"To return to the Phaedo: Cebes expresses doubt as to the survival of the soul after death, and urges Socrates to offer arguments. This he proceeds to do, but it must be said that the arguments are very poor. The first argument is that all things which have opposites are generated from their opposites... Now life and death are opposites, and therefore each must generate the other. It follows that souls of the dead must exist somewhere, and come back to earth in due course. ...The second argument is that knowledge is recollection, and therefore the soul must have existed before death. ...As to this one may observe that the argument is wholly inapplicable to empirical knowledge. ...Only the sort of knowledge that is called a priori - especially logic and mathematics - can possible be supposed to exist in every one independently of experience. In fact, that is the only sort of knowledge that Plato admits to be really knowledge. ...He adds another argument, which had a longer history in philosophy: that only what is complex can be dissolved, and that the soul, like the ideas, is simple and not compounded of parts. What is simple, it is thought, cannot begin or end or change."
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy
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A History of Western Philosophy
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