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¶ … Phaedo, Socrates asserts that the physical senses are a distraction to acquired pure knowledge. What reasons does Socrates give to justify this assertion? Did you find Socrates' argument on this point convincing? Why or why not? Was there anything that you read in the Phaedo that you found especially interesting, or that you did not completely understand?
The best way that we can understand Socrates' reason for seeing the physical senses as distraction is by understanding his underlying philosophy of Forms. To Socrates, every physical and conceptual element was a Form that was merely a mirage of eth Ideal within. The Ideal was contained within the Form, but beyond it, and the physical packaging of the Form occluded it. True happiness and Love can never consist of physical manifestation; it is always alluding to something beyond it - to the true eudemonia which is genuine, authentic bliss which is contained in the spirituality and intense pleasure of Pure Knowledge.
In the Phaedo, Socrates gives three reasons for the body, or materialism being a hindrance to pursuit of wisdom:
1. The senses are unreliable and deceptive. They trick the soul...
They occlude the light of the soul (as Socrates showed in another place with people chained in a cave watching the dancing fire). They prevent her from gaining true knowledge and prevent the philosopher form reflecting. The soul can only gain freedom when she "dismissed the body" and is "as much alone with herself as possible" (65c).
2. One has to spend so much time satisfying one's natural physical desires such as eating and drinking to satisfy hunger and thirst. What a waste of time! (66c). In this way, too, our attention is distracted from seeing the Forms inherent in aspects such as the Just, the Beautiful, the Good, and "in a word, the reality of all other things, that which each of them essentially is" (65d). These Forms can be approached only by pure thought alone but sense perception obstructs us from seeing them / contemplating them.
3. Passion, desires, emotions, and fears introduced by the body lead it off course, swamp the human into irrational and indiscrete behavior leading to individual, national and global misery and conflict that frequently culminate in war and death:…
Instead, he challenges the reliability of the person who claims knowledge, by asking him for a definition that would hold for all circumstances. The point is not to ascertain whether he is right in this case, but to see whether his claim could hold for every case. This is close to the skeptical issue, but deceptively so."(Benson, 87) in the Socratic view therefore, knowledge is perceived as the greatest
The logic is simple: the judges here are fakes but the judges in the afterlife are real; and moreover, the one truth he asks the jury to keep in mind is that "…a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death" (41-c). After all, Socrates will find joy in questioning and having discussions with iconic persons like Homer or Orpheus: "I could spend my time testing
Plato conceived that there were two great causes of human corruption, viz., bad or ill-directed education, and the corrupt influence of the body on the soul. His ethical discussions, therefore, have for their object, the limiting of the desires, and the cure of the diseases produced by them in the soul; while his political discussions have for their immediate object, the laying down of right principles of education, and enforcing
However, many times, viewing an object in relation to other objects does indeed transcend the permanence of the meaning and create new meaning. Therefore, our knowledge of what we are convinced is real can change, which highlights the question of whether or not our original knowledge was real before it changed; or if knowledge can ever be real. Socrates posed these questions initially, pondering the ability to agree that
Immortality of the soul- many philosophers, laureates and scientists have delved upon the subject in both the earlier times and the present time. However, the logic of the immortality of the soul, whether it is true or not that is the soul being mortal, has not been justified till yet. Plato and Socrates have justified what they believe, Kant also rationalizes the existence of God and the immortality of soul,
Socrates In Euthyphro, Socrates' questioning centers on discovering the true definition of piety -- but it is geared towards arriving at a sense of reasonable judgment (after all, he himself is about to go before the judges, and he would like to receive a judgment that is reasonable from them). What he meets in Euthyphro is willfulness and subjectivity. Socrates attempts to show why it is important to remain objective about