Abstract

The book treats Plato's Sophist 237-264. The introduction observes that problems Plato tackled are the same as contemporary problems about predication and mental representation of natural-language statements, and that Plato's account of the relation between language, mind, and reality strongly resembles a contemporary mental-representationalist language. Given that Plato was responding to a problem about negation, the author finds it "quite astonishing that modern representationalists pay no attention to these difficulties concerning negation".