Image and Paradigm in Plato’s Sophist
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Description
The Sophist sets out to explain what the sophist does by defining his art. But the sophist has no art. Plato lays out a challenging puzzle in metaphysics, the nature of philosophy, and the imitation of philosophy that is unraveled in this new and unconventional interpretation. Here is a new translation of this important late Platonic dialogue, with a comprehensive commentary that reverses the dominant trends in the scholarship of the last fifty years. The Sophist is shown to be not a dry exposition of doctrine, but a rich exercise in dialectic, which reveals both the Eleatic roots of Platonic metaphysics and Plato’s criticism of unrevised Eleaticism as a theoretical underpinning for sophistry.
The Sophist is presented now not as an artefact of the intellectual past or precursor of late 20th century philosophical theories, but as living philosophy. In a new translation and interpretation, this late dialogue is shown to be a defense of and not a departure from Plato’s metaphysics. The book is intended to provide a complete interpretation of Plato’s Sophist as a whole. Central to the methodology adopted is the assumption that all elements of the dialogue to be understood must be understood in the context of the dialogue as a whole and in its relation to other works in the Platonic corpus.
ISBN
978-1-930972-04-9
Publication Date
2007
Publisher
Parmenides Publishing
City
Las Vegas (NV)
Keywords
Metaphysics, Sophistry, Platonic dialogue
Disciplines
Comparative Philosophy | History of Philosophy | Metaphysics
Recommended Citation
Ambuel, David, "Image and Paradigm in Plato’s Sophist" (2007). Cultural and Philosophical Inquiry Books. 13.
https://scholar.umw.edu/cpr_books/13