Recall one of the central claims of the theory of the forms that there are various kinds. Strict Monism, of the kind often – but not exclusively – attributed to the Eleatics, holds that on every level, despite appearances, there are not a variety of things.

Monism amounts to the doctrine that all things are, on some level, one. However, from a combination of careful exegesis of said fragments and the engagement with their work by later philosophers, we can piece together a fairly sophisticated understanding of what the Eleatics actually thought.įor the purposes of reading the dialogue, it is the doctrine of Monism which defines the Eleatic position, largely because it defines the opposition between Platonic and Eleatic thought. Parmenides’ work comes to us only in fragmentary form, and none of Zeno’s work appears to have survived whatsoever. These issues turn on the central philosophical concerns of the Eleatic school.Įleatic Thought A photograph of the Akropolis in Elea, via Wikimedia Commons. Once the seventh definition is given, the dialogue appears to turn away from defining the Sophist as such and turns towards some of the philosophical issues raised by the attempt to do so. The Sophist is defined in seven different ways, and any attempt to reconcile such definitions doesn’t appear successful. Although a large part of the dialogue is taken up with attempting to define the Sophist, and the term ‘Sophist’ is clearly pejorative, this part of the dialogue doesn’t appear to yield a clear theoretical return. Perhaps because the Sophist is meant to be read more indirectly, as a kind of example of the weaknesses of Eleatic thought. Whereas many Socratic dialogues at least appear to be a genuine, two-way conversation, the Eleatic Stranger portrayed in the Sophist is exceptionally didactic. For one thing, the conversation recorded in the Sophist is between Theaetetus and an ‘Eleatic Stranger’. There are various reasons for making the claim that Plato is concerned with both the Eleatic and the Sophist schools, and one of these has to do with the structure of the Sophist. However, Plato is concerned to set his philosophical outlook against that developed by another school that of Elea, of which Parmenides and Zeno were and are the main proponents.Īlthough isolating Plato’s work as responding to just one of these schools would be reductive, and ahistorical, one might reasonably claim that the Eleatics are as much a target of Plato’s dialogue as the Sophists themselves.ĭefining the Sophist An illustration of Plato by Cunego, 1783, via the Wellcome Collection. The Sophists are regarded as one such school, and a critique of Sophistic philosophy is certainly one motivation behind the Sophist.

In the century or so before Plato, Greece and the wider Greek speaking world (encompassing parts of modern day Italy, Turkey, Egypt and the Balkans) produced an extraordinary range of philosophical schools. Raphael’s ‘The School of Athens’, 1511, depicting Plato in the centre, wearing pink robes, and Parmenides upstage of him, to the left of the man leaning on the desk. Recurrent components include the distinction between a world of appearance and reality which exists beyond perception and common place understandings of the world, that the forms which inhabit this latter conceptual space are of various kinds, and that philosophical inquiry is the mode by which we can move beyond perception and gain access to reality.

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