The Immortality of the Soul: Phaedrus 245c-e

Although the text of this argument seems to present itself as a tight logical argument, it has what we might call dangling threads. Commentators, beginning in antiquity, have taken these to be invitations to speculation. The result is an array of contradictory analyses about, e.g., the subdivisions of the arguments and, then, how the subdivisions are related to one another, and to the conclusion. In this article, I will offer a new analysis, in which I will distinguish two sub-arguments: one dealing with the principle of motion and one dealing with the principle of becoming; then I will show how the two sub-arguments are related. I will argue that to understand this whole argument, and the way the two sub-arguments fit together, we must assume a conception of motion that differs in important ways from our contemporary conception of motion.