Plato's Argumentative Strategies in Theaetetus and Sophist

Abstract

In Theaetetus and Sophist, Plato accomplishes a construction operation of his adversaries which leads him to associate doctrines regularly attributed to Heracliteans or Eleatic thinkers with different sophistical positions. However, his primary purpose is not to refute historical positions, but to assert fundamental theses and principles of his own philosophy. So I am not interested here in evaluating the legitimacy of such associations, or "dialectical combinations", as Cornford (1935, p. 36) calls them. I will focus instead on the peculiar kind of argument he employs for the refutation of both kinds of opponents. This is a sort of peculiar argumentation, as I will try to show, which does not appeal to the existence of the Forms but to the conditions of the possibility of language.In this paper I attempt to show that resorting to the factum of language rather than to the assumptions of the Forms is not a flaw in these arguments. On the contrary, this assures them a greater scope than the one of those arguments which Socrates proposes to his followers in Phaedo or Republic. The arguments I have chosen to analyse try to persuade every speaker (a fortiori the philosopher) who is ready to accept certain premises that Plato deemed necessary for our language practice.