Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes and abbreviations
- Division of the Sophist
- 1 How to read the Sophist
- 2 The sophist and the philosopher
- 3 How the sophist appears
- 4 Analysis of the structure of appearance
- 5 Appearance and image
- 6 The sophistic counter-attack on philosophy
- 7 The philosophic defence against sophistry
- 8 The final definition of the sophist
- Bibliography
- Index locorum
- General index
2 - The sophist and the philosopher
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes and abbreviations
- Division of the Sophist
- 1 How to read the Sophist
- 2 The sophist and the philosopher
- 3 How the sophist appears
- 4 Analysis of the structure of appearance
- 5 Appearance and image
- 6 The sophistic counter-attack on philosophy
- 7 The philosophic defence against sophistry
- 8 The final definition of the sophist
- Bibliography
- Index locorum
- General index
Summary
The question of what the sophist is
Chapter 1 has suggested that the basic problem of the Sophist, taken as a whole, is to define what the sophist is, and has examined the structure of the dialogue to get rid of one great obstacle to interpretation. Next, we must ask why the question about the sophist matters for philosophy. What did the question ‘What is a sophist?’ mean to Plato, and what does it mean to us?
In Plato's day, the influence of the professional intellectuals or teachers called ‘sophists’ was so great on his society that it seems reasonable for Plato to examine the nature of the sophists. We modern readers, on the other hand, might think that this question is merely of historical importance, since the ‘sophists’ are historical figures that no longer exist. We tend, furthermore, to imagine that, even if the historical situation of his day forced Plato to examine the sophists, he could never have taken such a trivial issue as criticism of the sophists seriously, or at any rate more seriously than many other important philosophical issues. To this view, I respond in the following way. What Plato saw in the essence of the sophists is not so much a historical problem only for his time as a philosophical problem which is of great significance for establishing philosophy itself. Since the sophist is without doubt a historical figure for us, we must first examine the meaning of the ‘sophist’ in the historical context.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Unity of Plato's SophistBetween the Sophist and the Philosopher, pp. 43 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999