General Introduction

Abstract

Plato’s view of the soul is often stated roughly as follows: the soul is a fallen daemon temporally incarcerated in the body as punishment for an original sin. As this is equally often intended as a justification for dismissing Plato’s view of the soul as wrong-headed or irrelevant for the modern debate it seems apposite to undertake a closer examination of the text to see whether this was Plato’s view. The answer we shall reach is that at a certain stage in his career (middle phase) Plato may be said to have held the above view, but that he held other views at other stages, and that the arguments for all these views seem worth serious consideration.