Throughout the Phaedo, Socrates uses a priori evidence coupled with logic to support his idea that the soul is immune to death and to destruction, and therefore will continue to exist after the death of the body. He uses empirical science sparingly since his arguments deal with intangible objects and concepts for which it is not possible to collect data: Socrates cannot experience death to prove that the soul continues after it. The affinity argument is crucial here as 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 demonstrate that the soul is immune to death and destruction. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Socrates supports the affinity argument using logical rather than empirical evidence, i.e. comparing the soul to the Forms to demonstrate that it is eternal, and demonstrating how the body is different and will therefore decay. First, he argues that "things which always remain the same and in the same state are very likely not to be composite, while those which vary from one moment to another and are never the same are very likely to be composite", by making a concept more explicit he links to the soul by saying that "those who always remain the same can only be grasped by the reasoning power of the mind and are invisible", which implies that the soul is not composite - as Socrates believed. Many philosophers, on the other hand, disagree and see the soul as composed of desires such as appetite and lust, and although Socrates argues that these are part of the body and consequently the soul is free from them in death, his argument is weakened by the fact that he presents no evidence that the soul is non-composite, but simply links it to other non-composite entities. In contrasting the soul with the body - "The soul resembles the divine and the body the mortal" - which we recognize as subject to decay, he supports his thesis that the soul, on the contrary, is not. In the text he himself reaches this conclusion: '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 confirms his belief that the soul is immune to destruction, and later uses this argument in his final attempt to demonstrate its immunity to both this and death. Having differentiated the body and the soul, later in the text Socrates goes on to state 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 the heat [...] but when the heat approaches it will retreat before him or be destroyed", and supports this by arguing that his strangeness is a essential property of the number three: «Shall we not say that three will perish or suffer something first, while remaining three, becoming even?». Consequently, if their quirk were taken away, they would no longer be three. Having established this "quite sufficiently", Socrates uses the same argument in terms of the soul to show that it is immune to death, asking "What, present in a body, makes it live?" and receiving the answer "a soul". From this he draws the conclusion that "whatever the soul occupies, always brings it life", and therefore it must be "immortal" because "the Form opposite to the Form which achieves this result could never reach it": the soul being that which gives life to the body means that it can have no part in death. In this way, Socrates successfully uses logical proofs in his final attempt to prove that the soul is immune.