  According to the Republic, every human soul has three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. (This is a claim about the embodied  soul. In Book Ten, Socrates argues that the soul is immortal  (608c–611a) and says that the disembodied soul might be simple  (611a–612a), though he declines to insist on this (612a) and the  Timaeus and Phaedrus apparently disagree on the  question.) At first blush, the tripartition can suggest a division  into beliefs, emotions, and desires. But Socrates explicitly ascribes beliefs, emotions, and desires to each part of the soul (Moline 1978). In  fact, it is not even clear that Plato would recognize psychological  attitudes that are supposed to be representational without also being affective and conative, or conative and affective without also being  representational. Consequently, ‘belief’ and  ‘desire’ in translations or discussions of Plato  (including this one) must be handled with care; they should not be  understood along Humean lines as motivationally inert  representations, on the one hand, and non-cognitive motivators, on  the other.