Abstract

This small book has one principal theme that explains most of its parts: Seligman claims that the "central sections" of the Sophist cannot be explained by linguistic or syntactic analyses, but rather require attention to Plato’s ontological commitments. This assumption, unfortunately an unusual one in the light of many recent works on Plato’s Sophist, conditions his further claim that the principal aim of the Sophist is to dismantle the Parmenidean canon of non-being as to medamos on. He diagnoses the main work of the Stranger as showing the interweaving of being with non-being, and that in this, "Plato’s key move is his discovery that the true nature of non-being is ‘difference'." Taking the notion of the koinonia at the level of the "greatest kinds," Seligman shows that the copular- and identity-senses of "is" must be replaced by the consequences of the auto kath’ hauto and pros allo senses of being, or by "participating in being" and "participating in otherness."