Plato’s Philebus, Part 2: Does the Universe Have a Soul and Reason?

Where does the human soul come from, if not the universe of which we are part? The question that Socrates poses relates to his assertion that everything comes to be from a cause, as he and Protarchus search for the causes of the soul’s pleasure in things that in time neither are, nor ever were, nor ever will, be. In the second of three meetings on Plato’s Philebus, members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups met on January 29, 2023 to consider the unlimited nature of pleasure within the limits of becoming, and the role of reason in bringing harmony to the good life. We explored the distinction between memory, which is what the soul experiences together with the body, and recollection which the soul later experiences on its own, and the importance of the soul’s capacity to divide a thing’s general form into its many unities until it finds the “common element”. Where does reason find the common element – perhaps in the middle of every thing?