‘Metaphysics’ and ‘phenomenology’ in Plato (the “Phaedo”)

The article considers the correlation between the ‘metaphysical’ and ‘phenomenological’ approaches in Plato’s “Phaedo”. Here, the ‘metaphysics’ refers to philosophical judgments that are considered as certain external principles that are not directly related to the philosopher’s ‘work of consciousness’. The ‘phenomenology’, on the other hand, refers to the specific philosophical experience of observing one’s own ways of grasping things in the immediate reality of awareness. At the beginning of the dialogue, in the so-called ‘defense of Socrates’, he first offers several premises that are accepted as axioms by his interlocutors and, secondly, he describes a philosophical purification as the ‘gathering of the soul’, which results in a confusion of ideas about the soul as either separated and existing after death or ‘being collected in itself’ in the process of philosophical, metaphorical ‘dying’. The first and the third arguments for the immortality of the soul can be considered as ‘metaphysical’, based on analogies, and the second and the forth, as ‘phenomenological’, based on the practice of contemplation of ‘eide in themselves’ by the soul ‘in itself’. It is concluded that Plato’s eide do not appear due to induction or deduction and are not a doubling of general concepts, as Aristotle believed, but are revealed as a result of some effort to realize one’s own awareness of one’s own grasping of being. This is what is outlined here as the difference between ‘metaphysics’ and ‘phenomenology’.