Abstract

The main goals of this dissertation are four in number: to show how the task of keeping distinct the sophist and the philosopher is at root an ethical task, linked, ultimately, to the fate of Socrates, to show that the Stranger appreciates this link and in response attempts to keep the sophist and the philosopher distinct for the sake of defending Socrates from the charges of sophistry that have been unduly advanced against him, and that in the process of doing this he becomes a Socratic philosopher, to show how this task is responsible for initiating the investigation of non-being, which in turn, despite its seeming theoretical abstractness, is thus also ethical in nature, and finally, to show how the result of the Stranger's investigation of non-being compels him to propose, against his philosophical father Parmenides, that non-being is and that it enjoys a necessary connection with being that is characterized by mimesis . I will furthermore show that mimesis accounts for the possibility both of the philosophical and of the non-philosophical, sophistic life, and that the Stranger distinguishes the one from the other on the basis, ultimately, of their different responses to the problem of non-being, which is to say, the opposing ways in which both the sophist and the philosopher are each imitators. In more detail, I attempt to show how it is on the basis of the Stranger's recognition of the necessary connection between non-being and logos that he is able to capture the long-awaited sophist, whom he characterizes as a deceptive maker of false images in speech, which in turn, provides the necessary basis upon which we may distinguish the sophist from the philosopher, Socrates, the latter of whom, in contrast to the sophist, makes "true images" in speech