From Death to Life: Key Themes in Plato's Phaedo

Franco Trabattoni is Full Professor of History of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Milan. His main research interests concern Plato’s philosophy, to which he has devoted a number of publications, including Essays on Plato's Epistemology (Leuven, 2016).

Introduction

 1Why Publish This Book?
 2Detailed Synopsis of the Book


1 Death

 1Dogmatism, Scepticism, etc.

 2Plato’s ‘Third Way’

 3Philosophy or Religion?

 4Immortality

 5Between Science and Ignorance

 6Conclusion


2 Suicide

 1Cebes’s Amazement

 2The Argument

 3The Morality of Happiness



3 Virtue

 1The Philosopher and Virtue: A Digression?

 2A Contradiction between Phaedo and Republic?

 3Philosophy as Politics

 4Popular and Philosophical Virtue

 5The Philosopher According to Plato

 6The Political Relevance of Asceticism

 7Conclusion



4 The (True) Philosopher

 1Sokratismusstreit

 2The True Philosopher: The Identity between Theory and Practice

 3Antisthenes and the Use of Pleasures: From Xenophon’s Symposium to Plato’s Gorgias

 4Antisthenes in the Phaedo

 5Philosophy and the Use of ?????

 6The Philosopher’s Life and Death



5 Recollection

 1Recollection as Demonstration of Immortality

 2Recollection as Condition of Possibility of Knowledge

 3Problems Solved

 4Recollection as Explanation of Human Middle Condition

 5Meno 85c–d

 6Episteme and Doxa



6 Harmony

 1Soul as Harmony: The Pythagorical Background

 2Socrates’ Second Argument

 3Socrate’s Third Argument

 4The Crucial Premise of the Third Argument

 5The Philosophical Significance of Socrate’s Refutation



7 Causes

 1Methodological Problems

 2The Causes of Generation, Corruption and Being

 3The Physical Causes: Socrates’ Dissatisfaction

 4What Is the Problem?

 5Eleatic Background

 6Conclusion



8 Voyage(s)

 1‘Deuteros plous’

 2What Is the “First Voyage?”

 3Images

 4The Logos “Hardest to Disprove”

 5Deuteros Plous in Philebus

 6Deuteros Plous in Statesman

 7Conclusion



9 Life

 1The ‘Last Argument’

 2What Occupies What?

 3Immortal and Indestructible

 4Conclusion



Works Cited