Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

150
David Sedley
ning the main conclusion. Hence we can use it to throw light on exactly
what that reasoning was.
The vital retrospective sentence from Stage 2 is 106b2 –4: “If the
immortal is also imperishable, it is impossible for soul, whenever
death attacks it, to perish. For what we have said before shows that a
soul won’t admit death, and won’t be dead.” That is, the eternally prolonged
future existence of the soul is guaranteed by the fact that,
were it to pass out of existence, it would thereby become that contradiction
in terms, a dead soul. 6 For a soul to die is as impossible as for a
trio to come to be an even trio, or for snow to become hot snow.
One famous objection, voiced originally by the second successor of
Aristotle, Strato of Lampsacus, 7 runs: “Just as fire is uncoolable for as
long as it exists, perhaps so too soul is deathless for as long as it exists.”
Strato’s point is the following one: Socrates’ argument tells us only that
soul is incapable of being dead as long as it exists, i. e. that there is no such
thing as a dead soul; but that does not show that a soul always exists.
This objection, and variants of it, have enjoyed success among modern
critics too.
But how damaging is the objection to the Stage 1 argument? It
would be hard to deny any of the following premises:
6 In case it should be objected that the Cyclical Argument has already admitted
the idea of a dead soul, with souls being said to alternate between being alive
and being dead, it needs pointing out that nowhere in that argument is it
said to be souls that are the subject of this change; the implication is if anything
that it is we human beings – soul-body composites – who alternate between the
two states alive and dead. A solitary apparent exception occurs later, at 77d1–3,
where the Cyclical Argument is being briefly recapitulated; it seems wiser to
treat this latter as a misleading shorthand than to force a rereading of the entire
Cyclical Argument in the light of it. This still leaves the question how to relate
the Last Argument to the provisional definition of death as the soul’s separation
from the body (64c4 – 9), since the soul’s death, as counterfactually envisaged in
the Last Argument, cannot satisfy that definition, being rather the soul’s simple
extinction. This might seem to imply that the earlier definition was incomplete;
but it will do nicely as a definition of death as it actually occurs, and hardly deserves
to be criticized for ignoring a kind of death which the Last Argument will
maintain to be intrinsically impossible anyway. Its one possible oversight is its
failure to cater for the death of the body; but it is not clear to me that the Phaedo
ever allows that the body – as distinct from the soul-body composite – is properly
called alive and can therefore be said to ‘die’.
7 Damascius, in Phd. I 442. Strato’s criticisms are usefully translated in Hackforth
1955, 195 – 198.