Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo

Abstract

There is a passage in this dialogue which has led many scholars—the great majority of those who have translated or discussed it in detail—to think that Plato’s Forms are meant to be causes. This is the methodological and metaphysical preamble (95E-105G) to the final argument for the immortality of the soul. The importance of this passage could hardly be exaggerated : as much is to be learned from it about Plato’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science as from any other text of equal length in his corpus. But it is also one of the most perplexing. Scholars who have not confessed its difficulty have evidenced it just the same in the wild diversity of the interpretations they have put on it. According to Eduard Zeller, Plato teaches here that the Ideas are meant to be formal, efficient, and final causes all rolled into one. 2 Paul Shorey, at the other extreme, maintained that when Plato speaks of the Ideas as aitiai he is offering “only a tautological logic … a consistent and systematic substitution of the logical reason for all other forms of cause.” 3 More recently commentators have not hesitated to take their own perplexed reading of this text as evidence of unclear thinking in its writer. Mr. I. A. Crombie tells us there is “a nest of confusions” here, arising from Plato’s “jumbl(ing) mathematical and non-mathematical topics together, and fail(ing) into the bargain to distinguish different senses of such notions as ‘through’ and ‘in virtue of.” These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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