Faidonas: Filosofavimo Subjekto Demarkavimo Problema
Phaedo: Problem of the Demarcation of the Subject of Philosophizing

Summary/Abstract: In the Phaedo, Plato discussed the soul. It was Socrates who included the soul on the agenda of philosophy. In his ardent polemics with sophists, Socrates promoted an alternative man measure. Socrates spoke of the need to take care of the soul by making it better. Plato attempted to reconstruct theoretically the practical philosophizing of Socrates. So Plato was compelled to define the subject of the imperative as well as the preconditions that make sense of the imperative. Sensual soul or body, which already has been defined by sophists as the anonymous subject of pragmatic or daily thinking, was taken as the starting point for the definition of the soul as a subject of ethically specified philosophizing. Following Heraclitus, daily thinking and its subject were related to death. In opposition to them, philosophical thinking and its subject were marked with a meaning of immortality. Therefore, the definition of the subject of ethically modified philosophizing turned into theoretical arguments for the soul’s immortality. This article attempts to reconstruct those aspects of the new subject of philosophizing which became apparent in the dialectical and gnoseological arguments for the soul’s immortality. The dialectical argument for the soul’s immortality rests on the ambiguity of speech that in synoptical thinking is ontologically interpreted as an ambiguity of reality. The latter assumption presupposes an alternative to daily thinking and demarcates the traditional image of the soul from the area of daily thinking. The gnoseological argument for the soul’s immortality departs from the gnoseology of daily thinking and constructs a theory of recollection as a specific cognitive feature of the ethically specified soul.

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