Phaedo

Plato, a student of Socrates, is one of the greats of early Greek philosophy. He founded the Academy, the first university, where he expounded on Socrates’s ideas and trained the great philosopher Aristotle. His Socratic dialogs, including Phaedo and the Republic, serve as a kind of biography of Socrates’s philosophy and methods. Apparently absent due to illness on the day of Socrates’s execution, Plato attributes his knowledge of that day to Phaedo, a fellow student whose report includes an important discussion about the soul and the afterlife that help fill in our understanding of those areas of Socratic belief.

Plato elsewhere expands on Socrates’s ideas, but most of his beliefs descend to us through his Socratic dialogs, one of the most important of which is the Phaedo. Whether the dialogs represent Socrates’s original concepts or Plato’s embellishments on them is an open question that has teased scholars for centuries.

Widely regarded as the founder of Western philosophy, Socrates spent many years as an Athenian soldier noted for bravery in service to Athens before spending his last years as a teacher and gadfly. He believed that the purpose of life was to cultivate virtue, and that the best method involved study and introspection combined with a general disregard for the distractions of physical pleasures.