Article Title

A Platonic Model of the Soul-Body Relationship

Authors

Kenneth Dorter, University of Guelph

Abstract

Editor's note: After blind peer review, this paper was selected for reading at the University of Dayton's 10th annual Philosophy Colloquium, held Feb. 27-28, 1981.

In presenting a unified overview of Plato's conception of soul I do not intend to suggest that Plato's undogmatic and unsystematic approach to philosophy can be reduced in a systematic dogma. The model I develop is meant to be taken not dogmatically but instrumentally, as a basis for relating to one another the various things that Plato says about the soul. It is furthermore based upon a conviction that the progressive development of Plato's conception of soul, in the course of the dialogues, was a matter of extension and refinement rather than recantation, so that the conception of soul does not change in principle, at least after the Phaedo. I shall argue later that this is true even of the considerable difference between the way that the soul is spoken of in the Phaedo and the Republic.

Recommended Citation

Dorter, Kenneth (1982) "A Platonic Model of the Soul-Body Relationship," University of Dayton Review: Vol. 16: No. 1, Article 3.
Available at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/udr/vol16/iss1/3