The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

Sometimes in life I have a hard time solving for Y.* You too? Suppose there is a certain wisdom to admitting you don’t know the answers. Suppose there is evidence of the afterlife in our inherent human forms? The Last Days of Socrates is a collection of Socrates’s most notable and important dialogues. As you might expect, he was a next-level thinker. Thinking was what he was passionate about and why not? If you are really good at thinking, then you can likely rationalize your way out of all suffering.

I probably could have read more about this book before diving in, but philosophy seems like a tough thing to summarize. In his Phaedo argument, Socrates tries to prove reincarnation with the same logic of why two can never be three at the same time. Aside from this last (near death) dialogue, I think the rest of his arguments are quite nice.

Of course I would like to learn some more modern philosophies but it seemed logos to start at the beginning if I am going to co-opt any preexisting worldviews. Should you read The Last Days of Socrates? Sure. Especially if you are pretending to know about philosophy.

*Solving for Y is a reference to an episode Pete and Pete in which Ellen boycotts math because she can’t use algebra to solve for Why.