Delve Into Sophist Brought To You By Plato Released As Paperbound
Ill have to read this again, I suspect God kills a kitten every time Theaetetus says “clearly” “definitely,” “of course, ” BECAUSE NONE OF THAT IS CLEAR AT ALL,
I became interested in Sophist through Heidegger, Ive read a bunch of Platos dialogues before, I cant remember which, I read them without any guide they impressed me as mildly amusing, beyond that its completely mysterious to me how anyone can walk away with any sort of certainty, or conclusion.
Plato always leaves me feeling “trolled, ”
The “nice” thing about reading backwards from modern “signposts” is that I get to appreciate other peoples interpretive efforts, I dont think I could have taken this dialogue very seirously if I didnt know it inspired so many generations of philosophers, and now Im burning with desire to read Heideggers lecture on Sophist, and his investigation of “beings, even though Ill have to learn to read Greek first.
And I suspect thats the whole point not to indoctrinate readers with any kind of solidified “knowledge,” but to inspire more dialogues, investigations, contemplations.
I dont usually rate books I dont understand, but I think, for the psychological effect it created bafflement commingled with desires to dig deeper its justifiable to give it.
The dialogue's explicit aim is to define, oppose, and discredit “the Sophist” but it ends up discussing very important issues like being, nonbeing, truth, dialectics, motion, rest, sameness, difference, sophistry, philosophy, and so on.
The Sophist raises serious problems against Plato's philosophy, while Socrates “the Philosopher” stays there in the background and does not intervene at all in order to clarify, rebuke, or defend.
Theaetetus, mechanically agrees to everything that the Sophist says,
Probably the most topic is the one concerning being/nonbeing and its relation to truth, Truth is to claim that what “is” is and what “is not” is not, But what “is” is I love when we are told that there are two ways to approach beings/to be one that claims that only what you can grasp with our hands “is” and another one that is more theoretical/ideal/general.
“Is” can be a form of predicating but more importantly it concerns beings in their existence, But how can we talk about a nonbeing as if it “is” and moreover in singular or plural and how can we generalize and find some common ground between clearlydifferent beings like motion and rest by virtue of their being/to be
The topic of beings/nonbeings, Being, and its connection with truth raised here by Plato stayed more or less in the background for more than two thousands of years until Heidegger brought it explicitly to the forefront again.
Leave it to Plato to ask a simple question Who is the sophist and create an entire ontology as a biproduct, Platon öncesi dönemde savunulan var olan ve var olmayan düşüncesine yeni bir bakış açısı, Felsefenin temel taşlarından, Felsefeyle ilgilenen herkesin okuması gerekir, “Sofist”in kim olduğuna dair bir araştırmayla başlıyor daha sonrasındaysa varlık tartışmasına geçiyor, Önemli olan aralarda yaptığı gönderimleri kavramak, Şahsen ben kitabı okurken birden fazla kaynak kullandım, daha iyi oturması amacıyla, Her ne kadar ingilizcesini kavramları açısındandan tercih etsem de, çok detaylı bir okuma yapmıyorsanız, türkçesi gayet güzel.
Great book. Being gives being to motion and rest, So motion and rest are different, except in their participation from being,
Also, the sofists are those hiding in nonbeing, Are the apophatic theologians then sofists Un clásico, . .
Interesting. Plato is one of the best thinkers to have lived on this planet, I liked a lot his description of charlatans sophists and their wordplaying,
Probably worth reading for people who are into classics, philosophy or the sort, Plato is a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science, Plato is one of the most important Western philosophers, exerting influence on virtually every figure in philosophy after him, His dialogue The Republic is known as the first comprehensive work on political philosophy, Plato also contributed foundationally to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, His student, Aristotle, is also an extremely influential philosopher and the tutor of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, An interesting discussion on sophist definition and its connection with arts and martial arts, On some cases the dialogs was circling around, but its quite logical, Drags in the middle. In chasing down the definition of a Sophist, the Visitor's investigation is both exhaustive and exhausting, Sophistry abounds. An issue Plato himself actually acknowledges in the text:
Visitor: We should leave pointless things like this alone, Instead we should be able to follow what a person says and scrutinize it step by step, When he says that what's different is the same in a certain way or that what's the same is different in a certain way, we should understand what he means, and the precise respect in which he's saying that the thing is the same or different.
But when someone makes that which is the same appear different in just any old way, or vice versa, or when he makes what's large appear small or something that's similar appear dissimilarWell, if someone enjoys constantly trotting out contraries like that in discussion, that's not true refutation.
It's only the obvious newborn brainchild of someone who just came into contact with those which are
Theaetetus: Definitely,
Visitor: In fact my friend, it's inept to try to separate everything from everything else, It's the sign of a completely unmusical and unphilosophical person,
Engaging directly with the unmusical
and unphilosophical can be tedious, Completion, however, rewards perseverance for The Sophist has the best bookends of any of the Platonic dialogues I have read thus far.
Chato demais. Mas tal qual o Parmênides, vale pelo modo de raciocinar By the middle of the book here's what I really wanted to see happen:
STRANGER: There are some who imitate, knowing what they imitate, and
some who do not know.
And what line of distinction can there possibly be greater than that which divides ignorance from knowledge
THEAETETUS: There can be no greater.
STRANGER: Was not the sort of imitation of which we spoke just now the
imitation of those who know For he who would imitate you would surely
know you and your figure
THEAETETUS: Naturally.
STRANGER: And what would you say of the figure or form of justice or of
virtue in general Are we not well aware that many, having no knowledge
of either, but only a sort of opinion, do their best to show that this
opinion is really entertained by them, by expressing it, as far as they
can, in word and deed
PUNCH
STRANGER: OW!
STRANGER:.
. .
STRANGER: Did you just punch me in the face
THEAETETUS: Yes, in the nose,
STRANGER: That REALLY hurt!
THEAETETUS: Sorry, but I had a justified true belief that punching you in the face would finally make this interesting.
I've been saying "yes", and "very true" for over an hour now and you haven't communicated anything of testable value, You've assumed a definition of knowledge and seem to be under the impression that through deduction you can arrive at an absolute truth that would somehow settle all further inquiry.
You've provided not a single conjecture that I, or anyone listening, could ever evaluate, test, or even attempt to falsify,
STRANGER: AGH, my nose is bleeding, . .
THEAETETUS: You're right, that was uncalled for, Please, go on using sophistry to tell me why sophistry is bad,
But that never happened,
Here's something fun, filter out everything Theaetetus says, it goes like this,
, . .
THEAETETUS: Yes.
THEAETETUS: True.
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
THEAETETUS: True.
THEAETETUS: What do you mean, and how do you distinguish them
THEAETETUS: Very true,
THEAETETUS: True.
THEAETETUS: Yes.
THEAETETUS: Yes, it is often called so,
THEAETETUS: By all means,
THEAETETUS: True.
THEAETETUS: True.
THEAETETUS: Most true.
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
THEAETETUS: To be sure,
THEAETETUS: True.
THEAETETUS: Granted.
THEAETETUS: Very true
THEAETETUS: There are certainly the two kinds which you describe,
THEAETETUS: Very good.
THEAETETUS: By all means,
THEAETETUS: Undoubtedly.
And so on for the entire dialogue,
Perhaps out of boredom, or perhaps trying to distract myself from hoping the stranger gets punched in the face, I wondered if every "True" and "Very true" could be deciphered as some kind of code or riddle maybe there is a hidden message encoded in repetitive affirmations.
Or maybe I'm just desperately looking for something of value in this text, . .
Anyway, this is not a dialogue as we use the word, but instead a diatribe against sophists ironically characterizing "sophists" for doing exactly what Plato, as the "stranger", was doing via this dialectic approach.
At one point I had to stop because I thought maybe I was reading a farcical comedy, I kept an open mind, but every page became harder and harder to get through, Hours of dialecticglop and semantic entanglements, I'll assume some of that was a problem of translation, but still, a punch in the face would have made the whole thing much more interesting.
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