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Episode 143: Plato’s “Sophist” on Lies, Categorization, and Non-Being

July 11, 2016 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_143_6-21-16.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:46:08 — 97.2MB)

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 espeically 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?). This whole interest in sophistry is certainly still relevant to discourse today!

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.

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Filed Under: Podcast Episodes Tagged With: Parmenides, philosophical methodology, philosophy podcast, Plato, Sophists

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  1. 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:
    July 18, 2016 at 7:00 am

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

    Reply
  2. Were the Sophists Really All That Bad? | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 20, 2016 at 7:00 am

    […] a well-known fact that Plato hated Sophists, and in our latest episode we’ve been examining his reasons. But were the Sophists really nothing more than immoral […]

    Reply
  3. One-on-One | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    October 12, 2016 at 7:00 am

    […] in which we are likely to interact. But having just spent two-and-a-half hours listening to the PEL boys dissect Plato's Sophist, it seemed like the conversation we should have would be […]

    Reply
  4. Authenticity from Heidegger to Fanon | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    June 27, 2017 at 8:01 am

    […] authenticity go right back to the beginning of the Western intellectual tradition in the form of Socrates’s concern with the genuine self. Eight hundred years later, St. Augustine expressed a similar […]

    Reply

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