Trying to make sense of Plato's "cyclical argument" for birth and rebirth in Phaedo 72d, and after reading this post,
my question is whether the following interpretation of the argument is known in the literature,
and what, if any, objections to it have been presented, or can be presently given.
My main motivation is the phrase "must not all things at last be swallowed up in death?"
which comes as an obvious conclusion, based on some reasoning that is not clearly presented.
Could that be the notion of "quantity of things" being diminished if transferred among beings?
So this is my interpretation of the argument:
Suppose that life is something that is given from a living giver to a receiver, as apparently happens.
(giver and receiver can well be groups of individuals).
Now if all of the giver's life were given to the receiver,
then the giver would immediately die, but this does not normally happen.
Therefore the receiver gets a portion of life less than the giver's.
So, continuing by successive diminutions, all life
would eventually "be swallowed up in death".
But experience has shown that life does not work this way.
So the only solution is that our initial assumption is wrong: life is not given from a living giver to a receiver.
On the contrary, each new receiver gets a portion of life that already exists, previously embodied, presently un-embodied,
and the "giver" serves only as an intermediary transferer.
An obvious objection to the above argument is that of fire transferred from some burning torch to an extinguished one, whereby no obvious diminution occurs. So the question here would be whether this procedure is a valid analogy for the propagation of life.
