Matthew Walker, "The Soul’s Retreat from Death: Re-Reading Socrates’ Final Argument in Plato’s _Phaedo_"

According to a long tradition of criticism, Socrates’ final argument in the Phaedo establishes the soul’s immortality, at most, in only a trivial sense. On this view, the argument fails in its aim to establish the soul’s unqualified indestructibility. This talk sketches a new interpretation of the final argument. On the one hand, Socrates need not be aiming to establish the soul’s unqualified indestructibility; on the other hand, the psychic immortality that he more plausibly establishes need not be merely trivial.