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This chapter examines the disputed relationship between Ambrose’s theology and Neoplatonic philosophy, with specific reference to his account of the identity of the person. One controversial passage is from On the Good of Death, where Ambrose, paraphrasing Ennead IV.7, appears to claim that an individual’s identity lies in the soul and that the body is not a constitutive element of the self. It will be argued that Ambrose’s dichotomization of soul and body in On the Good of Death and his appropriation of Plotinus reflect his understanding of the human condition after its corruption by sin, described based on his interpretation of Romans 7.

This chapter is devoted to Phaedo. It attempts to explicate the account of the person in that dialogue along with the proofs for the immortality of the soul. In this dialogue, along with the claim for the immortality of the soul the separation of Forms is found and the consequent demotion of the reality of the sensible world. It is within this context that the relation between embodied and disembodied persons is properly situated. This relation is understood as one between endowed and achieved personhood or selfhood. It is shown that for Plato, the ideal person is a knower, the subject of the highest form of cognition. That this form of cognition is apparently attributable only to disembodied persons is of the utmost importance. From this, it follows that the achievement of any embodied person is bound to fall short of the ideal.

Preexistence is associated with both Pythagoras and Orpheus, however. Plato is the most important classical source for ideas about pre-existence, writing about it in Phaedo, Meno, Phaedrus, Republic, and Timaeus. Symposium also presents a version of soul-mate love as have premortal bases. Preexistence supports Plato's particular epistemology as well as a version of theodicy and his understanding of erotic desire. Plato also links preexistence to theosis, a connection that will contribute to the paradigms eventual demise.

This chapter shows how the earliest accounts of Seneca's death were shaped by the conventions of death writing in the Greco-Roman world, some of which were already in use in Plato's Phaedo and in the accounts of Cato the Younger's suicide. These conventions, when applied to Seneca's death, serve more than one function in the broader representational edifices constructed by the three historians, particularly Tacitus. The telling of Seneca's death plays a pivotal role in three main stories: the arc of Seneca's life and career in Julio-Claudian Rome; the self-consciously literary story of tension between annalistic writing and the Exitus virorum illustrium; and the catalogue of executions and suicides in books 15 and 16 of the Annals.

The chapter takes the form of a commentary on Plato, Phaedo 74a9-c6. This passage is the centrepiece of Socrates' main argument for Recollection, based on the example of seeing equal sticks or stones and being led by these to think of something distinct from them — the Equal itself. This passage has long been recognized as containing a pivotal argument for the separation of forms from their sensible instances. But virtually every sentence of it has generated at least one interpretative crux.

This chapter makes several proposals concerning Plato's discussion in Phaedo (95e f.), where causes or explanations are said to be or be based on forms or essences. It states that Plato's argument involves not a contentious notion of a Platonic form but only the notion of essence in the sense of the correct answer to a question of the type ‘What is’, with which we are familiar from earlier in this dialogue, from Plato's earlier dialogues. Second, the chapter suggests, Plato's argument does not rely on a presupposed notion of essence but rather serves to establish the need for such a notion in the context of explanation. Third, it contends, Plato's argument does not rely on the principle ‘like-explains/causes-like’ but rather on the requirement that explanations must be uniform, which Plato spells out independently of that principle. Fourth, the chapter argues, in Plato's account of explanation, which involves basic essences, physical or material components of things can be genuinely part of explanations. Finally, Plato's argument is to be understood as conducted according to a general method of argument and inquiry. This method of argument and inquiry consists in first articulating a particular aporia about explanation in general, and then arguing that a particular account of explanation is both necessary and sufficient to resolve this aporia. The aporia is that, on the one hand, no proposed explanation is genuinely explanatory unless it is uniform; but, on the other hand, no currently proposed explanations, be they everyday or the scientific ones favoured by the natural philosophers, are uniform or begin to indicate how the uniformity-requirement is to be satisfied in the explanations that we propose.

This chapter shows how Proclus and Damascius approached the myth of the Phaedo as a scientific text, with particular attention paid to their attempts to understand and support Plato’s remarks about four traditional problems regarding the Earth’s size, shape, stability and position. Although Plato makes assertions about the Earth’s occupying the middle position in the cosmos and being spherical, Damascius supplies an assortment of missing arguments. These range from astronomical arguments familiar from Ptolemy and Cleomedes, and physical and metaphysical arguments that have their source in the Timaeus and other staples of Platonism. When it comes to the size of the Earth, Damascius and Proclus acknowledge the disagreement between Plato on the one hand and Aristotle (who had astronomers such as Erastothenes on his side) on the other, and literally fight an uphill battle for their school’s founder by urging us to reconsider whether the mountain peaks we see are not to be taken as indications of the true size of the Earth’s surface. But it is perhaps Plato’s treatment of the Earth’s stability that most forcefully establishes his affiliation with the cosmological tradition. For here he produces an argument that resonates very strongly with arguments found in Anaximander (and Parmenides) and that was vigorously criticized by Aristotle. Here again, later Platonists are once more compelled to take a new look at the text and re-evaluate Plato’s relation to his predecessors as well as to his successor Aristotle.

With chapter 10, the author starts the long study of the Republic, which lasts for 9 chapters. This chapter discusses the relevance of the theory of forms for Plato’s ethics. Considering the crucial passages of the Republic book V but also of the Phaedo, it is argued that the distinction between sensibles and forms is significant for ethics. Socrates fails to provide proper definitions in ethics because, lacking the theory of forms, he unsuccessfully tries to make the definitions fit with sensible properties.

Despite being material beings, humans are unlike most material objects—we are conscious and able to express our thoughts in language. This book examines the possibility of giving a naturalistic explanation of these latter aspects of human activity. The last discourse of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo suggests that it is possible that some of our motivations are non‐Darwinian, i.e. not directly concerned with survival and reproduction and that our nature as conscious agents can make our goals and projects puzzling or inexplicable in physical or biological terms. If we are programmed for survival and reproduction, why, e.g. did Socrates choose that fate that he did? Kant and Wittgenstein represent modern philosophers who also circumscribe the role of naturalistic explanation and leave room for a philosophical account of our behaviour as rational, moral agents concerned with thinking and acting for the best.

This chapter turns to Plato's Phaedo as well as the Gospel of Matthew: two narratives about death, and two visions of human nature. Christ's cry on the cross, as told by Matthew, gives voice to an understanding of human life that is radically different from that of Socrates. For Phaedo's Socrates, the truly important things in life are ideas: the eternal order of the world, the understanding of which leads to unperturbed peace and serenity in the face of death. The Gospel is the complete opposite: it testifies to the incurable presence of the Unknown in every moment of life, a presence that rips apart every human certainty built on what is known, that disturbs all peace, all serenity—that severs the continuity of time, opening every moment of our lives to nothingness, thereby inscribing within them the possibility of an abrupt end and the chance at a new beginning.

Plato offers the first metaphysical exploration of the nature of causation and explanation, and the relationship between these and other metaphysical concepts, such as forms, properties, and the soul. Hankinson focuses on two dialogues, the Phaedo and the Timaeus; in the first of these, Plato rejects the materialism of natural science, in favour of the good as the ground of teleological explanations, and he invokes forms as invariable causal properties. Plato explores the notion of an archê, or ultimate principle, in his argument for the immortality of the soul; this notion comes together with the concept of hypothetical investigation and the casual account of knowledge in the Timaeus. Here, Plato offers a cosmogony invoking a divine artificer who fashions the universe from a receptacle, a material substratum that can receive all forms. In Plato's philosophy, there is the emergence of a concern with the correct form that an explanation ought to take, and also an emphasis on teleological explanation.

This chapter sets out the theory of forms defended in the Parmenides and spelled out in more detail in the Phaedo and the objections leveled against forms to determine how the theory can be revised and preserved. Among the main problems discussed are participation (initially the relation between sensible particulars and forms), self-predication (the form of F-ness is itself F), forms as causes, and the question whether forms are separate (exist apart) from the things whose features they are invoked to explain or are immanent in them. The chapter argues that many problems stem from the separation of forms. Later chapters will show that the dialogues in the series Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman treat forms as immanent but keep much of the rest of the theory intact.

In Chapter 7 Aristotle draws some conclusions from the survey of earlier philosophers' views in A3-6. He is interested, not so much in what archai they believed in, or in what kinds of causes they believed in, but rather in how they used their archai as causes: that is, how they used, in explaining other things, the things they posited at the beginning of their accounts. In A7 he is especially interested in how philosophers who posited a Good as an archê used it in explanations. Developing the Phaedo, Aristotle argues that although Anaxagoras posited a Good (namely nous), he used it in explanations only as an efficient cause, not as a final cause, and so did not use it as a cause quâ good. Aristotle then turns the argument against Plato, arguing that although he posited a Good (namely the One), he used in explanations only as a formal cause, not as a final cause, and so did not use it as a cause quâ good. (Plato used efficient and final causes, but, Aristotle claims, he used his archai only as formal and material causes, and used only derivative things as efficient and final causes.) Aristotle is himself implicitly promising that he will discover a good archê and use it in explanations as a final cause. He is not arguing that earlier thinkers progressively discovered the four causes, but rather that even those who posited a Good failed to use it as a final cause; this helps to persuade Aristotle's readers that a new investigation is needed. This chapter concludes with a discussion of Aristotle's critique of the material monists in the first part of A8.

This chapter attempts to distinguish the way in which Plato in the Republic talks about the good itself from the way in which he talks about the just, the temperate, the brave, etc. It suggests that the obvious respect in which the idea of the good differs from the other forms points not so much to a revision of views expressed about the forms earlier, for example in the Phaedo, as to an explication in light of which the Phaedo and other earlier dialogues should be re-read. On the basis of this investigation, some tentative conclusions are drawn concerning the development or, respectively, the systematic nature of Plato's ontology in the dialogues up to and including the Republic.

This chapter analyses Gregory Vlastos' interpretation of the Socratic problem in order to establish Plato's subjective credentials. It argues that the Platonic invention or his series of dialogues is subject to the Socratic event, which was extensively and symptomatically played out in the Apology and resolved in the Republic. It criticises Vlastos' separation of Socrates and Plato and shows that the Phaedo is a meditation on the proper course a subject faithful to the production of truths must take in order to realise the place of a non-sophistic education.

This chapter examines the influence of Greek philosopher Plato on the Christian concept of hope. It analyzes the extent to which Plato was the source of a theology that treats the resurrection of the flesh as an appendix or supplement to the immortality of the soul, and clarifies some of Plato's thoughts which had been subject to the misunderstandings of Christian and non-Christian idealists, positivists and logicians. This also provides an interpretation of Plato's Phaedoand discusses the Christian message of death and hope.

This chapter focuses on the topic of humanity's ultimate felicity, which is another common interest between some Greek philosophers and believers of scriptural religions. It discusses assumptions that a person's mundane existence as a material entity was not the end of the matter; that there had to be something more than a life of material pursuits and satisfaction. This chapter includes Plato's dialogues in Phaedo where he enunciated and argued for the doctrine that the human soul is immortal by virtue of its essential incorporeality and hence incorruptibility. In other dialogues of Plato, the core doctrine of an immortal soul is associated with the ancillary ideas of the pre-existence of the soul and of the transmigration of souls. It talks about how in later Platonism, especially the philosophy of Plotinus, the basic idea of an immortal soul is interpreted in terms of the doctrine of the ascent, or “reversion”, of the human soul to some higher entity, the World Soul, or even to the One, the ultimate reality.