Plato's Three-part Soul
In Republic IV, how does Plato’s Socrates argue for a three-part soul? Is the argument successful? Socrates’ early ideas about using his questioning technique in the pursuit of knowledge lead to both realizations and further questions. One such problem is that people seem to have inner contradictions. If people were able to have one overriding virtue, or one principle of moral action, or one guiding concept of decision making, then there shouldn’t be a contradiction within an individual person about what is good or just, or what to do, in any given circumstance. And yet, this exists. Plato seeks to solve this problem in ‘The Republic’ by proposing a three part soul, allowing for the three parts to potentially contradict each other. This solution emerges from the phenomenological experience of the self and the observation of other humans such as expressed in discussions and debates. The three proposed parts of the soul are the reasoning part that is able to do rational thinking and the