Plato is Therapy, to Guide Us Out of the Cave of Bad Thinking: Phaedo part 4

This is part 4. You are welcome and will not be left behind, even if you missed part 1 or 2

We Need Epistemic Therapy, we do not know how to know.

1-Our view of knowledge is distorted. Plato offers not just a theory of truth, but a therapy for the soul—a way of seeing that can reshape how we live.

We will be discussing Plato and the forms by reading the Phaedo. Join us.

This is link to a free PDF of all Plato’s works. Use a translation that included the accepted academic numbering system.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Xh7jrEn06i1lWiG2qlN056Eg0a7aGoo6/view?usp=drive_link

This is a link to what we are studying on May 15th. We will start at point #21 on page 6.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dNax1k1nFaxuZU2ZB6XsBN4eWS8iyc4W?usp=drive_link

The sections in the Phaedo mimic modern Philosophy of Mind discussions. They discuss musical harmony. Does the wooden lyre and the stings create the harmony or is harmony used to pluck the stings in a certain fashion to create the music we hear. Is the lyre the primary important part? Or is the mind of the composer the primary important part.

Phaedo At 93A, Socrates makes a key point:
“A harmony does not direct its components; it is directed by them.”
The thesis advanced is that, the harmony depends on how the parts are arranged—the parts do not control the harmony the harmony controls the parts. But the soul, he argues, clearly can oppose the desires and states of the body. For instance, when the body wants to drink or eat, the soul can choose not to. We observe countless examples of the soul resisting the body.

One must therefore suppose that a harmony does not direct its components, but is directed by them.
He accepted this.
A harmony is therefore far from making a movement, or uttering a sound, or doing anything else, in a manner contrary to that of its parts.
Far from it indeed, he said.
Does not the nature of each harmony depend on the way it has been harmonized?

By implication Socrates wants to highlight that the opposite is true, harmony is a non-material reality that allows a harp to be played.

. Then if someone breaks the lyre, cuts or breaks the strings and then insists, using the same argument as you, that the harmony must still exist and is not destroyed because it would be impossible for the lyre and the strings, which are mortal, still to exist when the strings are broken, and for the harmony, which is akin and of the same nature as the divine and immortal, to be destroyed before that which is mortal; he would say that the harmony itself still must exist and that the wood and the strings must rot before the harmony can suffer.