Socrates' last defense: the body as a metonymy of the sensible

Abstract

Socrates defends the philosophical life under the threat of death penalty in four Dialogues by Plato: Gorgias, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. The latter resumes and summarizes the previous ones as to this defense. In the Phaedo, through a series of repeated and crisscrossed indications of the rhetorical and philosophical appropriation of the mythical repertoire of images, death becomes a metaphor for knowledge, the body becomes metonymy of the sensible, God Hades metaphor of the intelligible and the Gods antonomasia of ideas or intelligible forms. If the sense of this appropriation were taken into account in the reading of the dialogue, its understanding would, in my point of view, undergo a turnaround and become much more philosophical.