcKenna98 ( talk) 04:00, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
In the sentence about Socrates' trial and death, this bit in parentheses is quite wrong: '(though some scholars think it was more for his support of "philosopher kings" as opposed to democracy)'.
The idea of philosopher kings is from Plato's Republic, which is one of his late works, written long after Socrates' death. There is no evidence from the early dialogues that Socrates was even aware of this idea, let alone a supporter of it. We have two accounts of Socrates' defence in court (usually but misleadingly entitled Apology, from the Latin apologia), one by Plato and one by Xenophon. Neither is a verbatim record, but there is no reason to think they paint a misleading picture.
It's true that there was a political dimension to the trial, but it was most likely based on the notorious fact that Socrates had associated with Alcibiades, who had gone over to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, and with several of the leaders of the murderous and tyrannical oligarchy that had briefly held power in Athens after the city's defeat by Sparta – including Critias, the vicious leader of the oligarchy. People wrongly thought that his teaching was responsible for their evil acts. Democracy had only been restored a few years previously at the time of Socrates' trial in 399BCE, and people were still bitter and angry about their suffering under the Thirty's reign of terror.
The nature of the charges against Socrates and the resulting trial is only marginally relevant to this article, and is in any case covered in the article on his trial. I suggest that the entire sentence should be drastically reduced to something like this: 'Socrates had been tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of the city; he was convicted by the jury, imprisoned and sentenced to death.'