Ancient Greek Philosophy: Socrates in the Phaedo/Aristotle/Epicurus/the Stoics/Plotinus- choose 3 - Essay Example

Our senses create ignorance and evil and cause us to fear death from concern for the body and its desires (Phaedo 13:2-8). He states: ‘true philosophers have a desire for death’ (9:15) because it is not ‘anything else than the separation of the soul from the body’ (9:27). For Socrates, the soul can exist alone; it is when led by the body that it becomes distracted by desire and pleasure rather than virtuous truth (10:14-16). The soul is ‘encumbered’ by the body, which prevents real contemplation and true satisfaction of desire (11:8-10).

Therefore, Socrates fears not death, rather he welcomes it as an entry into another world, for souls ‘of the deceased exist somewhere, from whence they return again to life’ (16:55-57). Indeed, this is the only way in which we can ‘contemplate with the soul itself’ (11:36), as we are not distracted from all those bodily desires. Our souls remain alive upon death, says Socrates, and return to life once again. This is the intense theme throughout his discourse in Phaedo, that death is not a fearful, but a virtuous happening.

Indeed, he strived to refrain from indulgence in bodily desires so that he could indeed not fear death whence it arrived for him. This is the immortality of the soul; the fundamental element. For Epicurus, the whole of the universe consists of atoms and void. In his Letter to Herodotus, he summarized all scientific reasons for the world through basic principles. All natural phenomena can be explained by these atoms and matter flying through space. Epicurus rejects all concepts of immaterial soul and takes the purely scientific, logical approach.

Our knowledge of the world is received through sense-perception and nothing more. All bodies consist of smaller bodies and can be broken down, though not indefinitely. The intense basis of scientific logic in Epicurus’ beliefs is concise and