Episode 143: Plato's "Sophist" on Lies, Categorization, and Non-Being
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2016
⏱️ 106 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On the later Platonic dialogue. What is a sophist? These were guys in Ancient Greece who taught young people the tools of philosophy and rhetoric. They claimed to teach virtue. In Sophist, "the Eleatic Stranger" (i.e., not Socrates) tries to figure out what a sophist really is, using a new "method of division." This Plato era provides a nice transition to the category man Aristotle, and the whole concern with sophistry is certainly still relevant today!
End song: "Dumb," by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).
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Transcript
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| 0:23.0 | Now please enjoy the show. |
| 0:30.0 | Here listening to partially examined life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who read one |
| 0:36.8 | point said I'm doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. |
| 0:40.5 | Our question for episode 143 is something like, what is falsity? |
| 0:44.6 | We read Plato's dialogue, the softest, probably written around 360 BC. |
| 0:50.4 | You can join the discussion, get the text, and lots more information at partiallyexaminalife.com. |
| 0:55.4 | This is Mark Linton Meyer, best classified as a hunter of keys, wallet, and phone in |
| 0:59.7 | Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 1:00.7 | This is Wes L.O.N. in, but not of Boston, Massachusetts. |
| 1:05.1 | This is Dylan Casey, angling for some non-being in Middleton. |
| 1:09.2 | All right, so this is kind of a follow-up on our previous one on the Fadris in that the |
| 1:15.7 | Fadris, the whole second half, was about what is the rhetorician. |
| 1:19.7 | And we didn't really, you know, we got the main point of that, but there was some appetite |
| 1:24.0 | to talk about that topic some more. |
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