Name: 9.プラトン、第四部：魂の不死性の議論（続き (9. Plato, Part IV: Arguments for the immortality of the soul (cont.))
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:49:07.000Z
Duration: 50 min 21 s
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Professor Shelly Kagan: We've been working our way

through Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul.

And last time I spent a fair bit of time working through

objections to, not quite the last argument

we're going to look at, but the penultimate argument,

in which Plato tries to argue for the simplicity of the soul.

The set of connected ideas, you'll recall,

were these: that Plato wants to suggest that in order to be

to destroy something is to basically take its parts apart.

If he could only convince us that the soul was simple,

it would follow that it was indestructible and,

hence, immortal. He asks, what's our evidence

What kinds of things are simple? Well, these are--he then goes

on to claim--invisible things, things that don't change.

After all, changing is a matter of the rearrangement of the

change, it can't be simple. Maybe it could be destroyed.

But if we could become convinced that the soul was not

composite, if it was something that couldn't change,

then it would simple. Perhaps then it would

indestructible. And then he goes on to suggest

that the invisibility of the soul is evidence for it's being

changeless, and hence simple, and hence indestructible.

So that's the argument we worked through last time.

And I spent a fair bit of time suggesting that if you pin down

precisely what Plato means by invisible, the argument doesn't

actually go through. Before leaving that argument,

there are a couple of extra remarks I want to make about it.

First, we probably shouldn't have been so quick to want to

buy into the suggestion that the soul is changeless.

After all, if you think about it, it seems that at least on

the face of it the soul does indeed change.

that it's hot; on another day you believe that

it's cold. On one day you believe that so

and so is a nice person; on the next day you believe

that so and so is a mean person. You desire to learn the piano,

Your beliefs, your goals, your intentions,

your desires--these things are all constantly changing.

And so, at least on the face of it, it looks as though we might

well want to say the soul--if we do believe there are souls--the

soul is changing as well, in terms of what thoughts and

beliefs it's housing. So we should have been

skeptical in the first place of any argument that said,

based on the invisibility of the soul, we can conclude that

it's changeless. It doesn't seem to be in fact

we should be, or at least we might well be,

skeptical of the claim that the soul is simple.

Indeed, Plato himself, in other dialogues,

argues against the simplicity of the soul.

Now, that doesn't mean he's right in the other dialogues,

but at least suggests that we shouldn't be so ready to assume

In The Republic, famously, Plato goes on to

argue that the soul has at least three different parts.

There's a rational part that's in charge of reasoning;

there's a spirited part that's sort of like the will;

there's a part that has to do with appetite,

desires for food, drink, sex, what have you.

Plato elsewhere argues the soul is not simple at all.

So perhaps it shouldn't shock us that the argument he's

sketching here for the simplicity of the soul based on

soul--perhaps it shouldn't shock us that that argument doesn't

succeed after all. Finally, although I gave Plato,

previously, the assumption that if only we could establish the

simplicity of the soul, it would follow that soul was

indestructible--after all, you couldn't break a soul by

tearing its pieces apart if it didn't have pieces,

I just want to register the thought that it's not actually

Well, they clearly can't be destroyed by the particular

method of destruction that involves taking them apart.

If they don't have parts, you can't take them apart.

But for all that, it still seems conceptually

possible for a simple to be destroyed in the following

sense: it goes out of existence. After all, where did the

Well, at least from a logical point of view,

it seems as though there's no difficulty in imagining that at

one point a given simple didn't exist and then at the next point

it popped into existence. Well, how did that happen?

Maybe God said--God says at the beginning of Genesis,

"Let there be simples." At a given moment they weren't

Well, after a while maybe God says, "Let the simples no longer

Seems as though that idea makes sense, and so even if we agreed

that the soul was simple, even if we granted everything

in Plato's argument up to this point and said,

"the soul really is simple," it still wouldn't follow that it's

the possibility that the simple soul might simply pop out of

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9.プラトン、第四部：魂の不死性の議論（続き (9. Plato, Part IV: Arguments for the immortality of the soul (cont.))

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