Plato's Image of Immortality

Plato's Image of ImmortalityAuthor(s): Kenneth DorterSource: The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 105 (Oct., 1976), pp. 295-304Published by: Wiley for The Philosophical QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2218860 .

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THE

PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

VOL. 26 No. 105 OCTOBER 1976

PLATO'S IMAGE OF IMMORTALITY BY KENNETH DORTER

The third immortality argument is the most neglected of all the arguments-and perhaps even of all the passages-of the Phaedo, and it is easy to see why. The other arguments are set out with a good deal of formal rigour and are based on clearly exhibitable factors such as the reciprocating cycles of nature, our implicit appeal to apparently pre-empirical paradigms when we judge properties such as equality, and the entailments of such concepts as life, death, and immortality. This one, however, is set forth rather casually, is frequently weakened by qualifications and hesitancy, and is based merely on analogy, thereby being open to rejection by anyone who simply chooses to reject the analogy.

Because of these factors the possibility has been overlooked that, in another way, it may be the most important of the arguments. It is, after all, the central argument of the dialogue, both in the sense of being closest to the middle of the dialogue and, if one treats the first two arguments as constituting a single complex argument (as Socrates does at 77c-d), also in the sense of being the middle argument (however, I shall continue to refer to it as the third). Such centrality tends to be a position of honour in Plato, although in itself it proves nothing. The third argument's importance among the arguments for immortality is, I think, like the importance, among arguments for the existence of God, of the argument from design. The argument from design is, from a logical-scientific point of view, also the weakest of its group. The cosmological arguments, like the first Phaedo argument, are based on inferences from observed natural processes-the perpetual chain of mechanical causality, in one case, and the reciprocity of natural processes, in the other. The ontological argument, on the other



296 KENNETH DORTER

hand, like the final argument of the Phaedo, impresses by its dazzling conceptual deductions, which possess the remarkable quality of appearing both simple and opaque. But the argument from design, like the third argument of the Phaedo, is putatively justified neither by strictly observed natural processes nor by conceptual entailment, but only by loose analogical reasoning. This symmetry between the two groups of arguments is not especially remarkable, since, when investigating what is not knowable intrinsically, three natural avenues of approach, or clues, are respectively the processes of nature (which include recollection as well as the workings of external nature), the entailments of concepts, and reasoning from analogy. What is more remarkable is that the argument from design, despite its lack of rigour, seems ultimately to be the most persuasive of the arguments, to judge from the reasons most people actually give for affirming God's existence. In what follows I shall try to show that this is true as well of the third argument of the Phaedo, and shall offer an analysis and interpretation both of the argument proper and of Socrates' immediate application of it.

Allowing for some ambiguities, and reserving certain questions for later, the argument may be summarized as follows.

l(a) composite -? dispersable; (b) incomposite -? indispersable (78c 1-5)

2(a) unchangeable -> incomposite; (b) changeable -> composite (c 6-9).1

Socrates' next words, "now let us go back to those things to which we looked in the previous argument", suggest that the first stage of the argument is finished. Let us therefore note the premise to which it leads.

2'(a) changeable -* dispersable; (b) unchangeable -> indispersable. Now,

3(a) Form -> unchangeable; (b) particular -> changeable (d 1-e 5) 4(a) particular (and changeable) -> visible (b) (Form and) unchangeable -> intelligible and invisible (79a 1-8)

5(a) invisible -> unchangeable; (b) visible -+ changeable (a 9-11) 6 We are partly body, partly soul (b 1-3) 7(a) body resembles the visible; (b) soul resembles the invisible2

(b 4-c 1). This concludes another stage of the argument and we can now draw the conclusions, not stated until 80b, that

C l(a) body resembles the visible (7), therefore the changeable (5), therefore the dispersable (2);

(b) soul resembles the invisible (7), therefore the unchangeable (5), therefore the indispersable (2).

'See David Gallop, Plato, Phaedo (Oxford, 1975), p. 138. 2This is the one premise at which Cebes balks, conceding at first only that "it is not

seen by people anyway" (79b 8). His fear of the soul's disintegration shows that he at least sometimes thinks of the soul as some special kind of physical substance. Thus he is ready enough to admit that people don't in fact see it, but seems reluctant to insist that it is intrinsically invisible. If, like a gas, it were physically substantial, it might somehow be capable of being rendered visible.



PLATO'S IMAGE OF IMMORTALITY 297

Further, 8(a) making use of the body for learning involves us in the sensible,

changing world; (b) making use of the soul alone involves us in the (invisible) eternal,

unchanging, immortal realm, to which it is akin (79c 2-d 8). Therefore,

C 2(a) soul resembles the unchangeable; (b) body resembles the changeable (d 9-e 7).

Further, 9(a) In a living body nature ordains that soul rules; and (b) body

serves (e 8-80a 2). 10(a) Similarly, by nature the divine rules; and (b) the mortal serves

(a 2-6). Therefore,

C 3(a) soul resembles the divine; (b) body resembles the mortal (a 7-9): Consider, then, Cebes, whether, from all that has been said, these are our results: soul is most similar to the divine and immortal and intelligible and uniform and indissoluble and what always holds to itself in the same way about the same things; and body is most similar to the human and mortal and multiform and unintelligible and dis- soluble and what never holds to itself in the same way about the same things (80a 10-b 5).

Socrates concludes by pointing out that although the body eventually disintegrates, it at first remains in the same state for a fairly long time,3 even if it is in beautiful condition and at the prime of life,4 and especially if it has been embalmed. Indeed, certain parts, such as bones and sinews, are, so to speak, immortal. If this is true of the body, Socrates suggests, the soul must be truly imperishable.

The three approaches to the conclusion, culminating in C1, C2, and C3, reflect three considerations on which the question is viewed, recalling the three stages of the earlier argument in defence of the philosophic life as the practising of death (64c ff.), to which Socrates referred at 79c 2. The earlier argument moved first from a consideration of the body (the unworthiness of corporeal desires: 64c-65a) to a consideration of the soul (the body's hindrance of it in the soul's pursuit of knowledge: 65a-d), and then to a consideration of the Forms themselves and how they must be approached (65d-66a). Here too the three levels of being are reflected in the three con-

3Although it may take a very long time for the body's dissolution to be accomplished, the process begins immediately upon death, since the body stops renewing itself (cf. Symposium 207e). If we take Socrates' earlier remark, that the body is "quickly dis- solved" at death (80b 9), to refer to this onset, not the conclusion of the process, the apparent contradiction between the two passages (cf. Gallop p. 142) can be resolved.

4This is perhaps the prevalent reading: W. D. Geddes, The Phaedo of Plato (London, 1863); W. J. Verdenius, "Notes on Plato's Phaedo", Mnemosyne, IV ser. 11 (1958), 193- 243); R. Loriaux, Le Phedon de Platon (57a-84b) (Namur, 1969); David Gallop, pp. 230-1.

On the other hand, John Burnet, Plato's Phaedo (Oxford, 1911); R. S. Bluck, Plato's Phaedo (London, 1955); and R. Hackforth, Plato's Phaedo (Cambridge, 1955) take Av TOLOc6,rn &pq to refer not to a time of life but a season of the year; while Archer-Hind, The Phaedo of Plato (London, 1894), and Hackforth take eav to mean not "even if" but "especially if". Fortunately none of these disputes matter to the argument.



298 KENNETH DORTER

clusions. The first conclusion is drawn from the contrast of soul and body, resulting in the soul's designation as invisible, a merely negative term signifying the absence of a corporeal quality rather than the presence of something proper to it. The second conclusion, however, as with the earlier argument, is based on the soul itself and its aspiration toward knowledge, with the observation that the body hinders it because of its inconstancy, while the soul, when it abstracts itself from bodily movement, displays its constancy, a sign of indissolubility. The third conclusion, again, is based on a consideration of the divine, its mandate to rule; and here the indissolubility of the soul is affirmed not because of the absence of a corporeal property, or because of its own intrinsic steadiness, but because of its kin- ship to the divine.

The general point of the argument is that, since the soul resembles the divine in so many essential ways, we can expect it to resemble the divine also in point of immortality. The Phaedo's opening three arguments for immortality thus progress, like the stages of this argument and the one about the philosophic life, from a consideration of the soul in relation to corporeal nature, through a consideration of its intrinsic activity in pursuing knowledge, to a consideration of it in relation to the nature of the Forms. The first argument investigates corporeal nature, the cycle of alternation, and infers the need for the permanence of psychic material. The second investigates the soul's way of learning, concluding that it is a recognitive process entailing prenatal apprehension (whether we take this literally or metaphorically) of the essences of things. The third, although making reference to the corporeal and philosophic implications of the soul, is primarily directed to a comparison of the soul and the divine (the divine conceived interchangeably, it seems, in terms of gods and Forms), offering grounds for immortality derived not from the exigencies of nature or of learning, but from the soul's nobility of being, which shows it akin to eternal things.

The argument is clearly not intended to be a rigorous one. The language is quite imprecise in places, so much so that steps l(b) and 2 are ambiguous in their subject-predicate relationship, and several premises are seriously weakened by qualifications. For example, it is appropriate for an incomposite thing, if for anything, not to be dispersed (78c 4); incomposite things are most likely things that are constant (c 7); soul is more like the invisible than is body, and body more like the visible than soul (even though Cebes has already admitted that the soul in fact is invisible, and would certainly have admitted as well that body is visible, 79b); and, finally, it is concluded that the soul is indissoluble or close to it (80b 8). The qualifications reflect, and are presumably meant to call our attention to, the fact that the argument is not a rigorous deduction but an appeal to analogies. There is more of an attempt to argue from shared predicates to similarity of subject, than to construct a deduction that avoids undistributed middle terms.

I suggested at the beginning that this argument, though the least rigorous




of the four in the Phaedo, may be the most persuasive. Perhaps the most significant and fundamental reason why people have continued to believe in the non-finality of death and in their personal immortality is the sense of something eternal within oneself. We feel there is something in us eternally valid, something that counts for all time, which is not erased with our death. One can thus speak of eternality in temporality (the presence of the eternal at every moment of time), of the eternal recurrence of every moment, and of the indefinite perpetuity of the personal soul after death, and evoke in one's audience a feeling of recognition, for each of these gives expression to that inward sense. By giving thematic consideration to the appearance of the soul as noble and divine, Plato brings to our attention the sense of nobility and divinity within us, from which our feeling of eternality springs. Nothing is rigorously demonstrated, but our inner conviction is encouraged and articulated. Like the argument from design for the existence of God, this is effective-perhaps more so than any other such argument-because it explores and develops the source of the belief, rather than producing arguments that are clear and impressive but somehow irrelevant to our convictions.

If we ask which of the three above expressions of the sense of eternity Plato espouses, the answer seems at first to be the indefinite perpetuity of the soul after death. But this cannot be assumed uncritically, for Socrates' use of religious imagery does not coincide with its popular meaning, much though he obscures these differences. He is concerned here with convincing his audience that death is not to be feared (which can be taken as reflecting, at least in part, Plato's own intentions toward his own audience); and we have just heard that this convincing must be achieved by incantation as well as argument, and that Socrates is a master of this (77d-78a). Incanta- tion, the context shows, is here understood as an attempt to illustrate to our pre-rational nature (the "child within us") something that may also be demonstrated to our intellect. As most people are moved not ultimately at the level of intellect but by emotion and imagery, such incantation is an important adjunct to demonstration where persuasion as well as investigation is important. Accordingly, throughout the Phaedo, Socrates connects his conclusions with their analogues in popular religion. This gives to the pious the illusion of reassurance, the illusion that the religious doctrines they would like to believe in have been corroborated by Socrates' arguments. If one looks more closely, however, one finds that the relation between Socrates' conclusions and the tenets of popular religion is one of metaphor, not identity. Thus, although Socrates speaks here of Hades, it turns out that he does not mean the underworld of traditional mythology, but rather the intelligible, invisible ("A(aSq, o&8C) realm of the Forms (80d 5-7). Similarly, he speaks of the gods, but his characterization of them as supremely good (62d, 80d), and dwelling in Hades (81a, 85a-b), shows that what he means by "gods" is different from what the traditional religion took them to be. Rather, as we



300 KENNETH DORTER

have seen, the term seems to be used as a metaphor for the Forms. If Socrates is thus willing to use the terms and images of traditional religion as metaphors to present his own views, but metaphors whose literal sense is quite different for him from what it is to the pious, this may apply just as much to his use of the religious image of the indefinite perpetuity of the personal soul, as to the images of Hades and the gods.

Once one abstracts from the misleading connotations of popular religion conveyed by Plato's unconventional use of "Hades" and "the gods", one can see the Phaedo's arguments as furnishing us with a sense of immortality closer to the discovery of eternity within ourselves than to unending individual perpetuity. The first argument showed that the vital principle within us must continue to exist lest all vitality ultimately be extinguished from the universe. This surely provides us with no grounds for belief in the survival of our individual personality, despite Socrates' ambiguous references to Hades. It does, however, convey the idea that the life within us is in- separable from the life that always was and always will be. It gives us no grounds to hope that we, in any meaningful sense, continue to exist, but it enables us to perceive that a spark of eternality lies at the heart of our being. It shows us possessing not a discrete individuality which continues always to exist, but a universality within which we can perceive our participation in the everlasting.

The same is true of the argument from recollection. What is shown there is that the learning and reflection characteristic of human consciousness are founded upon an underlying apprehension of eternal Forms that are the ultimate meaning of the finite objects of our experience. The presence of the eternal in the temporal, rather than the pre-existence of individual consciousness, is what primarily gets shown. Perhaps for this reason, the temporality of the argument seems to be left deliberately ambiguous.5

So in the first two arguments, and in the third as well, the implications point to immortality, conceived not as individual continuity, but as consciousness of the eternal present-despite the contrary appearance conveyed by Socrates' use of religious imagery. This is reflected somewhat in the arguments' language, which always implies distinctions between the temporal personality and the eternal soul. Socrates does not speak merely of the body's dying and being born, while "we", the souls, continue to exist. Rather he speaks of our dying and being born, while the soul continues to exist. Such language discourages an uncritical identification of the immortality of soul with a continuity of personal consciousness-in fact discourages any such interpretation. The disjunction becomes more apparent in each proof, as they progressively turn toward the soul's most spiritual nature. It is more noticeable in the second proof6 than in the first, and most

5I have discussed this in "Equality, Recollection, and Purification" (Phronesis, 17 (1972), 198-218), esp. pp. 210-8.

6See ibid., pp. 211-2.




of all in the third, where not only is there an explicit distinction between "us" and our souls (79b 1), but the "human" is consistently identified with the corporeal and mortal (78d 10, 80b 3), thus making it already questionable whether any surviving soul could meaningfully be said to retain any vestige of humanity that must be presupposed in a doctrine of personal immortality. The effect of this is to make it difficult to equate psychic survival with personal survival, and, by contrast, to give greater prominence to the sense of immortality afforded by apprehension of the timeless present.7

Nevertheless, after the argument Socrates proceeds to give an apparently matter of fact account of what is likely to happen to the soul after death, and the soul as here described is clearly individual and personal. It is not enough simply to assume without further consideration that the posthumous events Socrates describes are merely metaphors for something else. Nor would it follow necessarily if they were incompatible with the concluding myth, since the latter alone may be fictitious. Such a conclusion can be justified, if at all, only by an examination of his words.

The section begins with the remark already referred to, that the true sense of "Hades" is not the traditional one, but rather the realm of the invisible and pure, which accordingly only accommodates souls purified of the influence of the visible body, a purification not accomplished by death but only by the prior leading of a life devoted to philosophy rather than corporeal pursuits. Such souls dwell evermore with the gods (80d-81a). The soul that has not lived purely, that has devoted itself to corporeal desires and shunned and feared the intelligible, will be stained by corporeal forms. "One must consider this [stain] ponderous, heavy, earthy, and visible, my friend. Possessing this, such a soul is weighed down and dragged back to the visible realm by fear of the invisible and Hades" (91c 8-11). This, we are told, explains the phantoms that are said to have been seen near burial places. These souls are eventually reincarnated in forms appropriate to their type of impurity. Those characterized by corporeal desire (gluttony, lechery, drunkenness, for example) become donkeys and the like. The spirited type (characterized by injustice, tyranny, robbery), on the other hand, become wolves, hawks, and kites. Those who led lives that were virtuous but only out of habit, not conviction, become social creatures like bees, wasps, or ants, after which they become human again. Unlike the lovers of the body, the lovers of honour (82c 5-8), and the practisers of "shadow-virtue" (cf. 68d-69a), the philosophers, joining the gods, are not reincarnated again.

7David Gallop, however, argues that 115c-d shows that "the soul is the true self, the real person": "After his death they should not speak of burying "him", but rather "his body" (115c 4-116a 1). "Socrates" is to be distinguished from his body, and is thus implicitly identified with his soul" (p. 88; cf. p. 224). But this does not follow, for the question is not whether Socrates identified the personality with the soul or with the body-no one supposes him to have identified it with the body-but whether he identified it with the soul or with the composite arising from the union of soul and body, and the latter view is as compatible with this passage as is the former. If the person is the composite of body and soul, then too by burying the inanimate body one would not bury the person, and the person would instead have "departed", since the composite, unlike the body, no longer exists. It seems likely to me that Socrates' way of putting it is deliberately ambiguous.



302 KENNETH DORTER

This account, if taken literally, would pose two serious difficulties. The first is that the philosophic souls' exemption from reincarnation would, slowly but inexorably, exhaust the world's vitality. According to the first argument, new souls are not created, rather the souls of the dead must be recycled into new births in order that the world continue in its present state. If each generation's philosophers escaped reincarnation, therefore, over suf- ficient millennia the conditions of birth would eventually be exhausted. One might derive from this a theory of historical progress toward universal blessedness, but Plato's view of history is cyclic, with the fundamental conditions remaining eternally the same.

The other, more immediate, difficulty is that Socrates, almost directly after rigorously distinguishing soul from body because it is invisible (79b 12-14), says that soul can become assimilated to the body, and take on corporeal forms that render it visible, while yet it remains soul (cf. Gallop, p. 143). I do not think either of these problems can be resolved satisfactorily as long as Socrates' words are taken literally.

Let us consider more precisely what Socrates means by the soul's taking on bodily forms. His remark, that "possessing this, such a soul is weighed down and dragged back to the visible realm by fear of the invisible and Hades", is provokingly ambiguous. Is it a literal admixture of corporeal weight that anchors the soul, or is it the soul's "fear of the invisible"? If the former, why should that be glossed as this "fear"? The two by no means sound synonymous. It seems likely that the first is an image, in popular religious terms, of the second; and the second the more literal expression. To test this interpretation let us examine Socrates' subsequent description of how the "corporealizing" of the soul comes about.

The soul is imprisoned by the body (82e ff.), but not merely in the earlier sense in which we were said to be imprisoned by the gods (62b), for we are discouraged from escaping that prison (ppoupa) while encouraged to escape this one (espytdg). This prison represents not merely a confinement within the body (life) but the additional devotion to the corporeal at the expense of the spiritual. It is depicted as well as a glueing (83e 2), nailing (83d 4), and binding (84a 5) of the soul to the body, brought about by means of pleasure and pain, desire and fear:

The soul of every person, when experiencing intense pleasure or pain, is forced at the same time to regard that which most affects it this way as most clear and true, although this is not the case; and these things are for the most part visible (83c 5-8). Every pleasure and pain, having a sort of nail, nails the soul to the body, and fastens it, and makes it have corporeal form, so that the soul considers to be true those things which the body so declares (d 4-6).

Our imprisonment is thus a function of our responding to the corporeal pleasures and pains, of our nurturing in ourselves corresponding desires and fears, and of our becoming increasingly attached to the visible realm. Philo- sophy must not only teach the soul the unreality attendant on sense percep- tion, but urge it to collect and gather itself together by itself, trusting to




thought rather than sense (83a-b). This collecting and gathering is under- mined by pleasures and pains, in attending to which the soul may be said instead to become diffused throughout the body, and thus "perform the endless labour of a Penelope working some web in reverse" (84a).8

In all of this, the references to the "glueing", "imprisoning", "binding", and "nailing" of the soul to the body (as well as its "unweaving" itself) are clearly metaphorical, and the reference to the soul's being made to have corporeal form (acoptaToLS': 83d 5)-which had just been shown in the pre- ceding argument to be a literal contradiction-coming in the midst of all these metaphors, is probably metaphorical as well. This accords with our earlier speculation that the soul's being "weighed down" by taking on corporeal forms (8opxTolot8o1S: 81c 4) was meant only metaphorically, as signifying "fear of the invisible". Our affirmation of the exclusive reality of sensible things, due to our devotion to the body, carries with it a disbelief in the reality of the invisible, and a resultant mistrust and fear of entering such a realm. That this fear should apply not to the living embodied soul, however, but to the disembodied soul after death, whose nature is to be invisible, is hard to accept. It would be somewhat reminiscent of the comedy theme of certain animated cartoons, where a ghost is terrified of ghosts.

There is thus good reason to conclude that here, as well as in his references to Hades and gods, Plato is using popular religious imagery to body forth his philosophical conceptions in concrete tangible metaphor. In popular religion not only is immortality represented by indefinite perpetuation of the personality, but the advantage of goodness and disadvantage of evil are represented by tangible rewards and punishments in the afterlife. Socrates and Plato clearly believed that goodness is intrinsically desirable, and evil intrinsically undesirable, but in a popular dialogue like the Phaedo, where much of Plato's, like Socrates', audience is composed of non-philosophers, such intrinsic worth and worthlessness could be illustrated at another level by the extrinsic rewards and punishments related in popular religion. Plato would be content to use these illustrations as metaphors, while allowing those who would to take them literally. The technique is similar to that of the "noble lie" advocated in the Republic.

The religious metaphors are not, of course, taken over without accom- modation to the philosophical teaching. They become forceful metaphors for illustrating abstract relationships. While on close consideration there may be no meaningful sense in which it might be said that "I" could be born as an animal after death and still be "I", there is nevertheless force in saying that, if I live as a voluptuary, I am living a life not worthy of my human nature, but more suitable for an animal such as a donkey, whose consciousness never rises above the sphere of hedonism; in short, that I

8I take the weaving to be a metaphor of the soul's gathering and collecting itself together, and the working of it in reverse to be a comparison of the soul's undoing its gathering with Penelope's undoing her web. For a different interpretation, see Gallop, p. 231 n. 40.



304 KENNETH DORTER

have attained a level of existence no better than that of such animals, and this is what I have made of myself. The same considerations would apply as well to the other examples. There seems no doubt that these are Plato's views, and I see no reason to believe that Plato thought that these analogies must manifest themselves also as literal transformations after death. His religious language conveys images that vividly bring home to us the implications of our choice of a way of life, and of the kind of person that we are, and I take it that the truth of these images is intended not in their application to some incomprehensible future but to the present.

If we devote ourselves to pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, although we do not have to worry about our souls' being too heavy to float up to the true Hades-the invisible-after death, there is a sense in which we do have grounds for concern during life. The more influenced by pleasure and pain we are, the more we implicitly affirm the reality and importance of corporeal experience, and the more subject we become to our bodily cravings. We become "glued" to and "imprisoned" in the body by habituat- ing ourselves to be responsive to the ceaseless unrest of the body. The tumultuous corporeal world becomes for us the natural realm, and the intelligible world appears strange and-because devoid of familiar pleasures and comforts-fearful, an object of mistrust as displayed by the prisoners in the cave allegory of Republic VII. Accordingly we shun the intelligible realm, are dragged back to earth, as it were. Because of the contrary charac- ter of the intelligible and corporeal, our corporeal nature will always hamper our attempt to discern the intelligible (66b-67b, 79c), and the more we allow ourselves to be influenced by the bodily, the greater will this hindrance be.

There is, in addition, a genuine sense in which our individuality survives death, and, although Plato makes no explicit reference to it here, the temporal dimension of the image of "after-life" may be intended partially to reflect it. Croesus' injunction "Count no one happy until he is dead", related approvingly by Herodotus and Aristotle, implies not only that while we are alive our nature is always subject to modification, but also the converse, that once we die our nature becomes enduringly fixed. Our "survival" may be an image of the perpetuity of our individual nature in the memory of, and in its effects on, future generations. Thus Walter Otto finds even in the Homeric conception of Hades the representation of the enduring of "what has been".9 Apart from those who have been virtuous only out of habit, who revert to humanity again after one generation, there is no indica- tion here that the departed souls will ever change from the state into which they have been transformed: companions of the divine for the philosophers, and types of beast for the others; and perhaps this after-life is an image of the legacy-as well as the meaning-of what we have become.

University of Guelph

9Die Gitter Griechenlands (Frankfurt), ch. IV, sec. 9 (translated as The Homeric Gods, New York, 1954). For an excellent discussion of this view in a modern context, see D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London, 1970), ch. 3.



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Plato's Image of Immortality