Plato on the Metaphysical Foundation of Meaning and Truth

✍ Scribed by Blake E. Hestir

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 286
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What is the nature of truth? Blake E. Hestir offers an investigation into Plato's developing metaphysical views, and examines Plato's conception of being, meaning, and truth in the Sophist, as well as passages from several other later dialogues including the Cratylus, Parmenides, and Theaetetus, where Plato begins to focus more directly on semantics rather than only on metaphysical and epistemological puzzles. Hestir's interpretation challenges both classical and contemporary interpretations of Plato's metaphysics and conception of truth, and highlights new parallels between Plato and Aristotle, as well as clarifying issues surrounding Plato's approach to semantics and thought. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of ancient Greek philosophy, metaphysics, contemporary truth theory, linguistics, and philosophy of language.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on the text
Abbreviations
1 Introduction
1 Truth in the Sophist
2 An introduction to truth
3 The metaphysical foundation of meaning and truth
4 Parallels between Plato and Aristotle
Part I Stability
2 Strong Platonism, restricted Platonism, and stability
1 Strong Platonism vs restricted Platonism
2 Aristotle’s Plato and stability
3 Concerns about stability in the Cratylus
1 Naming
2 The criticisms of Cratylus’s Heracliteanism
3 Positive results?
4 Flux and language in the Theaetetus
1 The account of Heracliteanism
2 The perils of an unstable foundation
3 A puzzle in the conclusion: a collapse of dialectic or meaning?
4 Solution to the puzzle: limited vs unlimited reference
5 An eye for being one … with qualifications
5 The foundation exposed: Parmenides 135bc
1 The text
2 A sketch of the theory at 134e9–135b2
3 Parmenides’ response: 135b5–c3
4 Forms and the possibility of language and thought
5 The translation of ‘dialegesthai’
6 Conclusion: the formal attributes and the kinds
Part II Combination
6 Being as capacity and combination: a challenge for the Friends of the Forms
1 The argument against the Friends
2 Being affected is being moved?
3 The prayer of children
4 The signification of ‘is’ and ‘being’. Part I: an aporia about being
5 The signification of ‘is’ and ‘being’. Part II
7 The problem of predication: the challenge of the Late-Learners
1 The problem of predication: “bringing the contraries forward”
2 The problem of unity: “vowel” forms and the internality of being
3 Saying goodbye to the third man
4 A veritable swarm of relativities: the externality of being as “being relative to”
5 Being and pros-predication
6 Where being hides in predication: some potentially puzzling cases resolved
7 The metaphysical foundation of truth
Part III Truth
8 Predication, meaning, and truth in the Sophist
1 The semantics of statement: naming, signifying, and indicating
2. What does a true statement do?
3 Ta onta hôs estin peri sou
9 Plato’s conception of truth
1 Concept and conception
2 Why not correspondence?
3 Aristotle on meaning and truth
4 Aristotle’s conception of truth
10 Truth as being and a substantive property
1 Truth as being
2 Truth as a substantive property
Bibliography
Index locorum
General index