Sophist

They were less interested in the political applications of the Gigantomachy and more interested in what it revealed about the nature of existence itself.

Plato, in the Sophist, used the war between giants and gods as a metaphor for the philosophical dispute between materialists.

those who believed only physical, tangible things were real.

And idealists, those who believed that the truly real things were invisible, non-physical, eternal.

And then for the Neoplatonists, they want this kind of systematized, rigorous investigation of first principles, of forms, of, you know, again, kind of things discussed in the Parmenides.

Then it sort of is divided later on among their new distinctness between whether the Sophist or the Philebus gives you the highest principles.

That's a sort of a difference between Plotinus and Proclus.

But we can sort of leave that aspect off the side for now.

And does the maturity of the Parmenides play into that? I mean, because Parmenides, even at the time, was accepted as a later dialogue.

Yeah.

And one way I read the Parmenides within Plato's kind of overall time span is that the Parmenides is the dialogue that you read as a student to get yourself ready for the really complicated technical stuff that you get in like the Sophist, Philebus, and these sort of agreed upon late dialogues like the Timaeus and the laws, you know, you start out with a relatively, relatively naive conception of the forms, but you need to disabuse yourself and don't really rigorous notion of the forms.

Once that don't fall victim to like the third man problem and these other objections, it's the kind of text that divides the dialogues that get sent out to everybody you know there's evidence that Plato circulated these texts but then it's like there's stuff that's only within the school only things for the really mature students that's the kind of role I think that Parmenides plays it's this text that's supposed to really inaugurate a mature student of Plato a mature metaphysician who's then able to do the really difficult stuff that you get in again like the sophist and statesman and these later dialogues

Silence being the first rudiment of contemplation.

In his Sophist, Aristotle credits Empedocles with the discovery of rhetoric.

Both Pythagoras and Empedocles accepted the theory of transmigration, the latter saying, 'A boy I was, then did a maid become, a plant, bird, fish, and in the vast sea swum.' Archytas is credited with invention of the screw and the crane.

Pleasure he declared to be a pestilence because it was opposed to the temperance of the mind.

... how close or far apart they really are.

I mean, if we think about what was going on in Plato's academy- Towards the end of Plato's life and the time that Aristotle was there, we think about what we normally call Plato's late dialogues, things like the Parmenides and the Sophist.

I mean, these are incredibly dense, complex works analyzing the, the meaning of particular words, uh, like being, for instance.

It's what we would now sort of say is armchair metaphysics, right?

And so time is his vehicle.

Time is his vehicle, and the thing is about the, the ancient Greeks is that Being and Time begins with this untitled first page, which begins with a quotation in Greek from a dialogue by Plato called the Sophist.

The quote says something like, "We do not understand what being means, and furthermore, we've forgotten to be perplexed by this." And the word perplexity is this interesting word in Greek.

It's called aporia.

Wouldn't that make it a somethingness? [laughs]

So this is, um, for those who are interested in this kind of thing, there's a Platonic dialogue called the Sophist, and, uh, essentially the, um, they, the, the guest philosopher in the dialogue, I forget his name, but is saying that, uh, the Sophist, where this is a person who's like engaging in rhetoric without any substance, essentially, is, um, like a wild animal that you have to track down and trap because he's wily and he'll use his words to evade and escape you.

Um, and that's kinda like the, the feeling that you get with this, is that he's like running down these trails after Brother Francis.

Mm-hmm.

They will compare the Ion as being akin both in subject and treatment.

They will urge the authority of Aristotle, and they will detect in the treatment of the Sophist, in the satirical reasoning upon Homer, in the reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that vice is ignorance, traces of a Platonic authorship.

In reference to the last point we are doubtful, as in some of the other dialogues, whether the author is asserting or overthrowing the paradox of Socrates, or merely following the argument whither the wind blows.

That no conclusion is arrived at is also in accordance with the character of the earlier dialogues.

They may be altogether spurious.

That is an alternative which must be frankly admitted.

Nor can we maintain of some other dialogues, such as the Parmenides and the Sophist and Politicus, that no considerable objection can be urged against them, though greatly overbalanced by the weight, chiefly, of internal evidence in their favor.

Nor, on the other hand, can we exclude a bare possibility that some dialogues which are usually rejected, such as the Greater Hippias and the Cleitophon, may be genuine.