Most men bound for death would stray away from troublesome thoughts. They might seek comfort in the company of friends or worldly activities. For the renowned philosopher, Aristotle, his final moments of life were a chance to examine the human condition to an even greater extent; to risk his own contentment in the pursuit of understanding and philosophy. In his landmark work, “Phaedo,” Plato depicts a dialogue between Socrates and the philosophers Cebes and Simmias. Within this lengthy philosophical discourse, Socrates makes several arguments in to prove the immortality of the soul. In his first argument, often referred to as the “Cyclical Argument,” Aristotle employs a concise and calculated train of logic. Socrates’ argument, structured …show more content…
A Modus Ponens follows the framework: if P, then Q, and P, therefore Q. The first premise of his argument stipulates that opposites come from their opposites and that death and life are opposites. His second premise asserts that all opposites are inherently cyclical in nature and flow in a circular pattern. Therefore, he concludes that death and life follow this same cycle and thus living beings come from the dead. Ultimately, Aristotle’s “Cyclical Argument” is unsound, as it follows a valid structure but one of its premises, specifically the first, is untrue. The first premise is untrue because Socrates transposes life and death into the same category as sleeping and being awake just as he transposes sleeping and awake into the same category as differences in degrees of physical existence. He also fails to account for the problem that inanimate objects pose to the opposite nature of life and death, and the cumulative divergence between the relationship between life and death and the relationships between degrees of being. This logical lapse severely troubles his entire “Cyclical …show more content…
Socrates supports this premise by asserting that instances of opposition only emerge from the existence of discernably differing states. Aristotle asks, "For example, whenever something comes to be larger, I presume that it is necessarily from being smaller before that the thing later comes to be larger?" (Plato, 2014, p. 58, 70e). He then asserts that things based on degrees of being are in fact reliant on their opposites, and thus only exist because of their opposites. In this case, degrees of being are states which can be described by comparative adjectives. They also exist along a spectrum as “bigger” and “smaller” are not fixed entities but rather they are indicative of a difference between two ambiguous degrees of existence. He points out several of these instances which include: “smaller” from being “larger,” “stronger” from being “weaker,” and “worse” from being “better” (Plato, 2014, p. 58, 71a). After listing more analogous examples, Socrates inquires, “‘Is there an opposite to living, as sleeping is to being awake?’” (Plato, 2014, p. 59, 71c). He then contends that death and life are opposites just as sleeping and awake. Furthermore, Socrates claims that these opposites fit into the same basic framework as degrees of existence and he treats them thusly. This assertion ultimately sums up the body of