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Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato
By: Francis M. Cornford (ed.)
Book Condition: annotations, Moderate highlighter markings, Good, Pen markings
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RM29.90 RM26.91
1 in stock
Description
SINCE the commentary aims at furnishing the reader with informa- tion as the need arises, it will be enough, by way of introduction, to indicate the place of the Theaetetus and the Sophist in the series of Plato's dialogues, and to define briefly the position from which the inquiry starts.
Our two dialogues belong to a group consisting of the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman. As M. Diรจs has observed, Plato leaves no doubt that the dialogues are meant to be read in this order. The Parmenides describes a meeting imagined as taking place about 450 B.C. between Socrates, who would then be about twenty, and the Eleatic philosophers, Parmenides and Zeno. To suppose that anything remotely resembling the con- versation in this dialogue could have occurred at that date would make nonsense of the whole history of philosophy in the fifth and fourth centuries; and I believe, with M. Diรจs, that the meeting itself is a literary fiction, not a fact in the biography of Socrates. No ancient historian of philosophy mistook it for the record of an actual event, which, had it occurred, would have been a very important landmark. The Theaetetus (183E, P. 101) alludes to this meeting, and it is once more recalled in the Sophist (217c, p. 166) in terms that can only refer to the Parmenides. The Theaetetus, again, ends with an appointment which is kept at the beginning of the Sophist; and the Sophist itself is openly referred to in the Statesman.
ISBN:9780672602948
