Review of Outstanding Questions

It is time to take count of questions raised previously that remain unresolved. These questions spring ultimately from the Stranger's disclosure at Statesman 285D that the purpose of his conversation with YS is to make its participants better dialecticians. In Chapter 10, we concluded that becoming a better dialectician is a matter of becoming increasingly capable of making accurate divisions, which in turn boils down to an ability to divide things according to Forms. Chapter 10 ended with the question of what accuracy in this respect amounts to.

Chapter 11 began with an attempt to make headway on this question by considering passages in other dialogues where Plato's characters talk to dividing things according to Forms. One such passage is Phaedrus 273E, in which Socrates likens the dialectician's ability to divide things according to Forms to the ability of a butcher to cut carcasses along their natural joints. This gave rise to a further question of what exactly gets divided in the dialectical process. A possible answer is indicated at Sophist 267D, where the Stranger faults earlier speakers of Greek for a certain laziness with regard to “the division of kinds according to Forms.” But nothing is said in this context about the nature of kinds or about the sense in which they might be subject to dialectical division.

Shifting attention to this further question in section 11.2, we undertook a survey of current views regarding what gets divided in the dialectical process.