Sophist

About the book

An Eleatic visitor joins Theaetetus in an inquiry intended to distinguish the sophist from other kinds of practitioner. A sequence of divisions classifies activities such as acquiring, producing, and imitating, but the effort to locate deceptive expertise raises more fundamental problems. If false statements say what is not, how can falsehood be possible at all? The discussion turns towards being, motion, rest, sameness, and difference in order to make that difficulty intelligible. Plato gives the dialogue a more sustained analytical shape than many of the familiar Socratic encounters. Its initial professional question remains important, yet answering it requires examining the relations that make meaningful speech and thought possible. Readers follow an argument in which a practical distinction repeatedly opens onto a deeper problem about the conditions of distinction itself.

• Being and difference
• Falsehood
• Definition

Why read it

For an exacting dialogue in which the attempt to identify deceptive expertise becomes a major inquiry into language and reality.

English translation by Benjamin Jowett