Read Plato Phaedo 78b-81a (Stephanus numbers; not pages) while considering the following questions:
· How does Plato describe “the Forms”?
· How do the Forms differ from material things?
· Is the soul more
like
the Forms or more
like
material things? Explain.
· How does
affinity
between the soul and Forms suggest the soul’s immortality?
———————————————————————
Note
: Plato doesn’t actually use the term “Forms” in the reading at this point yet. But he has been talking about “the reality of all other things, that which each of them essentially is” (65d-67b) such as the Beautiful itself, the Good itself, the Equal itself, etc. (75c-d, 76d).
And in this reading he talks about things like:
· “each thing in itself, the real” or
· “that reality of whose existence we are giving an account” or
· “those other realities” or
· the things that “the soul investigates by itself”.
This is what he (and I) mean by the “Forms”.
For the first two questions above, you could (but don’t have to) do a chart with a column for “Forms” and a column for “material things” and list adjectives under each. You could do this in pairs of opposites. For instance:
