No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
THE SOPHIST'S PUZZLING EPISTÊMÊ IN THE SOPHIST
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2023
Abstract
Against prevailing interpretations, this article contends that Plato's Sophist and Statesman accord the sophist a kind of ‘knowing-how’ (epistêmê). In Soph. 233c10‒d2, the Visitor and Theaetetus agree that the sophist has not truth but a δοξαστικὴ ἐπιστήμη. This phrase cannot mean ‘a seeming knowledge’, for –ικός adjectives formed from verbs express the ability to perform the action denoted by the verb—here, δοξάζω. Although not a first-order, subject-area knowledge, sophistry is a second-order knowledge of how to form and use judgements (doxai). Other acknowledgements of the sophist's epistêmê and the ascription to him of τέχνη, ‘craft/expertise’, confirm that the Visitor's conclusion is not to be dismissed as irony. To critics who argue from the Gorgias and from other works that Plato must consider the Visitor's conclusion an error, the author replies: 1) other dialogues do not control the Visitor dialogues; 2) the Visitor does not validly demonstrate that the sophist lacks all knowledge; 3) by admitting sensibles into Being, the Visitor and Theaetetus allow the objects of epistêmê to include things in the embodied world, even likenesses. Non-philosophers’ epistêmê in the Visitor dialogues is not implicated in the difficulties that critics have raised about epistemology in the so-called Two Worlds dialogues. On this new ontology, even the sophist, if guided by philosophical rulers, can benefit citizens by employing his elenctic expertise as Socrates did, aiding their growth toward virtue.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Footnotes
I am grateful to members of the audience at an International Plato Society panel at the American Philosophical Association, as well as to Natalie Hannan, Nicolas Zaks, Dana Miller, Anna Pavani and Paolo Crivelli for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.
References
1 By TW dialogues are generally meant the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Republic, the Phaedrus, Socrates’ dream in the Cratylus, and the Timaeus. For a review of the question, see Moss, J., Plato's Epistemology. Being and Seeming (Oxford, 2021), 18‒26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Cf. Gerth, R. Kühner ‒ B., Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache (Hannover, 1890–1904), 1.371 (§417.9)Google Scholar; Ammann, A.N., -ικός bei Platon. Ableitung und Bedeutung mit Materialsammlung (Freiburg [Switzerland], 1953), 260‒3Google Scholar.
3 Fronterotta, F., Platone: Sofista (Milan, 2007), 287Google Scholar. Τhe few others who opt for ‘opinion-producing’ or ‘opining’ either mistranslate οὐκ ἀλήθειαν as ‘not true’ or subsequently lapse into ‘apparent’ and ‘opinion-based’ (Centrone).
4 Cohen, L.J., ‘Belief and acceptance’, Mind 98 (1989), 367‒89Google Scholar, at 387.
5 M. Burnyeat, ‘Epistêmê’, in B. Morison and E. Ieradiakonou (edd.), Epistêmê, etc.: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Barnes (Oxford, 2011), 3‒29, at 16 n. 44.
6 S. Rosen, Plato's Sophist. The Drama of Original and Image (New Haven, CT, 1983), 163.
7 Cf. Soph. 257c–d, Plt. 258d–e, 264d–e, 267a, 300e; at Plt. 258c‒d and 264d‒e, epistêmê is replaced by technê. Gill, M.-L., Philosophos. Plato's Missing Dialogue (Oxford, 2012), 178CrossRefGoogle Scholar notes that ἐπιστῆμαι in Plt. 258b6‒8 correspond to what in the Sophist had been divided as technai.
8 Snell, B., Die Ausdrücke für den Begriff des Wissens in der vorplatonischen Philosophie (Berlin, 1924), 87Google Scholar.
9 Gill (n. 7), 178 agrees that this accords the sophist an epistêmê, but, she says, the Visitor makes a mistake unnoticed by his audience: ‘The Stranger never credited the sophist with knowledge, only with art or expertise (technê).’ Gill does not discuss the sophist's δοξαστικὴ ἐπιστήμη.
10 Esses, D., ‘Philosophic appearance and sophistic essence in Plato's Sophist: a new reading of the definitions’, AncPhil 39 (2019), 295‒317Google Scholar, at 305; similarly, Beere, J., ‘Faking wisdom: the expertise of sophistic in Plato's Sophist’, OSAPh 57 (2019), 153‒90Google Scholar, at 161‒5, who names artists whom Plato may have meant.
11 Cf. Rosen (n. 6), 133; Centrone, B., Platone. Sofista (Turin, 2008), xxiv‒xxvGoogle Scholar.
12 Apelt, O., Platonis Sophista (Leipzig, 1897), 104Google Scholar.
13 G. Fine, ‘Epistêmê and doxa, knowledge and belief, in the Phaedo’, in F. Leigh (ed.), Themes in Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic Philosophy. Keeling Lectures 2011‒18 (London, 2021), 27‒46, at 31 n. 17.
14 L. Brown, ‘Definition and division in Plato's Sophist’, in D. Charles (ed.), Definition in Greek Philosophy (Oxford, 2010), 151‒71, at 164‒8.
15 L. Brown, ‘Innovation and continuity. The battle of the Gods and Giants, Sophist 245‒249’, in J. Genzler (ed.), Method in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 1998), 181‒207, at 189.
16 R. Barney, ‘Technê as a model for virtue in Plato’, in T.K. Johansen (ed.), Productive Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy. The Concept of Technê (Cambridge, 2021), 62‒85, at 63.
17 On this point, see P. Woodruff, ‘Plato's early theory of knowledge’, in S. Everson (ed.), Companions to Ancient Thought 1. Epistemology (Cambridge, 1990), 60‒84, at 71‒3.
18 T. Robinson, ‘Protagoras and the definition of “sophist” in the Sophist’, in B. Bossi and T.M. Robinson (edd.), Plato's Sophist Revisited (Berlin and Boston, 2013), 3‒13, at 11‒12.
19 N. Notomi, The Unity of Plato's Sophist. Between the Sophist and the Philosopher (Cambridge, 1999), 64‒7, 274‒8.
20 On the methods of Socrates and ‘noble sophistry’, see Zaks, N., ‘Socratic elenchus in the Sophist’, Apeiron 51 (2018), 371‒90CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Esses (n. 10).
21 N. Zaks, ‘Éristique et réfutation socratique dans le Sophiste de Platon’, in S. Delcomminette and G. Lachance (edd.), L’Éristique. Définitions, caractérisations et historicité (Brussels, 2021), 267‒88.
22 N. Zaks, ‘Διακριτική as a ποιητικὴ τέχνη in the Sophist’, CQ 70 (2020), 432‒4.
23 Recent defences of the sophist's technê include Beere (n. 10), 182‒7 and Jeng, I.-K., ‘On the final definition of the sophist: Sophist 265a10‒268d5’, RevMeta 72 (2019), 661‒84Google Scholar, at 676‒8.
24 Cf. C. Kahn, review of Gill, M.-L., Philosophos. Plato's Missing Dialogue (Oxford, 2012), Mind 123 (2014), 1191‒5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1193.
25 This view is defended on different assumptions by Gill (n. 7) and Kahn, C., Plato and the Post-Socratic Dialogue. The Return to the Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge, 2013), 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 R. Hathaway, review of Irwin, T., Plato's Moral Theory. The Early and Middle Dialogues (Oxford, 1977), RMeta 31 (1978), 674‒5Google Scholar.
27 Cf. Trabattoni, F., Essays on Plato's Epistemology (Leuven, 2016), 265‒87Google Scholar.