Abstract

This dissertation's most general goal is an exploration of philosophic practice in Plato's middle period and the implications of that practice on philosophic character. Specifically, I consider the philosopher's relation to the phenomenal world in the Phaedo as a means of addressing this question. The Phaedo has been almost invariably interpreted as Plato's most ascetic text, one which rejects the sensible and material world in favor of a solitary and sustained contemplation of the forms. In repudiation of that reading I argue that philosophical method as it is portrayed in the Phaedo is an active process, firmly rooted in the phenomenal world and that it is practiced largely at preliminary stages. These features of the practice arise from philosophy's dependence on sense objects for both the beginnings of apprehension and its maintenance. In fact, the philosopher ultimately cannot leave the phenomenal world behind in his investigations. ;It is true that in some of its rhetoric the Phaedo promotes a new kind of intellectual vision, or theoria, which does suggest the idea of an unmediated and complete perception of the forms by a purified soul. But my exploration of the actual process of purification justifies a rejection of the highly theoretical and ascetic images of the philosopher. Sustained and complete apprehension of forms is impossible. Instead, purification as it is described in the more rhetorical passages of the dialogue is a protreptic for the active painstaking inquiry of the philosophic life. In this reading of the Phaedo we discover a more complex relationship between the philosophic soul and the body, and hence we see a more complex epistemology and psychology