One of the Dialogues of Plato.

Originally intended to be part of a trilogy of dialogues along with Statesman and Philosopher, this dialogue concerns the nature and attributes of the sophist and his art. By the way, Philosopher either was never written or is no longer extant. This dialogue is unique among Plato's dialogues for it does not have Socrates as the central figure. Rather, the primary facilitator of the dialectic is only referred to as a stranger.

In the first half of the dialogue, the stranger and the young Theaetetus seek to categorize the sophist in the same way one would try to classify a plant or animal. That is, if the subject is of this general class then it is either this or that based on its properties.¹ The stranger then defines the two categories, places the subject into one of them, and moves on in the same manner, getting more and more specific each time. The result of this classification is that the two dialecticians find the sophist falling into several categories. He is someone that seeks to purify the soul, to sell a good, to produce a good, to persuade. And when they pursue the sophist down this line of reasoning, they run into trouble. For earlier in their argument, they were able to neatly put other learned folk such as painters and sculptors into neat single categories. The sophist wants to take up several slots.

They latch on to the art of disputation, which the sophist is said to profess. The sophist, in fact, professes to teach the art of disputation of all things. To say such implies that they have knowledge of all things. Obviously, this is impossible so we get the idea that the sophist is something of a con man. In fact they place him in the branch of creative arts having to do with making appearances but not an image, or in their words, fantasy. But Parmenides and other sophists deny that a falsehood can be uttered or professed, because to do so would assert the being of non-being, a thing they deem impossible.

What follows in the dialogue, from this point, is a rather long ontological discussion about what is being and not-being. I won't go into it here because, frankly, I didn't get it. The gist of it was that there is a property of things called being and a class called not being, that a thing may have either the one or the other property. The consequence of the existence of not-being is that falsehood and deceit are possible, for if not-being did not exist all things would be true. In the end, they classify the sophist a deceiver, a professor of fantasies, a juggler of words, and some other unpleasant things. Perhaps someone with better reading skills than I can node the details of the argument better.

Plato also deals with the subject of the sophist and his false teaching in Euthydemus.

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¹ It is not uncommon in some nature books to try to classify plants, for example, in this manner. Is it woody stemmed or green stemmed? If it is woody stemmed, then does it grow straight up or along the ground? And so forth until the plant is identified.

Sophist is an early Socratic dialogue. Where it fits in the chronology is a bit unclear. It seems as if it was to be part of a trilogy: Sophist, Statesman, Philosopher, but only the first two still exist. The dialogue begins the day after Theaetetus (wherein the doctrine of justified true belief was expounded) with the interlocutors returning to be questioned by Socrates. Unfortunately, they are out of luck: Socrates himself only takes part in the very beginning of the dialogue. The dialogue itself is performed by Theaetetus, the young, dashing mathematician-philosopher, and an unnamed foreigner. Since the ancient Greek word for foreigner (or stranger) is ξενον, I've taken to calling him Xenon, like the element.

The first part of the dialogue attempts to answer the question "What is a Sophist?" using what was then the novel method of discrimination. This amounts to a very long, drawn out analysis of the skill of sophistry starting from the broadest possible category of the arts (including skills) and repeatedly subdividing categories until the art of the sophist is made manifest. Six such "deductions" are made, from "a paid hunter after the young and wealthy," to "a purger of souls, who removes opinions that obstruct learning". The details are not particularly enlightening, save for an interesting passage on the nature of knowledge.

In this passage (230b-231a), Xenon relates a myth of knowledge as a purification of the soul. This myth plays a huge role in Phaedo, Meno, and The Republic, though whether or not it was developed here or elsewhere is difficult to discern. From this myth we also get the first justification for the use of the dialectic, a justification that is also developed in the above sources: that the method of questioning removes impurities (that is, false beliefs and prejudices) present in the soul so that it can understand things properly.

And, if you're like me, blindly believing everything Plato has been spoon-feeding you so far, everything is working out precisely as planned. But there's far more to this dialogue than meets the eye. With characteristic irony, Plato has described by demonstrating what it is the Sophist does in the very act of appearing to seek the skill of sophistry! It is the Sophists that make seemingly endless distinctions, only to identify the end products. No, my good friend, it is not as Xenon says. The Sophist doesn't fit into more than one slot: it is that the Sophist wants to fit himself and everything else into a multiplicity of slots. God, Plato's such a mindfucker.

It is clearly in Plato's interest to come out and defame the Sophists as liars and tellers of half-truths, but unfortunately, there is metaphysics afoot. The pre-Socratics developed some of the most naive, helpless-looking metaphysics in the western tradition, and thankfully we don't have to give half a second's time to any of them because Plato destroys them all. Truly, my friends, all you need is dialectic.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. To call a Sophist a liar is to say that there are liars: people who say something that isn't real. But Parmenides said oh-so-tautologically "Being is, and Not-Being isn't" (through the voice of a goddess, so it has to be true). "Well fuck, what gives?", says Theaetetus. So Xenon proceeds to troll some other pre-Socratics, drag their discourse into the dialectic, and tear them to shreds.

Some people, by the way, believe that one of the positions refuted here is one of Plato's early idealist theories, before he came up with Platonic Realism. If that's the case, perhaps there is a shred of humility in the bastard.

After he's run out of naive metaphysics to refute, Xenon makes the huge mistake of trying to set up his own, based on five categories: Being, Motion, Rest, Self, and Other. Using these he cobbles together an argument for what I can tell you in a single sentence: "Not-being is different from non-being." Well, okay, that's totally opaque.

Not-being is impossible to work with, as Parmenides brings up, because we can only speak of things that exist. But Plato argues that the apparent opposition between being and not-being is a false one, and that Parmenides has conflated mere existence with truth. False beliefs aren't not-being, since they exist (after a fashion), but they also aren't being, since they aren't true. The distinction between the existential form of "is" and the veridical form of "is" and with it the first steps toward modern logic have their roots here. Being is no longer identical to truth, and metaphysics no longer epistemology.

Sophist ends with a proper application of the method of discrimination. They conclude the Sophist is one who multiplies entities endlessly (yum, anachronism!), as opposed to the philosopher, who wields the dialectic to get rid of illusionary entities and false beliefs.

Soph"ist, n. [F. sophiste, L. sophistes, fr. Gr. . See Sophism.]

1.

One of a class of men who taught eloquence, philosophy, and politics in ancient Greece; especially, one of those who, by their fallacious but plausible reasoning, puzzled inquirers after truth, weakened the faith of the people, and drew upon themselves general hatred and contempt.

Many of the Sophists doubdtless card not for truth or morality, and merely professed to teach how to make the worse appear the better reason; but there scems no reason to hold that they were a special class, teaching special opinions; even Socrates and Plato were sometimes styled Sophists. Liddell & Scott.

2.

Hence, an impostor in argument; a captious or fallacious reasoner.

 

© Webster 1913.