• Log In

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

Subscribe on Android Spotify Google Podcasts audible patreon
  • Home
  • Podcast
    • PEL Network Episodes
    • Publicly Available PEL Episodes
    • Paywalled and Ad-Free Episodes
    • PEL Episodes by Topic
    • Nightcap
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • (sub)Text
    • Phi Fic Podcast
    • Combat & Classics
    • Constellary Tales
  • Blog
  • About
    • PEL FAQ
    • Meet PEL
    • About Pretty Much Pop
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Meet Phi Fic
    • Listener Feedback
    • Links
  • Join
    • Become a Citizen
    • Join Our Mailing List
    • Log In
  • Donate
  • Store
    • Episodes
    • Swag
    • Everything Else
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • My Account
  • Contact
  • Mailing List

Ep. 143: Plato’s “Sophist” on Lies, Categorization, and Non-Being (Citizen Edition)

July 9, 2016 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

The Partially Examined Life (Citizens): (Protected Content)

Plato by Genevieve ArnoldOn the later Platonic dialogue (ca. 360 BC). What is a sophist? Historically, these were foreign teachers in Ancient Greece who taught young people the tools of philosophy and rhetoric, among other things, and especially they claimed to teach virtue.

In this dialogue, "the Eleatic Stranger" (i.e., not Socrates, who is present but wholly silent after the first couple of pages) is trying to figure out what a sophist really is, and in the process is showing us a new procedure for defining a word, which he calls the method of division. This is sort of like 20 questions, where you start with "animal, vegetable, or mineral?" The difference, of course, being that in 20 questions, one player already knows the answer, and you might ask whether it makes any sense at all to use such a method when you really don't know what the thing is that you're looking for. If you don't know what a gastopod is, then you can't start to answer that by asking yourself what general type of thing it is. But with "sophist," or any other term (e.g., justice, knowledge) that Plato concerns himself with, of course you know enough to start the inquiry, and the point is to get more philosophically precise. So a better example might be "what is a whale," where you start with the animal you can see and end up classifying it as mammal as opposed to fish.

The Stranger ends up classifying the sophist in several ways corresponding to various properties ascribed to sophists (Is he someone who hunts for the souls and money of young people? Is he someone who divides people from their confused beliefs? Is he someone who creates false beliefs in people's heads?) but ends up having to explore the concept of falsity, and its metaphysical correlate, non-being. The "Eleatic" in "Eleatic Stranger" is supposed to connote Parmenides, a Presocratic philosopher who famously claimed that all existence is really One, with no real change. This means that all the variation among the things we see is really illusion: all is Being, and there can be no real thing as a lack of Being. Among the many paradoxes for language coming out of this view is that we can't even rationally say that "non-being does not exist," because in doing so we're using "non-being" as the subject of the sentence—i.e., as an object, i.e., as something that in some sense exists and has this property of not existing. And this property of "not existing" of course means "partakes of non-being." So, saying that unicorns don't exist is a matter of attributing this paradoxical property to these non-things.

If Plato/the Stranger wants to claim that the sophist is a liar, then he has to make sense contra Parmenides of the idea that a sentence can be false, i.e., can refer to a state of affairs that IS NOT, that lacks being. Non-being has to in some sense be a real thing. The eventual solution in this difficult dialogue is that the concept of "other" makes talking about non-being make sense. A unicorn is not really a non-thing; it's just a thing that's different than any of the things that are in the world, or a better way of putting it is that the situation of there existing a unicorn is other than any of the situations that hold. Falsity just means "other than truth."

So, how does all this talk of sophistry vs. philosophy relate to our intellectual climate today? Why would anyone believe Parmenides in the first place, such that it's worth our time to refute him? And is this definition by the method of division just a gimmick, where for you to come up with appropriate grounds for division, you really already have to know the answer to your question in advance? Mark, Wes, and Dylan try to ferret their way through these issues in this fast-paced, comparatively difficult discussion. This means that you will likely wish to listen to most or all of our previous Plato episodes before you bother with this one, and hearing us tussle with non-Being in Hegel's Logic or with Heraclitus (a counterpoint view to Parmenides) might also help. In some ways, you might see this dialogue and other supposedly "late" Platonic works (meaning we really don't, for the most part, know what order these were written in) as a bridge between Plato and Aristotle, as this method of division and the style of the dialogue are much more dry than one might expect from Plato.

Buy the book or follow along in this online version. Dylan's fancy new Eva Brann translation is Plato : Sophist: The Professor of Wisdom (Focus Philosophical Library).

End song: "Dumb," by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

Plato picture by Genevieve Arnold.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Filed Under: Citizen Content, Podcast Episode (Citizen) Tagged With: falsity, metaphysics, Parmenides, Plato, Sophists

Trackbacks

  1. Episode 143: Plato’s “Sophist” on Lies, Categorizaton, and Non-Being (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 11, 2016 at 7:00 am

    […] we'll take a major detour into hardcore metaphysics. Don't wait until next week for it! Get the Citizen Edition as one of the many benefits of a PEL Citizenship. And as Wes explains at the beginning of the […]

    Reply
  2. Episode 143: Plato’s “Sophist” on Lies, Categorization, and Non-Being (Part Two) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    February 4, 2017 at 11:54 am

    […] to part 1 first or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition with your PEL Citizenship. Please support […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

PEL Live Show 2023

Brothers K Live Show

Citizenship has its Benefits

Become a PEL Citizen
Become a PEL Citizen, and get access to all paywalled episodes, early and ad-free, including exclusive Part 2's for episodes starting September 2020; our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more causally; a community of fellow learners, and more.

Rate and Review

Nightcap

Listen to Nightcap
On Nightcap, listen to the guys respond to listener email and chat more casually about their lives, the making of the show, current events and politics, and anything else that happens to come up.

Subscribe to Email Updates

Select list(s):

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Support PEL

Buy stuff through Amazon and send a few shekels our way at no extra cost to you.

Tweets by PartiallyExLife

Recent Comments

  • Seth Paskin on PEL Eulogies Nightcap Late March 2023
  • John Heath on PEL Eulogies Nightcap Late March 2023
  • Randy Strader on Ep. 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty (Part Two)
  • Wes Alwan on PEL Nightcap February 2023
  • Kunal on Why Don’t We Like Idealism?

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

Become a PEL Citizen!

As a PEL Citizen, you’ll have access to a private social community of philosophers, thinkers, and other partial examiners where you can join or initiate discussion groups dedicated to particular readings, participate in lively forums, arrange online meet-ups for impromptu seminars, and more. PEL Citizens also have free access to podcast transcripts, guided readings, episode guides, PEL music, and other citizen-exclusive material. Click here to join.

Blog Post Categories

  • (sub)Text
  • Aftershow
  • Announcements
  • Audiobook
  • Book Excerpts
  • Citizen Content
  • Citizen Document
  • Citizen News
  • Close Reading
  • Combat and Classics
  • Constellary Tales
  • Exclude from Newsletter
  • Featured Ad-Free
  • Featured Article
  • General Announcements
  • Interview
  • Letter to the Editor
  • Misc. Philosophical Musings
  • Nakedly Examined Music Podcast
  • Nakedly Self-Examined Music
  • NEM Bonus
  • Not School Recording
  • Not School Report
  • Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts
  • PEL Music
  • PEL Nightcap
  • PEL's Notes
  • Personal Philosophies
  • Phi Fic Podcast
  • Philosophy vs. Improv
  • Podcast Episode (Citizen)
  • Podcast Episodes
  • Pretty Much Pop
  • Reviewage
  • Song Self-Exam
  • Supporter Exclusive
  • Things to Watch
  • Vintage Episode (Citizen)
  • Web Detritus

Follow:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Apple Podcasts

Copyright © 2009 - 2023 · The Partially Examined Life, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Copyright Policy

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in