GREK.SP24

In the Phaedo, Plato presents a poignant picture of the last hours of Socrates. Plato’s dialogues all prompt questions about how to read and understand the complex interchanges between the interlocutors, but no dialogue presents the stakes of the discussion as vividly as the Phaedo, where the debates on the nature of death and the soul are set against the background of Socrates’ imminent execution. How ought one to live? What does it mean to die? How is the life of philosophy a practice for death?
In this seminar, we will explore the ideas of life and death, soul and body, philosophy and purification in the Phaedo. In addition to a close reading of the text itself, we will sample from the scholarly debates over the understanding and interpretation of the Phaedo that have gone on over the past two and a half millennia of reading Plato’s Phaedo.