The "Sophist" sets out to explain what the sophist does by defining his art. But the sophist has no art. Plato lays out a challenging puzzle in metaphysics, the nature of philosophy, and the limitation of philosophy that is unraveled in this new and unconventional interpretation.
Here is a new translation of this important late Platonic dialogue, with a comprehensive commentary that reverses the dominant trends in the scholarship of the last fifty years. The "Sophist" is shown to be not a dry exposition of doctrine, but a rich exercise in dialectic, which reveals both the Eleatic roots of...