Plato's Sophist (Session 1 of 2)

The Sophist is set the day after the events of The Theaetetus, and belongs to a loose trilogy in which Plato works out his conception of philosophy — the third installment being The Statesman, which we'll read next month.

The dialogue tackles some of Plato's thorniest metaphysical territory: being and non-being, appearance versus reality, and how it's even possible to say something false. It approaches these problems somewhat sideways, through an inquiry into the nature of the sophist — the pretender to wisdom — and how he differs from the true philosopher. Along the way, the Stranger introduces his method of division and collection (diairesis) — repeatedly splitting a concept in two to narrow in on a definition. The dialogue is also famous for staging the "Battle of Gods and Giants," a clash between hard-nosed materialists who think only bodies are real and idealists who argue that invisible, incorporeal things (like justice or wisdom) are just as real — a debate that still echoes in philosophy of mind today.

The dialogue's central figure is a Stranger from Elea, a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno, who serves as the true philosopher of the piece (and largely takes over Socrates' usual role as questioner).

We'll be reading this dialogue across two sessions— this week we'll cover the first half, and we'll finish the dialogue together next week.

Session 1 reading: Stephanus 216a–236d
For this session, we'll cover the first part of the dialogue: the Stranger and Theaetetus's hunt for the sophist using the method of division. On the surface, it looks like a taxonomy exercise — the sophist gets compared in turn to anglers, merchants, hunters, and imitators — but each failed attempt at a definition is really a probe into deeper questions: What separates genuine knowledge from its counterfeit? What is imitation, and when does it shade into deception?

The most striking result comes in the final division, where the sophist is cast as a kind of purifier of the soul — someone who refutes people's false conceit of knowledge, much as Socrates does in dialogue after dialogue. This is where the reading gets interesting and uncomfortable: is the sophist just a corrupted double of the philosopher? Is the difference between them one of kind, or of intent? That question will hang over the rest of the dialogue — and over the method of division itself, which will come under its own scrutiny as the technique that's supposed to nail down definitions.

By the end of this stretch, the sophist has been provisionally defined as someone who produces false appearances (eidōla) rather than true knowledge — but defining "false" turns out to require confronting the ancient taboo, going back to Parmenides, against saying "what is not, is." We'll take up that puzzle in Session 2.

Text: https://www.platonicfoundation.org/translation/sophist/
Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyJmGkq2c1c&t=2543s. (~48min)

Please read in advance — we'll discuss together.