INTRODUCTION: MYTH AND COSMOLOGY

Greek philosophical cosmology did not originate completely out of the blue. The first philosophical cosmologists - usually referred to as Ionian or Milesian cosmologists because they worked in Miletus, in Ionia - could react against, or sometimes build upon, popular conceptions that had existed in the Greek world for a long time. Some of these popular conceptions can be gleaned from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod (eighth century B.C.). In Homer the cosmos is conceived as a flat earth, surrounded by the Ocean (Okeanos), and overlooked by a hemispherical sky, with sun, moon, and stars. In the eighth century the annual course of the sun and the rising and setting of some constellations were integrated into a primitive seasonal calendar. Lunations were used for small-scale calendrical purposes (“the twenty-seventh of the month is best for opening a wine-jar” Hesiod Works and Days 814) and at some point - although there are no traces of this in Homer of Hesiod - some form of lunisolar calendar was established.

There is no question that Parmenides' poem was a watershed in the history of early Greek philosophy. No serious thinker could ignore his work. And yet it seems to pose insuperable problems for cosmology and scientific inquiry. The first generation to follow Parmenides includes thinkers who wished to continue the tradition of Ionian speculation. But how would they confront Parmenides? What would they make of him and what effect would his arguments have on their work? The first neo-Ionians, as they have been called, were Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Despite some salient differences, the two philosophers have much in common in their approach. They are near contemporaries, and as we shall see, they make similar moves in their approach to scientific speculation. Let us first examine the systems of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and then discuss their responses to Parmenides.

EMPEDOCLES AND ANAXAGORAS

After warning us to seek a balance in our evaluation of sensory evidence (DK 31 B3), Empedocles goes on to identify the basic constituents of the universe and to develop a cosmology based on those constituents. There are four “roots,” (rizômata): earth, water, air, and fire (B6), which combine in whole-number ratios to form compounds.

Soul, sensation, and thought: a separate chapter could be devoted to each of these items. But, beyond considerations of space, there is a rationale for broaching them together, for these three notions are in some sense correlated. It is on certain aspects of this correlation that I shall focus. The first part of this chapter concentrates on the soul, and its relationship to the two other terms. The second part specifically will be devoted to the relationship between thought and the senses. Since an important aspect of the latter question bears on epistemology, some overlap with J. Lesher's contribution to this volume (Chapter 11) is unavoidable. However, I have tried to draw attention to “physiological” rather than epistemological problems. As it turns out, this emphasis may not be too artificial because, as we shall see, there is a question as to whether the early Greek philosophers' interests in the relationship between thought and the senses was not primarily physiological rather than epistemological, in a sense of the term “physiological” that remains to be spelled out.

Much of our little information on Zeno's life comes from the prologue of Plato's Parmenides. Most scholars accept Plato's statement that when Socrates was “very young” (though old enough to engage in philosophical debate) Zeno was forty and Parmenides was sixty-five (Parm. 127a-b). The setting of the Parmenides is the quadrennial Great Athenaia, and the best guesses for its dramatic date are 454 B.C. when Socrates was 15 and 450 B.C. when he was 19. Also, Plato's statement that “Zeno was of a good height and handsome to see; the story goes that he had been Parmenides' young lover” (127b) is perfectly possible, though not otherwise attested. Even if the setting of the Parmenides is historically plausible, the notorious unreliability of Plato's reports on earlier philosophers makes it unwise to take much else of what he says on trust. The conversation in the Parmenides certainly did not take place, and we may fairly doubt that Socrates met the philosophers from Elea. Further, Plato indicates that Zeno's treatise was unknown in Athens prior to the dramatic date of the Parmenides (127c), but he also implies that it was written many years earlier, and he says it had been circulated (apparently soon after its writing) without Zeno's authorization (I28d) – claims that although not actually contradictory are hard to reconcile.

POETIC PESSIMISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPTIMISM

The Greek philosophers were not the first to reflect on the nature and limits of human knowledge; that distinction belongs to the poets of archaic Greece. In Book XVIII of the Odyssey, for example, the failure of Penelope's suitors to sense the disaster awaiting them prompts some famous remarks on the mental capacities of the species from the disguised Odysseus:

Here, as on other occasions in the Homeric poems, the thoughts of mortals reflect only their present experiences,- the events that lie ahead lie also beyond their powers of comprehension. Conversely, when the gods choose to endow an individual with superhuman powers of insight, his knowledge is distinguished by its vast range:

Protagoras and Gorgias are the most significant of the early sophists. Although philosophy as we understand it was not their chief business, they taught views and methods of argument that have fascinated subsequent philosophers. In their own context they exhibit the spirit of the new learning, the cultural and intellectual revolution of the fifth century B.C. in Greece. This revolution - or, rather, the reaction against it - is illustrated in Aristophanes' comic play, The Clouds, by a character enrolling in a sophistic school in order to learn the “unjust argument.” This, he has heard, can win a jury's favour for the worst of offenders. The syllabus, he finds, involves science as well as rhetoric, both laughable in this satire. What is not laughable is the popular animosity against the school that leads to its incineration (at least one student included), a grim sign of the strong feelings that would later contribute to the death of the man whose name Aristophanes uses for the leader of his imaginary school - Socrates.

INTRODUCTION

Justice was a major topic of debate at Athens during the period that extends from Aeschylus' Eumenides (456 B.C.), with its celebration of the inauguration of the court of the Areopagus, down to the trial and death of Socrates (399 B.C.), memorialized in Plato's Apology. Historians, dramatists, orators, and philosophers provide a range of perspectives and evidence on one of the crucial issues of the age. In the earliest Greek literature human justice had been very closely linked to divine justice and power, but in the fifth century, the time of tribunals and popular assemblies, what chiefly attracts attention is justice purely in the human sphere. Questions are raised about its origin, its connection with nature and truth, its performance, the conditions that can guarantee its development, and the forces that generate its opposite - coercive power, violence, and injustice.

In order to acquire a general idea of the terms in which these issues were explored at the end of the fifth century, it is enough to read the speeches Plato puts into the mouths of Glaucon and Adeimantus at the beginning of book two of his Republic. These speeches provide the best introduction to our theme because they exemplify the cultural background against which Plato develops his great project in this dialogue. Before turning to details, a few words are necessary on some of the questions that emerge in the preceding book.

INTRODUCTION

Ancient Greek philosophy arose in a culture whose world had always teemed with divinities. “Everything is full of gods, ”said Thales (Aristotle De an. 1.5, 411a8), and the earliest “theories of everything” were mythological panoramas such as Hesiod's Theogony, in which the genealogy of the gods is also a story about the evolution of the universe. Hence when certain Greeks began to think about the physical world in a philosophical way, they were concerning themselves with matters which it was still quite natural to term “divine, ” even in the context of their new scientific approach. Because of this, it is not entirely obvious where one should draw the line between the theology of the early Greek philosophers and their other achievements. But clarity is not served by classifying as “theological” every statement or view of theirs that features concepts of divinity. To theologize is not simply to theorize using such concepts in a non-incidental way. Rather, it is, for instance, to reflect upon the divine nature, or to rest an argument or explanation on the idea of divinity as such, or to discuss the question of the existence of gods, and to speculate on the grounds or causes of theistic belief.

Defining the sophist

I have shown in the first two chapters that the basic philosophical problem in the Sophist is how to distinguish the sophist from the philosopher. Now let us begin to discuss how the Sophist investigates the basic problem.

The Eleatic visitor sets out to define the sophist by pointing out an indeterminacy in our understanding of the sophist. The dialogue starts the inquiry with an agreement that people share a common name:

In order to understand the meaning and the procedure of defining the sophist, we should look, to begin with, at the three methods employed in the dialogue: definition, use of models, and division.

The aim of definition is stated in Passage 2: that a definition (logos) should fix our understanding of an object to which a certain name (onoma) refers. Let us consider what role the three elements, that is, name (or word), object, and definition, play when we inquire into a definition of something.

Introduction of the concept of an image

In the previous two chapters, we saw how inquiry focused on the concept of appearance in the course of defining the sophist. Through the New Attempt the sophist is characterised as one who appears to be wise but is not (cf. Passage 9: 233c1–11). In examining the sophist's appearing, we have also found out the significant role that appearance plays in philosophical inquiry. The inquirers have received many appearances of the sophist in the earlier inquiry; that, on the one hand, signifies their failure to define the sophist, but on the other, provides a clue to further investigation in the New Attempt. Facing this double role of appearance, it is necessary to distinguish between two ways of dealing with appearances: the sophist's use of appearance for deceiving others, and the inquirers' use of appearance in their philosophical inquiry (cf. 3.3 and 3.4).

It is at this point that Plato introduces the concept of ‘image’ (eidōlon). Just after the New Attempt, making images is introduced as a model for the sophist's appearing. This introduction of the concept of image has two main purposes. One is to illustrate and clarify some basic features of the concept of appearance. We shall examine in what respects the concept of image illustrates the concept of appearance. The other purpose is to show how the two ways of dealing with appearances can be distinguished.

The many appearances of the Sophist

What is the Sophist, usually deemed one of the greatest philosophical works of Plato? What philosophical problem does Plato propose and investigate in this dialogue?

The Sophist has many faces, each of which has attracted philosophers for two millennia. The issues discussed in the dialogue are all known to be so problematic and so important in the history of philosophy that philosophers have hardly ever asked what problem the Sophist really confronts, or what these issues are to be examined for. They have taken the ‘problems’ for granted. The variety of the philosophical issues it raises, however, makes us fail to see the dialogue as a whole. Each philosopher has taken up only a piece of the dialogue, so that the faces of the Sophist remain fragmentary; the Sophist has not shown us the whole figure nor its essence.

Let us begin our examination by considering how we can approach the dialogue, through a survey of the many faces it has shown its past readers.

With its traditional subtitle ‘On what is’ (peri tou ontos, de ente), the dialogue was treated, from antiquity to the Renaissance, primarily as a masterpiece of Plato's ontological thinking.

First, Plato tackles in Sophist 236d–242b the problem of ‘what is not’ (to mē on), which has proved one of the most important issues in Greek philosophy since Parmenides originally raised the issue. Parmenides, in his verse, strongly opposed ‘what is not is’, and his successors had to prove the possibility of the being of what is not, in order to secure change and plurality in our world.

The question of what the sophist is

Chapter 1 has suggested that the basic problem of the Sophist, taken as a whole, is to define what the sophist is, and has examined the structure of the dialogue to get rid of one great obstacle to interpretation. Next, we must ask why the question about the sophist matters for philosophy. What did the question ‘What is a sophist?’ mean to Plato, and what does it mean to us?

In Plato's day, the influence of the professional intellectuals or teachers called ‘sophists’ was so great on his society that it seems reasonable for Plato to examine the nature of the sophists. We modern readers, on the other hand, might think that this question is merely of historical importance, since the ‘sophists’ are historical figures that no longer exist. We tend, furthermore, to imagine that, even if the historical situation of his day forced Plato to examine the sophists, he could never have taken such a trivial issue as criticism of the sophists seriously, or at any rate more seriously than many other important philosophical issues. To this view, I respond in the following way. What Plato saw in the essence of the sophists is not so much a historical problem only for his time as a philosophical problem which is of great significance for establishing philosophy itself. Since the sophist is without doubt a historical figure for us, we must first examine the meaning of the ‘sophist’ in the historical context.

The art of apparition-making

Now we reach the final attempt to define the sophist, in the second Outer Part of the dialogue (264b9–268d5). Between the two points where the definitional inquiry into the sophist is suspended and resumed, there lies the long digression of the Middle Part (236d9–264b8), which deals with the difficulties concerning what is not and what is (236d9–251a4), the combination of the greatest kinds (251a5-259d8), and the explanation of falsehood (259d9-264b8). We have just clarified how that long argument is constructed with a view to providing solutions to the issues of appearance without being, of image, and of falsehood. In this chapter we shall determine what the final definition of the sophist is, and also illuminate in retrospect what has been done in the Middle Part. Of course, the argument in the Middle Part has much richer philosophical meaning than we discussed in the previous chapter and shall reflect here, but it is only when we examine the whole dialogue, particularly the final definition of the sophist, and assess the significance of the whole scheme, that we can properly understand the meaning of the Middle Part. I shall point out several important results of that argument which contribute to the final definition. Those who concentrate solely on the Middle Part usually dismiss them. This chapter examines the final definition step by step. Particular attention should be paid to its relation to the argument of the Middle Part and to the earlier divisions.