Plato, The Phaedo: Plato’s Phaedo is about the meaning of life and death. Socrates is about to be executed and his friends challenge his reassurances about immortality. Socrates replies by developing increasingly sophisticated conceptions of the soul. More than any dialogue but the Republic, the Phaedo encapsulates Plato’s philosophy generally: the nature of philosophy, the meaning of life, the nature of virtue, levels of knowledge, the divine, immortality, the theory of forms, and the doctrine of recollection. [recommended by Kenneth Dorter, University of Guelph]