The Partially Examined Life (Citizens): (Protected Content)
On the later Platonic dialogue. What is a sophist? These were guys in Ancient Greece who taught young people the tools of philosophy and rhetoric. They claimed to teach virtue. In Sophist, “the Eleatic Stranger” (i.e. not Socrates) tries to figure out what a sophist really is, using a new “method of division.” This leads to a long digression on the nature of “not-being” as a necessary component of false beliefs, which is what the Stranger claims that sophists provide.
End song: “Dumb,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).
