Throughout Phaedo, Socrates uses a priori evidence coupled with logic to support his idea that the soul is immune to death and destruction and will therefore continue to exist after the death of the body. He uses empirical science sparingly, because his arguments concern intangible objects and concepts for which no data can be collected: Socrates cannot experience death to prove that the soul continues after it. The affinity argument is key here because it establishes the differences between the body and the soul and thus supports his final argument, but it is later in the dialogue that Socrates' final attempt to prove that the Soul is immune to death and destruction. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essaySocrates supports the affinity argument using logical rather than empirical evidence, including comparing the soul to the Forms so to show that it is eternal, and to demonstrate to what extent the body is different and will therefore decompose. First, he argues that "things which always remain the same and in the same state are very likely not to be composite, whereas those which vary from one time to another and are never the same are likely to be be composite”, which makes a theory more explicit. connection with the soul by saying that "those which always remain the same can only be grasped by the reasoning power of the mind and are invisible", implying that the soul is non-composite - as Socrates believed. Many philosophers, on the other hand, disagree and see the soul as composed of desires such as appetite and lust. Although Socrates argues that these are part of the body and that the soul is therefore freed from them in death, his argument is weakened by the fact that he presents no evidence that the soul is non-composite, but the simply relates to other non-composite entities. By contrasting the soul with the body – “The soul resembles the divine and the body resembles the mortal” – which we recognize as subject to decadence, he supports his argument that the soul, conversely, does not. is not. He himself draws this conclusion in the text: “Is it not natural that the body dissolves easily and that the soul is completely indissoluble, or almost? Therefore, using logical rather than empirical evidence, Socrates justifies his belief that the soul is immune to destruction, and he later uses this argument in his final attempt to prove its immunity both from destruction and against death. After differentiating the body and the soul, later in the text Socrates goes on to explain why the latter, unlike the former, is “immortal” (105e)1. To do this, he uses the example of snow and heat, saying “that being snow, it will not admit heat […] but when heat approaches, it will either retreat before it, or it will be destroyed,” and he supports this by arguing that its oddity is an essential property of the number three: “Will it not be said that three will perish or suffer anything before, while remaining three, becoming even? So, if we took away his quirk, there would no longer be three of him. Having “sufficiently” established this, Socrates uses the same argument in terms of the soul to prove that it is immune to death, asking: “What, present in a body, makes it live?” and receive the answer “a soul”. From here he draws the conclusion that "whatever the soul occupies, it always brings it life", and must therefore be "immortal", because "the Form opposed to the Form which obtains this result does not.