Ideas from Phaedo

By Plato

Back to Phaedo

572 ideas

Sample Ideas

  • The hunt for justice reveals it was present ‘at our feet’ from the start in the founding principle; methodological humility is needed to recognize what lies nearest.
  • All preparatory studies acquire value for the city only when they are interconnected and considered in their mutual affinities; otherwise they do not serve the higher objective.
  • Souls that have been pre‑eminent in holiness, and especially those purified by philosophy, are released from the ‘earthly prison’ of the body and go to a pure home above, dwelling in a purer earth; the philosophically purified live altogether without bodies in indescribably fair mansions.
  • Counter-attack: Real rulers tend subjects like flocks for their own or their master’s profit; thus ‘justice’ is in fact another’s good (the rulers’), making the just a loser and the unjust a gainer—maximally so in tyranny.
  • The many sensible particulars (e.g., beautiful things, just things) partake of opposites and thus neither purely are nor are not; they lie between being and not-being and are therefore objects of opinion, not of knowledge.
  • Women guardians should share all duties, including war and defense, with lighter labors assigned due to weaker nature; ridicule of naked training misunderstands that the useful is the noble.
  • Oligarchy, aiming insatiably at wealth, breeds debtors, paupers, and social antagonism that culminate in civil strife and the eventual revolution to democracy.
  • Ring of Gyges thought experiment: if people could act unjustly with impunity (invisibility), both 'just' and 'unjust' would do the same things; hence people are just only by compulsion, believing injustice is more profitable.
  • If candidates are sound in body and mind, the vast education will save the constitution; if not, it will discredit philosophy still further.
  • The delay of Socrates’ execution is explained by the Athenian religious custom of keeping the city ritually pure during the annual sacred voyage of Theseus’ ship to Delos, during which no public executions may occur.