A late Platonic dialogue that hunts the definition of "sophist" through a chain of divisions, and along the way works out how false statements and not-being are possible at all.
Sophist is set the day after Plato's Theaetetus, with the same cast: Socrates, Theaetetus, Theodorus, and a new figure, an unnamed Visitor from Elea, a follower of Parmenides and Zeno, who leads the entire discussion in Socrates' near-silent presence. The stated task is to say clearly what a sophist, a statesman, and a philosopher each are, starting with the sophist. The Visitor's method is division: he keeps splitting broader categories (hunting, acquisitive art, disputation, and so on) in two, tracking the sophist down through six successive definitions, each capturing some real trait (the paid hunter of rich young men, the retail dealer in arguments, the manufacturer of false images of wisdom) without quite landing the kill, because the sophist keeps slipping into the gap between things that truly are and things that merely appear to be.
That pursuit forces the dialogue into its most famous and most difficult territory: the sophist's trade depends on saying what-is-not, on making false statements and false images, and Parmenides had forbidden speaking of not-being at all, treating it as strictly unsayable and unthinkable. The Visitor confronts this head-on, staging what he calls parricide against "father Parmenides," and argues that not-being does not mean the opposite of being but simply being different from something. On this account, a false statement is one that says of a thing that it is not what it in fact is, or that what is not, is, and this becomes intelligible once being, sameness, difference, motion, and rest are shown to blend and combine with one another as distinct "kinds" or forms that communicate without collapsing into each other.
The dialogue matters because it is Plato working out logical and metaphysical machinery, the analysis of negation, predication, and falsehood, that later readers treated as an ancestor of formal logic, while never losing its original target: pinning down the sophist as an image-maker who traffics in appearances rather than realities. It ends with the sophist finally cornered as a practitioner of an art of contradiction-making that produces false appearances of things, a workmanlike and somewhat anticlimactic capture after such an elaborate hunt, which is itself part of the dialogue's point about how slippery such a creature is.
“Sophist, statesman, philosopher.”
— Sophist · read this chapter →
“Yes, just as a wolf resembles a dog, the wildest thing resembling the tamest.”
— Sophist · read this chapter →
“a false statement, I think, will be judged false in just the same way — one that says the things that are, are not, and the things that are not, are.”
— Sophist · read this chapter →
“We must agree, then, that motion is both the same and not the same, and not be troubled by that”
— Sophist · read this chapter →
“So you see how truly it's said that this creature is many-colored and, as the saying goes, not to be caught with one hand?”
— Sophist · read this chapter →
It is a dialogue in which an unnamed Visitor from Elea leads Theaetetus through a series of definitions trying to pin down what a sophist actually is, and in the process has to explain how false statements and not-being are possible at all. Socrates is present but almost silent, having handed the conversation to the Visitor.
The main speaker is an unnamed philosophical Visitor (Stranger) from Elea, described as one of the circle around Parmenides and Zeno. Socrates asks the opening questions but then largely listens while the Visitor and Theaetetus carry the argument.
Through six successive definitions reached by repeatedly dividing broader categories in two: the sophist appears as a hunter of rich young men, a retail dealer and wholesaler in arguments and virtue, and finally as a maker of false images of wisdom, an artist of appearance rather than reality.
The Visitor argues against Parmenides that not-being does not mean the sheer opposite of being but simply being different from something else. This lets him show that false statements are coherent: they say something is what it is not, or is not what it is.
It refers to the Visitor's admission that he must contradict his own philosophical tradition's founder, Parmenides, who held that what-is-not cannot even be spoken or thought, in order to explain how falsehood and image-making are possible.
It contains one of the earliest sustained analyses of negation, predication, and false statement, treating being, sameness, difference, motion, and rest as forms that combine with one another, work later readers connected to the development of formal logic.
Alcibiades 1 · Alcibiades 2 · Apology · Charmides · Cleitophon · Cratylus · Critias · Crito · Epinomis · Euthydemus · Euthyphro · Gorgias