---
date: '2023-09-22'
description: Phaedo and Apology
id: Phaedo and Apology
modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:41 GMT-04:00
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title: Phaedo and Apology
created: '2023-09-22'
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## Structure

Problem → Thesis → Structure

## Apology

Socrates calls himself a stranger to courtroom speech because this is his first trial. He asks to use his usual conversational manner (_Apology_ 17c–18a).

Two layers of accusation:

- **Older reputation:** investigating the heavens and the earth, making the weaker argument stronger, and teaching others to do this (18b–19d). Socrates separates himself from this comic portrait and denies charging for instruction.
- **Current indictment:** corrupting the young, failing to recognise the city’s gods, and introducing new divine beings (24b–c).

Against intentional corruption, he argues that corrupting his associates would expose him to harm from them. If he corrupts them unintentionally, Meletus should instruct him privately (25c–26a). The argument relies on the premise that nobody knowingly wants to be harmed. It leaves room for unintentional corruption, and Socrates says such a case calls for instruction rather than prosecution.

Socrates presents his questioning as a service to Athens: it presses people to examine how they live (30d–31a).

> The unexamined life is not worth living

_Apology_ 38a. He gives this as his reason for refusing a life in which he must stop examining himself and others.

## Phaedo

- **Pain and pleasure:** relief from the fetter prompts the opening observation about their succession (60b–c).
- **Why reject suicide while accepting death?** Socrates treats humans as under divine care, so they must await release. Philosophical preparation for death means loosening the soul’s dependence on bodily distractions (61c–67e).
- **What if the soul is not immortal?** The affinity argument compares the soul with stable, invisible realities and the body with composite, changeable things (78b–80b). This resemblance is Socrates’s reason for expecting the soul to resist dissolution.

Recollection (72e–77a):

1. Perceiving apparently equal sticks or stones leads us to think of the Equal itself.
2. We judge the perceived things against that standard and find them deficient.
3. Socrates argues that this judgment requires prior knowledge of the standard, acquired before sensory experience and therefore before birth.

Experience prompts recollection; it does not supply the prior knowledge the argument requires. Its conclusion about existence before birth still leaves survival after death to be established (77b–c).

Source: Plato, [_Apology_](https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/plato-the-apology-of-socrates-sb/) and [_Phaedo_](https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/plato-phaedo-sb/), at the passages above.