28 - Fiona Leigh on Plato's Sophist
Posted on 10 April 2011
Peter talks to Fiona Leigh of University College London about Plato's Sophist, which revises the theory of Forms to explain how falsehood is possible.
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Further Reading:
• F. Leigh, "Being and Power in Plato’s Sophist," Apeiron 43 (2010), 63-85.
• F. Leigh, "The Copula and Semantic Continuity in Plato’s Sophist," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 34 (2008), 205-21.
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inter-relation between forms
Thanks for these podcasts.... just wanted to ask about this question of the inter-relations of the Forms (that you talk about at the end).....in the Parmenides it is explicitly stated that a person in philosophical training should look at all the major Forms (starting with the Many, Likeness, Unlikeness) and do the same analysis that Parmenides does with the One.
So one should do eight or nine different deductions on the Many starting with:- If the Many is Many..... then the Many is not One so the Many is not a Whole...etc Has anyone actually done this work? I can't find anyone....I know continental philosphers such as Sartre and Heidegger have done something with concepts like being, time and consciousness but they weren't following Parmenides programme explicitly!?
I don't think there is any way to tell in advance of doing this (difficult) work that it would be a waste of time, is there? In fact we can already see from the above that the Many is not the opposite of the One. And if we can somehow rediscover Plato's proof that the One is the same as the Good, then we can see that there is no such thing as the 'opposite' of Good, i.e Evil
All the best,
Dave
The Many
Dear Dave,
What an interesting question! No attempt to do this springs to mind, but then, the question of what the deduction applied to the One in the Parmenides is all about is such a difficult one, that it may be unclear what it would be to produce such a deduction for another Form. Of course the Neoplatonists love the Parmenides but they do tend to think of manyness in the way you are saying we shouldn't, that is, as a failure to attain unity. So they may even think this work has been done in that the negation of unity is an indirect way of thinking about multiplicity.
As far as I know Sartre and Heidegger weren't working with this dialogue but one might think of some of the earlier German idealists, who were at least strongly influenced by the Parmenides in an indirect fashion, given that they were influenced by Neoplatonism.
Best,
Peter
Forms
Dear Peter - hope you had a good Christmas.....thanks for confirming this....it is so difficult, because I am not with an university, to get answers to questions like this...(another benefit of your podcasts is that amateurs like me get to hear how Greek words and names are pronounced - might help avoid a lot of embarrassment in the future!)
I think that Aristotle has a lot to do with it...I think that his interpretations of Plato really set the direction and tone for what has followed. Still it is fairly surprising to me that 'the history of philosophy is a set of footnotes to Plato' but that there are still so much unplumbed depth to his work! It really is an incredibly rich body of work (Complete Works of Plato), and as you say somewhere else, why would you take any other book with you on a desert island! I'd even prefer it to Shakespeare for sure.
So Aristotle brought things down to earth and people became more interested in his logic that is actually directly useful dealing with things in the phenomenal world...Plato's suggestion in the Parmenides that we should investigate the logic of the Forms in themselves, even though people will think this is a useless activity, was then somehow discredited in comparison? I don't know!
Anyway I will try to do this work and see where it takes me! It might even be that looking at deductions for other Forms might help with understanding the deduction given of the One....there is an outside chance, for example, that the deductions contain a deliberate error (or errors), put there for pedagogical purposes, that we can 'correct' once we've done other deductions!
Also this work might help me with my confusion about what an actual 'opposite' is in terms of Forms....how many kinds of 'opposites' are there (I have heard of contradictories, and contraries, but are there more?). It seems very unlikely that for an 'opposite' Form you can just reverse the logic of the deductions, so that there is a perfect symmetry. I think this will work for some deductions but not others, and in different patterns for different pairs of Forms. So One and Many might have different 'symmetries' in their deductions than Smaller / Bigger or Like / Unlike?
Another reason I might attempt this work is that I think I can see the sense of it vaguely. These Form or concepts or categories or whatever, it seems to me, are timeless and eternal in a strong sense. Wouldn’t any higher intelligence of any kind have to understand things with these concepts? Aliens, higher intelligences, gods:- they all might be unimaginably different to us but surely they would all understand what Bigger and Smaller are, or that something can be Like or Unlike something else, or that things have existence (Being) or not? We all look for stability in our lives and it seems like these inter-related Forms are universal and stable in a way nothing else is, or is there a good critique of this view out there I should know about?
I guess this post is longer and more rambling than it should be, so will stop here!!
All the best,
Dave
Greek pronunciation etc
Dear Dave,
A quick caveat about Greek pronunciation: (a) as far as I know the question of how ancient Greek was really pronounced is an insoluble one, though poetry etc give us some indication; and (b) if anyone has a "correct" pronunciation it isn't going to be me, probably what you're hearing from me is a not so educated guess! (When we get to Arabic it will be a bit better.)
Regarding the Parmenides deductions, I'm glad you're so enthusiastic -- I agree that the question of how the opposites function is a really interesting one. It may be important to bear in mind Aristotle's distinction between a contrary and a privation, so the difference between hot vs cold and hot vs not-hot (something room temperature is not hot, but also not cold).
Cheerio!
Peter
Sound quality
Just a quick note to apologize for the background hum in this episode, which we weren't able to eliminate completely - there was a heater on in the room where the interview was done.