Course Content (Syllabus)
This dialog from Plato’s middle period of is one of the most important (and also most popular) Platonic texts. In highest dramaturgical force, Plato lets here Socrates spend his last hours before drinking the hemlock with a discussion on the soul and its immortality; in this context, Socrates will expound the main lines of the Platonic theory of Forms, presented here as a "hypothesis". Phaedo has been rightly called "the Magna Carta of Western metaphysics". Through a close reading, we will try to understand the reasons for this immense importance and impact. In particular, we will try to elucidate the relationship between the two main themes of the dialogue (the Forms and the immortality of the soul).