The Theory of Being and the Argument for Forms in Plato’s Sophist

What is it about?

The Sophist is a dialogue written by Plato later in his life, agreed to be one of his most significant works in metaphysics, the philosophical field concerned with what things are real and how they are related. Although it is clear that Plato has the anonymous main character, the Stranger, articulate a theory of how important entities relate to one another, including Plato’s favoured entities, ‘Forms’, there is no consensus among scholars about the details of that theory. In this paper, I provide a new account of that theory, rejecting the commonly-held views that the theory is articulated only relatively late in the dialogue (in the discussion of ‘greatest kinds’ from 254c onwards), and that Plato simply assumes the existence of Forms in the articulation of the theory. Instead, I argue, Plato has the Stranger propose a definition of ‘being’ (or ‘what is’) which he uses as a fundamental principle in his development of a metaphysical theory of reality, much earlier in the dialogue than has previously been supposed. On the basis of this principle, Plato’s character provides dialectical arguments against his (fictional) metaphysical opponents to argue for the existence of various sorts of entities as genuine items in reality, or members of the ontological population. These arguments include – for the first time, perhaps, in Plato’s writings – an argument for the existence of Forms.

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