The first full-scale commentary on the Cratylus, one of Plato's most difficult and intriguing dialogues.

"It is... remarkable that Reeve's is the first new English translation since Fowler's Loeb edition of 1926. Fortunately, Reeve has done an excellent job. His version is not slavishly literal but is in general very accurate. It is also very clear and readable. Reeve is particularly to be congratulated for having produced versions of some of the more torturous passages, which are not only faithful to the text but also make good sense in English. The long and detailed introduction is (...) worth reading in its own right." --R. F. Stalley, _The Classical Review_. (shrink)

This book aims to give a coherent interpretation of the whole dialogue, paying particular attention to these etymologies.The book discusses the rival theories ...

Only one philosopher has succeeded in building his reputation on silence—Cratylus. It is said that under no circumstance would he say anything, but would merely crook his finger. Nor is it known whether he achieved this unique glory by a persistence that lasted from toothless youth to toothless old age, or whether he merely petered out into withering speechlessness before the follies of man and the grandeur of God. More likely it was something like the latter, for otherwise we (...) would be confronted by the delicate riddle: why was he called a philosopher?Nevertheless, a tenable explanation is that Cratylus' reputation was arrived at by an experiment. Arranging philosophers on a scale of self.control in speech, one might derive the plausible law: the less one says the more he is of a philosopher. Ergo, say nothing and be declared the worthiest of philosophers. The difficulties in such an extrapolation, however, are very great. It is hard to see what harm just one word can do, and even two or three, or several, if they but fall short of being a sentence. Why absolute silence? Then, again, what harm is there in repeating even a multitude of words, the entire dictionary if you please, plus whatever sounds you can think of, provided you say nothing? And since we have progressed so far with the argument, what harm can there be even in connected speech, grammatical, fluent and mellifluous, provided you still say nothing? Cratylus, apparently, was playing a safe bet with a vengeance. He must have feared being understood by accident! (shrink)

Plato’s dialogue Cratylus focuses on being and human dependence on words, or the essential truths about the human condition. Arguing that comedy is an essential part of Plato's concept of language, S. Montgomery Ewegen asserts that understanding the comedic is key to an understanding of Plato's deeper philosophical intentions. Ewegen shows how Plato’s view of language is bound to comedy through words and how, for Plato, philosophy has much in common with playfulness and the ridiculous. By tying words, language, (...) and our often uneasy relationship with them to comedy, Ewegen frames a new reading of this notable Platonic dialogue. (shrink)

I discuss a textual problem at Cratylus 393bc and, after establishing the correct text, argue that the MSS readings point to the existence of a textual variant in the margin of an ancestor of the common source of our MSS, presumably an ancient edition of the dialogue. Then I make the further hypothesis that both readings originated as alternative attempts to interpret Plato's ambiguous orthography.

The Cratylus begins with a paradox; it ends with a paradox; and it has a paradox in between. But this disturbing characteristic of the dialogue has been overshadowed, not to say ignored, in the literature. For commentators have seen it as their task to discover exactly what theory of language Plato himself, despite his declared perplexity, intends to adopt as he rejects the alternatives of Hermogenes and Cratylus. A common view, then, has been to suppose that the πορίαι (...) of the dialogue are mere camouflage for the hidden dogma, whatever that may be. A favoured candidate, of course, has been the theory of transcendent forms, in some preliminary version. As a consequence, the dialogue has often been seen as a precursor to the great metaphysical works of Plato's middle period such as the Phaedo or the Republic. Not so, I shall argue. My case is that this dialogue centres upon a series of paradoxes which are both powerful and unsettling. Their final effect is to attack the theory of forms, not to defend it. They are, I suggest, genuine proposals of philosophical difficulty, rather than mere artifice to disguise an idealist truth. As such, they belong, and may clearly be seen to belong, with works of the critical period which subject the theory of forms to scrutiny. Thus the πορίαι of the Cratylus have their counterparts in the Parmenides, the Theaetetus and the Sophist. I propose, then, that the dialogue was written during the late, critical period of Plato's philosophical activity. (shrink)

Some interpreters take the arguments at Cratylus 439D3–440C1 to argue for Forms. Some interpreters also believe that these arguments are elliptical or contain lacunae. I accept that the arguments are elliptical. However, I deny that they contain lacunae. I present the most natural construal of the text and argue that it neither trades on Forms nor postulates Forms. To make my case, I show that Cratylus 439D3–440C1 has a modest end, which is to refute a particular notion of (...) flux. (shrink)

Some interpreters take the arguments at Cratylus 439D3–440C1 to argue for Forms. Some interpreters also believe that these arguments are elliptical or contain lacunae. I accept that the arguments are elliptical. However, I deny that they contain lacunae. I present the most natural construal of the text and argue that it neither trades on Forms nor postulates Forms. To make my case, I show that Cratylus 439D3–440C1 has a modest end, which is to refute a particular notion of (...) flux. (shrink)

The Cratylus begins with a paradox; it ends with a paradox; and it has a paradox in between. But this disturbing characteristic of the dialogue has been overshadowed, not to say ignored, in the literature. For commentators have seen it as their task to discover exactly what theory of language Plato himself, despite his declared perplexity, intends to adopt as he rejects the alternatives of Hermogenes and Cratylus. A common view, then, has been to suppose that the πορίαι (...) of the dialogue are mere camouflage for the hidden dogma, whatever that may be. A favoured candidate, of course, has been the theory of transcendent forms, in some preliminary version. As a consequence, the dialogue has often been seen as a precursor to the great metaphysical works of Plato's middle period such as the Phaedo or the Republic. Not so, I shall argue. My case is that this dialogue centres upon a series of paradoxes which are both powerful and unsettling. Their final effect is to attack the theory of forms, not to defend it. They are, I suggest, genuine proposals of philosophical difficulty, rather than mere artifice to disguise an idealist truth. As such, they belong, and may clearly be seen to belong, with works of the critical period which subject the theory of forms to scrutiny. Thus the πορίαι of the Cratylus have their counterparts in the Parmenides, the Theaetetus and the Sophist. I propose, then, that the dialogue was written during the late, critical period of Plato's philosophical activity. (shrink)

Plato's Cratylus is a brilliant but enigmatic dialogue. It bears on a topic, the relation of language to knowledge, which has never ceased to be of central philosophical importance, but tackles it in ways which at times look alien to us. In this reappraisal of the dialogue, Professor Sedley argues that the etymologies which take up well over half of it are not an embarrassing lapse or semi-private joke on Plato's part. On the contrary, if taken seriously as they (...) should be, they are the key to understanding both the dialogue itself and Plato's linguistic philosophy more broadly. The book's main argument is so formulated as to be intelligible to readers with no knowledge of Greek, and will have a significant impact both on the study of Plato and on the history of linguistic thought. (shrink)

The first collective monograph on one of Plato’s most intriguing dialogues with interest for readers of ancient philosophy as well as those who study modern theories of language.

Proclus' commentary on Plato's Cratylus is the only ancient commentary on this work to have come down to us, and is illuminating in two special ways. First, it is actually the work of two Neoplatonists. The majority of the material is supplied by the Athenian-based Proclus, who is well known for his magisterial commentaries on Plato's Timaeus and Parmenides, as well as for a host of other works involving the study of Plato. This material we have consists of excerpts (...) from Proclus' commentary edited by another figure who appears to be a Platonist working somewhat later in Alexandria. Consequently it contains insights into the philosophy of both of the principal late antique centers of Platonism, Athens and Alexandria. Secondly, the material is divided between the grittier issues of language-theory, on which it engages freely with other ancient philosophies, and theological discussion mostly involved with the etymologies of the names of Greek gods, in which Proclus is more concerned to relate his own brand of Platonism to the 'Orphic' and 'Chaldaean' theological systems, and also to Homer. Brian Duvick's extensive notes bring out all these facets of the ancient text. (shrink)

This paper is about an aspect of philosophic life, showing, in the case of one Platonic dialogue in particular, that the texts that later Platonists employed in a quasi-scriptural capacity could influence their lives in important ways. The Cratylus was seen as addressing the question of how names could be regarded as 'correct', raising the role of the name-giver to the level of the law-giver. It begins with the question of how a personal name could be correct. The ancient (...) text that offers us most evidence of the philosophic manipulation of proper names is Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, which makes it quite clear that the revision of individuals' names, and in particular the giving of a Greek name to those of non-Greek origins, had become a regular practice. The name, it seems, was intended to capture something of the actual nature of the individual in question. There is evidence that the practice goes back to the age of Lucian, and specifically to the circle of Numenius, whose own name is also that of a bird. His religious dialogue Hoopoe suggests that there was something special in bird-names; Lucian's Gallus reincarnates Pythagoras as a bird, while his Death of Peregrinus has the eponymous sham philosopher ultimately adopting a bird-name too. Curiously, the final name that Porphyry bears also closely recalls the name of a bird. This may be explained as the apt naming of one who rose to the highest philosophic vision in accordance with the 'flight of the mind' passage in Plato's Phaedrus. (shrink)

Yet, that the Cratylus is of philosophical significance seems to me to be an assumption we can safely make. Plato rarely discusses other than philosophical problems--and even these other discussions are raised and carried on in the context of philosophical questions. Moreover, he could hardly be expected to write a whole dialogue of no philosophical concern and significance. To understand what the philosophical significance of the Cratylus is in general, and for Plato's thought in particular, we must be (...) clear about the question Plato is trying to answer and the answer he gives to this question. That is, we must be clear about the question of the Cratylus: What is the correctness of names? and the two answers to the question Plato considers: convention, and natural correctness. (shrink)

While the argument of Plato’s Cratylus supports both the claim that there is a natural correctness of names and the claim that correct names need not be descriptions or imitations of their referents, the protagonists of the Cratylus find it infeasible to reconcile these two claims. In my paper, I account for this puzzling observation by elaborating a novel interpretation of the Cratylus. I show that the protagonists of the Cratylus are unable to make sense of (...) the results of their joined investigation because they rely on a mistaken preconception of what a correct name is. Based on this diagnosis, I contend that Plato wants his readers to comprehend and overcome the dialectical predicament of his protagonists. I thus illuminate both the internal logic of the Cratylus and the philosophical agenda Plato pursues in staging a dialogue with this particular internal logic. (shrink)

The three stated goals of this book are to provide an interpretation of the Cratylus which determines the roles Hermogenes and Cratylus play in the argument; to do justice to the dialogue's etymologies; and to assess the value of its aporetic conclusions. Baxter succeeds in presenting the dialogue, with its seemingly divergent parts, as a well-constructed whole. Baxter's interpretation enables the reader to raise the same kind of interpretive, philosophical questions that arise when one reads Plato's more accessible (...) dialogues. (shrink)

This book explores the various views on language and its relation to philosophy in the Platonic tradition by examening the reception of Plato’s Cratylus in antiquity in general, and the commentary of the Neoplatonist Proclus in particular.

This excellent new monograph does everything it promises: it sets the excerpts we have of Proclus's teaching on the Cratylus in their proper historical setting, carefully laying out what Proclus thought Plato's dialogue accomplishes in light of the questions the intervening philosophical tradition had posed. This alone would justify the use in the title of the otherwise tired "in Context" trope; but van den Berg does much more. In recounting the steps that bring us from Plato's Cratylus to (...) Proclus's Cratylus, van den Berg provides a comprehensive history of ancient accounts of names and naming. The work thereby richly earns its subtitle as well.The first of van den Berg's book's many virtues is the attention it gives to Plato's Cratylus itself. In chapter one, van den Berg persuasively argues that Plato is engaged in a different sort of project than his many successors: Plato's concern is with how names can be incorrectly assigned, and his answer hinges on the contention that such assignments reflect the divisions in being that they presuppose. Everyday language, crafted on the model of the sensible world, is thus an altogether unreliable guide to ultimate reality. This stands in stark. (shrink)

This book explains how the Cratylus, Plato's apparently meandering and comical dialogue on the correctness of names, makes serious philosophical progress by its notorious etymological digressions. While still a wild ride through a Heraclitean flood of etymologies which threatens to swamp language altogether, the Cratylus emerges as an astonishingly organized evaluation of the power of words.

The plot of the Cratylus, like that of the Protagoras, involves a striking contrast between the position which Socrates first appears to be defending, and the position he is maintaining at the end. And the intermediate sections share this mobility. No statement about the doctrine of the Cratylus can be truer than its contradiction, unless it is grounded in a recognition of this primary fact. Accordingly, a brief charting of the dialogue, in what I take to be its (...) major divisions, will be my first task. (shrink)

This bibliography, though not "complete," is nonetheless extensive. With respect to editions, translations and secondary literature appearing after 1900 it is virtually complete in several languages. It also includes the important editions and translations from the nineteenth century as well as a good deal of the philosophical and philological literature on the dialogue from that period. The works which have been cited fall into five main sections: I) Editions and Translations; II) Discussions devoted to a Comprehensive Interpretation of the (...) class='Hi'>Cratylus; III) Special Topics; IV) Historical Sources; and V) Other Secondary Literature which discusses the Cratylus only in Passing. Section III, "Special Topics," includes these subsections: a) Names vis-a-vis Knowledge and Reality; b) Truth and Falsity; c) The Etymologies; d) The Alphabet, Orthography, Onomatopoeia and Mimesis; e) The Personae: Cratylus and Hermogenes; f) Date of the Cratylus; g) Other Philological and Textual Issues; h) Miscellaneous Topics. (shrink)

Are the long, wildly inventive etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus just some kind of joke, or does Plato himself accept them? This standard question misses the most important feature of the etymologies: they are a competitive performance, an agôn by Socrates in which he shows that he can play the game of etymologists like Cratylus better than they can themselves. Such show-off performances are a recurrent feature of Platonic dialogue: they include Socrates’ speeches on eros in the Phaedrus, his (...) rhetorical discourse in the Menexenus, and his literary interpretation in the Protagoras. The paper compares these cases to work out the ground rules, purposes and implications of the Platonic agôn, and the Cratylus etymologies in particular. (shrink)

This detailed discussion of the Cratylus aims to explain the function of the long etymological section within the dialogue as a whole, arguing that it represents a Platonic critique of common Greek ideas about names.

In the last century, philosophers turned their attention to language. One place they have looked for clues about its nature is Plato’s Cratylus, which considers whether names are naturally or conventionally correct. The dialogue is a source of annoyance to many commentators because it does not take a clear position on the central question. At times, it argues that language is conventional, and, at other times, defends the view that language is natural. This lack of commitment has led to (...) a longstanding dispute over the outcome of the dialogue. I argue that the Cratylus provides no clear resolution to this problem because it presupposes certain unexamined metaphysical commitments about the nature of reality, which are in need of thorough investigation. (shrink)

This is an English translation of four of Plato’s dialogue (Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, and Cratylus) that explores the topic of sophistry and philosophy, a key concept at the source of Western thought. Includes notes and an introductory essay. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato’s immediate (...) audience. (shrink)

At Cratylus 385b–c, Plato appears to argue that names have truth-value. Critics have almost universally condemned the argument as fallacious. Their case has proven so compelling that it has driven editors to recommend moving or removing the argument from its received position in the manuscripts. I argue that a close reading of the argument reveals it commits no fallacy, and its purpose in the dialogue justifies its original position. I wish to vindicate the manuscript tradition, showing that the argument (...) establishes that there is subject matter for investigation, and there is a correctness of names. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato’s CratylusRosamond Kent SpragueDavid Sedley. Plato’s Cratylus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 190. Cloth, $60.00Discussion of Plato's Cratylus, to which this book is a notable contribution, must straightway come to terms with the question of Plato's seriousness (or lack thereof) in the etymology sections of the dialogue. Professor Sedley is a strong advocate of the seriousness of the etymologies, a position which, (...) he remarks, will not surprise most classicists, although it "may cause apoplexy among many of Plato's philosophical admirers" (23). More colloquially he writes, "if Plato was joking, the joke flopped" (39).But need we assume that Plato was either serious or joking? His sense of humor was peculiar, and seems to me nicely characterized by Guthrie when, in commenting on the present dialogue, he speaks of Plato as "tumbling together with an equally straight face absurdities and deeply held convictions" (History V, 25). I also incline more than Sedley to the frequent topicality of Plato's work.Nevertheless, the Sedley thesis may be seen to pay rich rewards. Perhaps most notable is the perception that the etymologies constitute a philosophical curriculum, moving along a well-defined trace from cosmology to the consideration (a watershed here) of ethical terms. This progression is especially significant in marking the emancipation of Plato from his early association with Cratylus and his subsequent allegiance to Socrates.Another mandatory topic is, of course, chronology. The Cratylus is seen to be unusual here in that what we have is most probably a reedited version. (A substantive point is at issue because the earlier version fails to distinguish clearly between the lawmaker and the [End Page 490] dialectician.) Thus to the question, where does the Cratylus fit in the traditional chronology, Sedley's answer is, "not in any one place" (7). As to the projected time of the revision, proximity to the Sophist is most likely.Sedley's general approach to the etymologies is hierarchical (here he identifies two important principles, Uniformity and Groundedness) rather than one of mutual support. He writes that the "'imitation' relation between sounds and things will be found [at] not just the primary level, but all the way up the chain" (126). Similarly with Socrates' painting analogy: "the primary pigments which the painter uses already imitate the simplest objects of vision" (128). In both cases the principles of Uniformity and Groundedness "are to some extent permitted to merge" (127).The business of name-making is of course a techne, as is that of painting. That both of these arts are approximate in nature is not an "ad hoc postulate [but] lies at the heart of Platonic metaphysics," since "any craftsman's embodiment of a Form in matter is necessarily less than perfect" (45). (As Sedley tellingly points out, "it is the Sophist Thrasymachus, and not Socrates, who proposes that a craftsman, qua craftsman, never gets anything wrong" [44].) As for Socrates' final position, it is "not the reversion to conventionalism that it has so often been taken to be" (145). Convention does play some part in signification, but it is also the case that names are some kind of vocal imitations, "a thesis, massively documented in the etymological section, from which Socrates never retreats" (145).One point on which I would like to have had Sedley's comments is the following: what does he think of Diogenes Laertius's remark (III, 6) that not only did Plato, after the death of Socrates, "attach himself to Cratylus the Heraclitean," but also to Hermogenes "who professed the philosophy of Parmenides"? Now the only real Parmenideanism in the dialogue (the position that a name is either a true name or not a name at all) is attributed not to Hermogenes but to Cratylus! (Is Descartes an empiricist? Is Hume a rationalist?) Furthermore, even though Cratylus adopts this position on a variety of occasions (429d, 432a, 433c, 436c, and 438c), he is too flighty (or, one might say, too fluxy) to stick with it, and continually relapses (431a, 432d, 433b, 435e, for instance). At the risk of being categorized as a non-serious reader of the Cratylus (which I am not... (shrink)

Against the background of a conventionalist theory, and staged as a defense of a naturalistic notion of names and naming, the critique of language developed in Plato’s Cratylus does not only propose that human language, in contrast to the language of the gods, is bound to the realm of myth and lie. The dialogue also concludes by offering a set of reasons to think that knowledge of reality is not within the reach of our words. Interpretations of the dialogue’s (...) long etymological sections often neglect this critique and tend to end up with an overly optimistic assessment of the theory of language on offer. In the light of one of the dialogue’s central etymological accounts, Socrates’ etymology of the name Hermes, this paper discusses two recent and influential versions of such a view: David Sedley’s theory of onomatopoetic encapsulation and Franco Trivigno’s qualified referentialism. It argues that the complex relation between language and reality expressed in the Cratylus cannot be exhaustively captured by either of these theories because Plato considers all names to be semantically underdetermined until they are put to use. It suggests that Plato rather works with a functionalistic notion of names and naming, and that the dialogue’s account of natural and correct naming is to be understood in these terms. (shrink)