ANNA PAVANI
Names and Methods
The Language of Dialectic in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES IN ANCIENT THOUGHT
Philosophical Studies in Ancient Thought
Volume 5
Béatrice Lienemann, Christian Pfeiffer, Christof Rapp ( eds.)
Anna Pavani
Names and Methods
The Language of Dialectic in Plato’ s Sophist and Statesman
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3.2 Dividing and Collecting by Means of
3.2.1 Dividing by Means of
3.2.2 Collecting by Means of
3.3
Detecting Mistakes within
4.1.1 Detecting Mistakes by Means of Myths and
4.1.2 Detecting Mistakes within Division by Means of
4.1.3 Incorrect and Correct ways of Naming and Dividing
4.2 The Names of the Statesman
5. The Role of Names in Plato’ s
Late Dialectical Methods
5.1 Linguistic Bewitchment
5.3 Names and Methods of Collection and Division
5.3.1 The Objects : The Plurality of Reference Ensured by Names . .
5.3.2 How the Methods operate : ( Names as ) Provisional
5.3.3
Acknowledgments
This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. Special thanks go to my supervisors on both sides of the Atlantic : Prof. Christoph Helmig ( University of Cologne ), who encouraged me to keep working on the Cratylus more than ten years ago, Prof. Mary Louise Gill ( Brown University ), and Prof. Cristina Ionescu ( Catholic University of America ), whose Scharfsinn and enthusiasm have inspired me both in good and hard times. Very special thanks go to Prof. René Nünlist ( University of Cologne ), who agreed to be on my defense committee and, since then, has been teaching me what it truly means to care for ( Greek ) words. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Mary Louise Gill, who warmly welcomed me at Brown University and helped me to conceive most of the ideas in this book. Along the way, I had the pleasure of discussing them with many dear colleagues in Prague, Providence, Bergen, Edinburgh, Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Tübingen, Leuven, Paris, Oxford, Bochum, Venice, Frankfurt, Rome, Catania, Athens ( Georgia – USA ) and Athens ( Greece ), Bari, Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, and Lisbon. My thanks once again for the inspiring and insightful discussions.
Not a single word of this book would have been written without the support I have received over the past years. In the first place, I am thankful to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of the European Union and to the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities Cologne, which made this whole journey possible. I also thank a.r.t.e.s. for granting me the Katharina Niemeyer-Sprachlektorat, which provided me with the opportunity to have my first draft proofread by Jonathan Griffiths. Parts of the later versions were proofread by Joshua Benjamins, whom I also would like to thank. All remaining mistakes – mistakes being a central issue of the analysis provided in this book, as readers shall see –are, of course, my own. Last but not least, I would especially like to thank the GANPH ( Gesellschaft für Antike Philosophie ) for awarding me the Promotionspreis in 2022, the three editors of the series “Philosophical Studies in Ancient Thought,” namely Prof. Béatrice Lienemann, Prof. Christian Pfeiffer, and Prof. Christof Rapp, for accepting my manuscript and providing me with helpful comments, and the Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung for generously funding the publication of this book.
Not a single step would have been taken without the support of those who accompanied me along the way over the past years. I owe a special debt of grati-
tude to the marvelous people I had the pleasure to spend my best and worst ( working ) hours with. To Giulia Dovico, Lisbeth Matzer, Ragna Winniewski, Nina Eckhoff-Heindl, and Katharina Maria Kalinowski, go my warmest thanks for all we shared besides one office. Finally, warm gratitude to my friends on both sides of the Alps, especially Sara, Alessandro, and Monica, and to my old and new family. This book is dedicated in loving memory to my grandmother.
Note to the Reader
The Sophist and Statesman are cited from the edition of E. A. Duke, W. F. Hicken, W. S. M. Nicoll, D. B. Robinson, and J. C. G. Strachan, Oxford Classical Text series, 1995. The few discrepancies are marked.
Unless stated otherwise, translations are my own. Since language is the focus of this book, I considered it not just appropriate, but also necessary to provide my own reading of the Greek text. I hope the reader will gain in transparency what got lost in elegance.
There is a twofold exception to this principle. On the one hand, I have not translated crucial terms such as technê and paradeigma. In both cases, I considered the transliteration less confusing than the familiar but misleading translations. I discuss at page 85 and 186, respectively, why both “art” and “expertise,” “example” and “model,” fall short of the Greek terms they are supposed to render. On the other hand, I have reluctantly translated onoma as “name,” which is by no means an adequate equivalent, as I explain in Chapter 1. In this case, I esteemed readability over accuracy.
Introduction
Xenos : “And what in turn about our inquiry on the statesman ?
Is it set before us more for the sake of the statesman or for the sake of our becoming more dialectical about everything ?
Young Socrates : That too is clear : it is for the sake of our becoming more dialectical about everything.” ( Stm. 285d4 – 7 )
Dialectic is the copingstone for all learnings ( thrigkos tois mathêmasin at Resp. VII 534e2 – 3 ) and the counterpart of eristic ( Men. 75c8 – d7 ). Dialectic is the “science of free men” who are nothing less than the true philosophers ( Sph. 253c ), and becoming “more dialectical” is the reason why – as the passage quoted above shows – the search for the statesman is carried out at all ( Stm. 285d ). If dispensing with Forms – as claims old Parmenides in the eponymous dialogue – what one would utterly destroy is precisely “the power of Dialectic” ( dynamis tou dialegesthai ) ( Parm. 135b5 – c4 ).1 It is with reference to “conversing,” “discussing” ( to dialegesthai ) that Plato named what he viewed as the highest technê. As the Socrates of the Cratylus asserts, indeed, the dialectician is the one “who is able to ask and answer questions” ( Crat. 390c10 – 11), the most important of which is the ti-esti question. For, as we learn from the Republic, only the dialectician “tries through argument and apart from all sense perceptions to find the being itself of each thing” ( Resp. VII 532a5 – b1) in order to give an account of the essence of each thing ( Resp. VII 534b3 – 6 ). Dialectic is “the method which endeavours in every case to apprehend concerning each thing what it really is” ( Resp. VII 533b1– 2 ).2
The dialogues present us readers with various ways through which the interlocutors aim to provide a satisfactory answer to the ti-esti question. For Plato called Dialectic the “ideal method, whatever that may be”3 to reach and explain
1 I adopt Kahn’ s rendering ; Kahn (1996 : 297 ).
2 Vlastos’ rendering ; Vlastos (1999 : 36 n.3 ).
3 Robinson (1953 : 70 ). Against Robinson, Kahn (1996 : 300 ) has argued that there is more consistency than it might appear. See also Dixsaut (2001 : 8 ).
the essence of things.4 Across the centuries, scholars have mostly considered the conception of Dialectic as portrayed in the so-called “early” and “middle” dialogues, leading to a neglect of the Late dialogues.5 To borrow Van Ophuijsen’ s expression, “there never was a Plato’ s Later Dialectic to supplement Robinson’ s Plato’ s Earlier Dialectic.”6 While much more is needed to fill such a gap, the present study moves in this direction.
An allegedly brand-new Dialectical method is usually said to be introduced with great emphasis in the Phaedrus. It is in the Phaedrus, to speak with Hackforth, that “Plato for the first time formally expounds that philosophical method – the method of dialectic – which from now onwards becomes so prominent in his thought, especially in the Sophist, Statesman and Philebus.”7 There, Socrates calls “dialecticians” those who master two procedures, which are referred to as “Division” ( diairesis ) and “Collection” ( synagôgê) respectively ( Phdr. 266b3 –4 ). Collection and Division are basic operations of our thinking and, as such, they accompany human beings since the beginning of time. For his part, Plato considers collecting and dividing throughout his work, though this interest becomes more explicit in the Late dialogues. In this book, I shall limit myself to analyzing the Sophist and the Statesman. Moreover, I consider them in the light of each other. There are two main reasons for this delimitation. Firstly, there is, as I will show in Chapter 2, a closer bond between the Sophist and Statesman than arguably between any other Late dialogues.8 Secondly, although Plato clear-
4 The indisputable relevance of Platonic Dialectic has been recognized by almost any philosopher after Plato. See, e. g., Hegel’ s remarks in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, i. e., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, (1996 : 21– 36 ). On Hegel’ s Auseinandersetzung with Plato’ s Dialectic, see Düsing (1980 ).
5 By “late,” I simply mean after the Republic.
Of scholarly research of the past century, which began with Rodier (1905 ), Robinson’ s study about Dialectic (1953 ), although restricted to the early dialogues, is still considered the leading one. Ackrill’ s In Defence of Platonic Division (1970 ), which reacted to Ryle’ s attack in Mind (1939 ) and in his book Plato’ s Progress (1966 ), was crucial in re-opening a serious debate on Plato’ s Late Dialectic. Besides the monographies by Stenzel (1931) and Stemmer (1992 ), more recent works on the Late Dialectic include volumes, such as Lane (1998 ), Sayre (2006 ), Delcomminette (2000a ), and Gill (2012 ), as well as a wider range of articles, such as Philip (1966 ), Moravcsik (1973b ), Wedin (1987 ), Brown (2010 ), Gill (2010 ), Henry (2011), Franklin (2011), and Muniz and Rudebusch (2018 ), not to mention the “new” perspectives on Platonic Dialectic contained in the homonymous volume by Larsen, Haraldsen, and Vlasits (2022 ).
6 Van Ophuijsen (1999 : 297 n.22 ).
7 Hackforth (1952 : 134 ).
8 Precisely such a strong bond justifies the exclusion of the Phaedrus and the Philebus from the present analysis. Surely, the Phaedrus ( Phdr. 265c8 – 266c8 ), where Collection and Division get allegedly defined, and the Philebus, where Dialectic is considered a gift of the gods ( Phlb. 16c5 ), are both extremely relevant to an assessment of Plato’ s understanding of Dialectic in his late works. Whereas I shall briefly refer to the Phaedrus in §5.2, the Philebus would require an
ly designed the Sophist and Statesman as a pair, “the task of interpreting the two dialogues together” has been, as Lane rightly remarks, “oddly neglected.”9 This book aims to fulfill as much as possible such a desideratum.
The Sophist and Statesman are tightly connected from a dramatic, thematic, and methodological point of view. From a dramatic point of view, the Statesman is meant to continue the conversation that was begun in the Sophist. This conversation, to which the Statesman refers repeatedly,10 is led by an unnamed character who appears only in these two dialogues, namely the xenos (“guestfriend”) from Elea. Obvious as it might sound, I take the Sophist and Statesman not to be “treatises in disguise,” but actual dialogues, in which the contributions of the interlocutors are crucial.11 The overarching aim of the discussants is to distinguish three target-terms from each other : the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher, as is stated at the outset of the Sophist and re-stated in the same terms at the beginning of the Statesman. Precisely to achieve this goal, the interlocutors will employ the method of Collection and Division.
As has been rightly remarked, our understanding of the Sophist and Statesman hinges on the way we interpret the dialectical method employed in the respective inquiries.12 Each of the two inquiries, indeed, deals with one of the three terms Socrates asks for in the prologue of the Sophist. There, the unnamed xenos from Elea is asked whether people in his hometown considered sophist, statesman, and philosopher to be one, two, or three kinds, just as the names for them are three ( Sph. 217a7– 9 ). By asking whether there are as many kinds as names, such that a genos can be attached to each name, Socrates is ascribing the highest relevance to names ( onomata ). This is a crucial feature of both subsequent inquiries, as we shall see.
Sophist, statesman, and philosopher are surely distinct, but it is not a small nor an easy task to determine clearly what each of them is, as the xenos candidly admits ( Sph. 217b1– 4 ) and as we readers will also come to acknowledge along the way. To fulfil this task, the interlocutors employ a method that has caused almost no sympathy across the centuries. “Plato’ s predominant logical fancy of
extensive treatment that exceeds the limits of the present study. As Di Lorenzo (2021 : 118 – 120 ) argues, the dialectic section of the Philebus ( Phlb. 13e9 – 17a7 ) is built upon peculiar metaphysical and ontological assumptions that must first be investigated on their own.
9 Lane (1998 : 8 ). Required is the “fuller interpretation of the Sophist and the Statesman as a pair.”
10 See, for example, Stm. 258b6 – 7, 266d5, 284b7, 286b10, and 291c3 – 4. I discuss these cross-references in §2.1.
11 I borrow the phrase “treatises in disguise” from Frede (1992 : 219 ). Pace Stenzel (1931 : 76 –8 ), I agree with Gill (2012 : 130 n.2 ) that the dialogue form of the Sophist is not merely an external trapping. I shall show that the same holds for the Statesman as well.
12 See, e. g., Ionescu (2013 : 41).
the last years”13 has been considered to be inaccurate, incomplete, and ineffective.14 For a deflationary account of the method of Collection and Division, we do not need to wait until the merciless and still influential judgement of Ryle, who wrote that the Sophist “consists queerly of a stretch of highly abstract and sophisticated philosophical reasoning sandwiched between some division-operations which presuppose no philosophical sophistication whatsoever.”15 The comic poet Epicrates already satirized the students of the Academy – he depicts them as saying unutterably weird things in their attempt to distinguish the genus of the pumpkin by applying what is usually identified with the method of Collection and Division. Even if the actual employment of the method, with its long and elaborated chains of Divisions, might strike the reader as “arbitrary, whimsical, or designed to make a particular point,”16 it seems quite unlikely that Plato developed them at such length for parody only.17 Therefore, it seems more appropriate to try to make sense of the method rather than to dismiss it, as scholars like Ryle do. Along these lines, I side with Chappell, who writes that “the long divisions with which the Sophist and the Statesman open can seem both tedious and self-parodic to us. They do not seem so to Plato ; he believes that, in a familiar phrase, it is the task of the philosopher “to divide nature at the joints ( Phdr. 265d – 266a ). [ … ] In doing so – if we do it correctly – we are recovering the structure of reality.”18 This book intends to show that many aspects turn the “pages of pedantic hair-splitting”19 into a much more appealing dialectical tool. The first aspect to appreciate about this dialectical tool is its pedagogical function.
Both dialogues constitute, in my view, a view for which my analysis as a whole constitutes a defense, pedagogical devices. As such, they intertwine theory and practice. This is the reason why I refrain from a running commentary on each step of Division and Collection undertaken in the dialogues, and instead focus on the interweaving of actual Divisions and Collections with methodological reflections. I contend that not only the Statesman, with its long methodological “Digressions,” but also the Sophist contains pieces of advice that help us to understand how the method works. One aspect is immediately evident. Employing the method is difficult. It therefore comes as no surprise that one can get it wrong. What does come as a surprise is the number and proportion of mistakes the dialogues contain. I take trial and error to provide the opportunity for theo-
13 Grene (1950 : 182 ).
14 Pellegrin (1991 : 402 and 406 ). See also Stenzel (1931 : 48 ).
15 Ryle (1966 : 139 ).
16 Brown (2010 : 157 ).
17 As, e. g., Scodel (1987 ) holds.
18 Chappell (2011 : 344 ).
19 Grene (1950 : 181).
retical reflections that are otherwise missing. Along the way, mistakes and aporiai play a pivotal role. It is to correct the previous mistakes that the myth and, later, the model of weaving are introduced in the Statesman ( at 268d5 and at 279a7, respectively ), and it is Theaetetus’ state of aporia after the first six Divisions that enables him to see what makes the sophist so difficult to catch ( Sph. 231b9 –-c2 ). Furthermore, resorting to models is crucial for the learning process : by means of a model ( paradeigma ) Theaetetus can start practicing ( Sph 218d2 ff.), and Young Socrates can make a fresh start after the previous mistake ( Stm. 277d1 ff.). For only by getting it wrong can the young interlocutors improve, and only by reflecting on their mistakes can they ( and we readers ) understand how the method works.
To account for the method of Collection and Division, scholars have focused on three entangled questions. The first question concerns the objects that are divided and collected ; the second, the exact way in which Division and Collection are performed ; and the third, the goal. On these three questions, we are left, as I shall show in the detailed state of the art of Chapter 1, with the history of mutually exclusive answers. Specifically, the method has been confined to taking either Forms or particulars as its objects ; to operating either analytically or taxonomically ; and to either reaching or missing the alleged target, which either corresponds to or differs from a definition. My own answer aims to provide a clue to overcome the one-sidedness of the above-mentioned views by focusing on the role that is accorded to language and, more specifically, to names.
Whereas it is unanimously recognized that Plato conceives language as fundamental to ( his ) philosophy,20 what has not been seriously attempted so far is to comprehensively analyze its specific role within Plato’ s Late Dialectic. Apart from the one exception of the barbaros-passage of the Statesman ( Stm. 262c8 –263a3 ), where the xenos famously connects the existence and the lack of denominations to right and wrong ways to divide human beings and numbers, names are usually said to play a peripheral role.21 A more central role has been acknowledged by only a few scholars.22
20 See, e. g., Sedley (2006 : 214 ): “Plato’ s worldview thus places an altogether pivotal importance on the gift of spoken language : as the basis of dialectic, it is a privileged means to philosophy, and thereby to the soul’ s salvation.” On how fundamental language is to Plato’ s philosophy, see also Silverman (2002 : 139 ). On the constitutive role of language in Plato’ s epistemology, see Mojsisch (1998 : 22 ).
21 To quote the most recent statement I found in the secondary literature, naming is said to be “the only step that the Stranger ever explicitly describes as unnecessary.” Muniz and Rudebusch (2018 : 404 ).
22 Moravcsik (1973a : 169 ), Lane (1998 : 25 – 26 and 31– 33 ), Notomi (1999 : 74 – 76 ), Balansard (2001 : 36 ), Franklin (2011 : 16 ), Henry (2011 : 250 – 1), and Fossheim (2012 : 95 ).
Notably, we do find a double definition of “name” in the final part of the Sophist : Names are defined, more generally, as “means of making known the essence with the voice” ( Sph. 261e5 ), and more specifically, as the “means of making known the essence with the voice” referring not to the actions, but to those performing the actions ( Sph. 262a6 – 7 ). Yet, these definitions usually go unnoticed, since verbs ( especially the verb “to be”), rather than names, are considered of pivotal importance in the Sophist. Moreover, a definition and a proper discussion of what a name accomplishes are generally sought in another dialogue, namely the Cratylus. Within the framework of the tool-analogy, Socrates defines the name ( onoma ) as a ”distinguishing tool” ( diakritikon organon ) of the essence ( Crat. 388b13 – c1). My main contention in this book can be summarized as follows : what is enunciated in the Cratylus, is performed in the diptych. In other words, the application of the Method of Collection and Division in the Sophist and Statesman demonstrates in actu that the name both is and functions as an instrument and that its principal function as such is to distinguish the essence of things. The critical function ascribed to the name is further specified through a technical comparison ( Crat. 388b13 – c1): Just as the kerkis ( a kind of “comb”) is used to differentiate the warp threads from each other, so the onoma is used to differentiate the ousia of one thing from the ousia of something else.23 This function is closely connected with the other determination of the name as instrument by means of which we teach one another ( didaskalikon organon at Crat. 388b13 ). My entire analysis shall show how seriously I take the pedagogical dimension of the application of the Method of Collection and Division in the diptych.
Remarkably, the scholars who have acknowledged the role of names have mostly limited it to Division. Οn its collecting function – the function which is considered complementary to the distinguishing function in the Statesman –nothing is explicitly said.24 Furthermore, it is indisputable that the little attention paid to the method of Collection and Division has focused almost exclusively on Division.25 Fortunately, scholars of more recent times have recognized this oversight, with the result that Collection is undergoing a sort of scholarly “rehabilitation.”26 This book also contributes to the growing emphasis on Collection, which is necessary to restore the balance between Collection and Division that has been missing so far.
23 The name is defined within the framework of a still puzzling tool-analogy, which I analyzed in Pavani (2022 : 91– 101). One of the merits of the carefully crafted analysis of Meißner’ s Auseindersetzung with the Cratylus, especially Meißner (2019 : 75 – 340 ), is that it restores to this analogy its centrality.
24 See Stm 282b6 – 7.
25 See Henry (2011 : 229 ).
26 See, e. g., Hayase (2016 ), Iwata (2019 ), and Muniz and Rudebusch (2018 ).
In this sense, I take the rehabilitation of Collection to go hand in hand with the rehabilitation of the Method of Collection and Division as a whole. First of all, this implies the acknowledgment of the variety of ways in which the method of Collection and Division is carried out and discussed in the Sophist and Statesman. The explanations of the method of Collection and Division offered so far have failed precisely because they attempted to distill the various applications into a single method to be applied to all cases.27 Far from confronting us with the same formula to solve different problems, both dialogues offer various applications of a set of strategies, which are applied in a similar fashion to solve highly different puzzles. The path leading to the statesman has to differ from the path travelled to catch the sophist. In both cases, I contend that true progress does not necessarily require the target to be finally pinned down. In other words, we do not need fully flagged definitions to consider the inquiries as successful. Far from offering us a last word on the essence of the sophist and the statesman, the dialogues teach both the young interlocutors and us readers how to distinguish between the two of them and, as I am going to argue, also how to view both, that is the sophist and the statesman, in relation to the philosopher. This result alone should suffice to earn more readers for the part of the Sophist in which the search for the sophist is carried out, as well as for the Statesman, a dialogue which has not only been particularly despised, but also remarkably disregarded.28 Like other recent works, this book aims to reverse this trend.
29
To conclude this introduction, I shall sketch the progress of my argument through the five chapters of this book. In Chapter 1, I address the three fundamental questions one needs to answer to characterize what has been labeled as Plato’ s “Late Dialectical method :” what gets divided and collected, how it gets divided and collected, and for the sake of what it gets divided and collected. In
27 According to the standard interpretation, which I refer to and discuss in §5.2 as the “one-method interpretation,” there is the same Method all across the Late dialogues. See, for example, Cherniss (1962 : 47 n.36 ) and Hackforth (1952 : 134 ).
28 The Statesman has been considered to be merely ironical, parodic, and playful ( see Rosen (1995 : 36 ), Scodel (1987 : 18 ), and Skemp (1952 : 18 ). See also Taylor (1961 : 250 ), who speaks of a “magnificient failure” and Ryle (1966 : 285 ), who goes so far as to claim that the Statesman “does not also tackle interesting philosophical issues.”
29 As White (2007 : vii ) and El Murr (2014 : 27 ) observe, the Statesman has enjoyed a Renaissance of recent scholarship. Besides monographs such as Delcomminette (2000a ), El Murr (2014 ), Sayre (2006 ), and D. White (2007 ), see the collections of essays edited by Havlicek, Jirsa, and Thein, by Sallis, and by Robinson and Bossi as well as by Dimas, Lane, and Meyer ( in 2013, 2017, 2018, and 2021, respectively ). They can be rightly seen as sequels to the seminal collection of contributions on the Statesman edited by Rowe in 1995, which had the merit of reopening the debate on a dialogue which, as Rowe explains in the Preface, had not received the attention it deserves. By contrast, it is hard to keep track of all commentaries on Plato’ s Sophist, the most recent of which is, to my knowledge, Zaks (2023 ).
surveying the interpretations put forward so far, I attempt to show that all answers prove to be flawed. In my view, the flaw lies in their principle of mutual exclusivity. I conclude Chapter 1 with a brief sketch of the premises of my own answer. In Chapter 2, I defend the need to limit my investigation to the SophistStatesman, which can rightly be considered a diptych. The bond that links the two dialogues is at once dramatic, thematic, and methodological, as I show by also taking the Theaetetus and the Parmenides into account. I argue that this is a necessary move in order to make sense of the many peculiarities of the diptych, not least Socrates’ eclipse in favor of an unnamed xenos from Elea. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the Sophist and the Statesman, respectively. After a discussion of the complex structure and the main subject ( skopos ) of each dialogue, each chapter develops a textual analysis in its own terms, whereas a comparative assessment of the employment of the methods of Collection and Division and the method of paradeigmata in both dialogues is deferred to Chapter 5. Chapters 3 and 4 contend that the diptych presents us with what Lane called the “Janusfaced account of names.”30 Names play a pivotal role in the inquiries conducted through Collection and Division, but also prove to constantly mislead the interlocutors. The close textual analysis in Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrates the variety of methods employed in the inquiry. This issue is addressed in Chapter 5, together with a comprehensive discussion of the role of names in the method of Collection and Division.
Names – this is the thesis I defend throughout this book – both help and hinder the development of the inquiry. It is the reflection on the name “sophist” that makes sense of Theaetetus’ progress, whereas it is by digging into mistaken and correct ways of naming and dividing reality that Young Socrates can detect and correct a major mistake in the search for the statesman. Names fulfill different dialectical functions. Names serve to bring many items under one head, thus proving how crucial Collection is. For it is by searching for the fitting name that Division advances, thus advancing the whole inquiry. Furthermore, the way in which the interlocutors name what they are doing brings to light the underlying conception of the method that Plato employs to distinguish the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher.
Finally, the consideration of both dialogues together leads us readers to the question regarding the last term Socrates asked for : after the sophist and the statesman, how can the true philosopher be marked off ? As is well known, the third term was only heralded but never made into an object of investigation in an eponymous dialogue.31 It is by prompting us to dwell on this question, as to
30 Lane (1998 : 32 ).
31 It has been argued that Plato intended to write a dialogue entitled Philosopher in which he would have defined the philosopher, but then abandoned this project for reasons on which scholars strongly disagree. It has also been argued that Plato never intended to write such a
how to distinguish the philosopher, that Plato wants to train us in the most philosophical task of all.32 Finding out what distinguishes the philosopher is at one with asking what philosophy itself is. Asking this very question, we are already doing philosophy, or what Plato called Dialectic. There seems to be no better question for us to deal with, if we want to become “more dialectical about everything” ( Stm. 285d5 – 6 ).
dialogue. This position has also been defended in different ways. Some scholars try to identify the Philosopher with various existing dialogues, whereas others identify the philosopher with what Plato says in various dialogues. Among the dialogues that allegedly portray the philosopher, scholars tend to privilege the Sophist, where the main speaker in the search for the sophist claims to have stumbled upon the philosopher instead ( Sph 253c6 ff.). More on this issue in footnote 125.
32 See Monserrat Molas – Sandoval Villarroel (2013 : 33 ).