Why is the Sophist a sequel to the Theaetetus?

Phronesis

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 33-57

  Kahn, Charles H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Being; Metaphysics; Not being; Truth and falsity

Indexed keywords

EID: 34548741421     PISSN: 00318868     EISSN: 15685284     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156852807X177959     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2. Thus Phaedo 72e echoes the discussion of recollection in the Meno, but does not refer to Socrates' conversation with Meno in that dialogue
3. This explicit reference to the earlier dialogue has been doubted by Rowe and others, but I cannot see that at Statesman 284b 7 can mean anything except "in the dialogue Sophist" Similarly for τov̂ aoqnaraû at 286b 10
4. For the documentary evidence supporting the division into three groups, sec my chapter "On Platonic Chronology" in J. Annas and C. Rowe (eds.), New Perpectives on Plato, Ancient and Modern (Cambridge, Mass./London, 2002).
5. Cornford was already crediting Diès with this observation. See Plato's Theory of Knowledge (London, 1935), 1.
6. The classical statement of this tendency is the influential paper of G.E.L, Owen, "The Place of the Timaeus in Plato's Dialogues," reprinted in Logic, Science and Dialectic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 65-84. Despite the dazzling brilliance of his arguments, Owen's attempt to remove the Timaeus from its place among the late dialogues is, in my view, a complete failure.
7. The Phaedo makes frequent use of the terminology of participation for the sensibleForm relation, but of course it is not committed to a literal notion of sharing. On the contrary, this relation is there left undefined ( 100d). After the criticism of the Parmenides, however, the metaphor of participation is abandoned as misleading for the sensible-Form relation, and it is transferred instead to the Form-Form relation in the Sophist as one of several expressions for connections between Forms
8. Notice the cunning way in which Parmenides induces the immature Socrates to accept the separation of Forms from their participants at Parmenides 130b, Socrates had used the term once, harmlessly, for logical distinction at 129d 7. Parmenides then uses it three times in immediate succession (130b 2-4) and twice again in the near context (130c 1, d 1), thus emphasizing the problem of separation that leads to the "greatest difficulty" of two independent worlds (133b 4)
9. D. Scdley, The Midwife of Platonism. Text and Subtext in Plato's Theaetetus (Oxford, 2004).
10. The standard modem version of this view of the Theaetetus is EM, Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge (London, 1935).
11. For an ancient precedent sec D. Sedley, "Three Platonist Interpretations of the Theaetetus" in C. Gill and M.M. McCabe (eds.), Form and Argument in Late Plato (Oxford, 1996), 89-93.
12. I take it that this point is well established, in particular by the work of Lesley Brown. Sec "Being in the Sophist: A Syntactical Enquiry," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy IV (1986), 49-70.
13. For the corresponding analysis in Aristotle, sec De Interpretation 2-5.
14. Russian source
15. "Some Philosophical Uses of 'to be' in Plato," Phronesis 26 (1981), 105-34.
16. This is true even for the impossible examples of confusing two universal concepts taking the beautiful to be ugly or a cow to be a horse. See Bumyeat's note in The Theaetetus of Plato, translation of M.J. Levett revised by Myles Bumyeat (Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1990), 323, n. 43.
17. For a more deflationary reading of this passage, see G.E.L. Owen, "Plato on the Undepictable," in Logic, Science and Dialectic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 138-47.
18. Alexander Nehamas notes that, even in the Philebus, Plato can speak of epistêmê for coming-to-be as well as for eternal being. See his "Epistêmê and Logos in Plato's Later Thought" in Virtues of Authenticity (Princeton, 1999), 238, However, only unchanging being is the object of "knowledge which has the most truth" (59b 7, 6 Id 10-e). With a shift in terminology, this cognitive contrast is preserved in the final ranking, where epistêmai are listed in the level below nous, together with technai and orthai doxai (66b).
19. Timaeus 27d 5: The initial statement here of ontological dualism seems to ignore the extension of Being to include change that is introduced in the Sophist. But this intermediate possibility is allowed for by the implied contrast in the concluding words. What comes-tobe is not "truly being"; it has the lower degree of being assigned to images at 52b 4-c5, cited in part above. And the mixed status of soul in the Timaeus may also represent a distinct ontological level.
20. Similarly in Phaedo 90c 2, where the misologists conclude that "there is nothing sound or stable either in things or in logoi, but that all things (panta ta onto) are reversing back and forth just like the current of the Euripus, and they do not stay in place for any time at all."
21. For my reading of Timaeus 49c-50a see "Flux and forms in the Timaeus" in M. Canto-Sperber and P. Pellegrin (cds.) Le Style de la Pensée. Recueil de textes en hommage àJacques Brunschwig (Psais, 2002), 113-131.
22. Met. A.6, 987b 14-18.