The following passages are from the Phaedo. At varying points questions are asked that require an explanation from you. Space is allotted for your explanations. The questions are meant to guide you through the text and lead toward an understanding of Socrates’ argument.

Socrates: “ When I was young, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call investigation of nature. I thought it was a glorious thing to know the causes of everything, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it exists; “
With this first statement how is Socrates like the other Presocratic philosophers which we have read?

“ … I investigated the phenomena of heaven and earth until finally I made up my mind that I was by nature totally unfitted for this kind of investigation.”
Does Socrates succeed in finding the causes of things as the Presocratics did?

“Then one day I heard a man reading from a book, as he said, by Anaxagoras, that it is the Divine Mind ( the Mind of God) that arranges and causes all things. I was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to me to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things, and I thought, ‘If this is so, the mind in arranging things arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be. So if anyone wishes to find the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of a particular thing, he must find out what sort of existence … or activity is best for it. And therefore in respect to that particular thing, and other things too, a man need examine nothing but what is best and most excellent; for then he will necessarily know also what is inferior, since the science of both is the same.”
What is the new theory of cause that excites Socrates? What does it mean to say that Divine Mind is the cause of all things? Specifically why should all be for the best or be as good as it could be if the Mind of God is involved in its coming into being? Does this saying remind you of the argument of one of the previous Presocratic philosophers?

“ As I considered these things I was delighted to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the cause of things quite to my mind, and I thought he would tell me whether the earth is flat or round, and when he had told me that, would go on to explain the cause and the necessity of it, and would tell me the nature of the best and why it is best for the earth to be as it is; and if he said the earth was in the center, he would proceed to show that it is best for it to be in the center; and I had made up my mind that if he made those things clear to me, I would no longer yearn for any other kind of cause.”
How does Socrates seek to apply the idea of the good or what is best toward an understanding of the world?