Second Sailing towards Immortality and God: On Plato’s Phaedo, 99e4-100a3, with an Outlook on Descartes’ Meditations, AT VII, 67

Abstract

This paper deals with the deuteros plous, literally ‘the second voyage’, proverbially ‘the next best way’, discussed in Plato’s Phaedo, the key passage being Phd. 99e4-100a3. I argue that (a) the ‘flight into the logoi’ can have two different interpretations, a standard one and a non-standard one. The issue is whether at 99e-100a Socrates means that both the student of erga and the student of logoi consider images (‘the standard interpretation’), or the student of logoi does not consider images, but that “consistency [of the logoi] should suffice for truth” (‘the non-standard interpretation’). (b) The non-standard one implies the problem of the hypothesis, a problem analogous to the problem of the elenchus. (c) There is a structural analogy between Descartes’ ontological argument for the existence of God in his 5th Meditation and the final or ontological proof for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo.