Sophist (dialogue)
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Sophist (dialogue)
The ''Sophist'' ( el, Σοφιστής; la, SophistaHenri Estienne (ed.), ''Platonis opera quae extant omnia'', Vol. 1, 1578p. 217) is a Platonic dialogue from the philosopher's late period, most likely written in 360 BC. In it the interlocutors, led by Eleatic Stranger employ the method of division in order to classify and define the sophist and describe his essential attributes and differentia vis a vis the philosopher and statesman. Like its sequel, the ''Statesman'', the dialogue is unusual in that Socrates is present but plays only a minor role. Instead, the Eleatic Stranger takes the lead in the discussion. Because Socrates is silent, it is difficult to attribute the views put forward by the Eleatic Stranger to Plato, beyond the difficulty inherent in taking any character to be an author's "mouthpiece". Background The main objective of the dialogue is to identify what a sophist is and how a sophist differs from a philosopher and statesman. Because each seems distinguish ...
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Henri Estienne
Henri Estienne (; ; 1528 or 15311598), also known as Henricus Stephanus (), was a French printer and classical scholar. He was the eldest son of Robert Estienne. He was instructed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew by his father and would eventually take over the Estienne printing firm which his father owned in 1559 when his father died. His most well-known work was the ''Thesaurus graecae linguae'', which was printed in five volumes. The basis of Greek lexicology, no thesaurus would rival that of Estienne's for three hundred years. Among his many publications of Greek authors, his publications of Plato are the source of Stephanus pagination, which is still used to refer to Plato's works. Estienne died in Lyon in 1598. Life Henri Estienne was born in Paris in 1528 or 1531. His father instructed him in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and typography, and according to a note in his edition of ''Aulus Gellius'' (1585), he picked up some Latin as a child, as that language was used as a in the multi- ...
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Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette (7 June 1930 – 11 May 2018) was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of ''bricolage''. Life Genette was born in Paris, where he studied at the Lycée Lakanal and the École Normale Supérieure, University of Paris. After leaving the French Communist Party, Genette was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie during 1957–8. He received his professorship in French literature at the Sorbonne in 1967. In 1970 with Hélène Cixous and Tzvetan Todorov he founded the journal ''Poétique'' and he edited a series of the same name for Éditions du Seuil. Among other positions, Genette was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and a visiting professor at Yale University. Work Genette is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such ...
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Right Opinion
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary platonists do not necessarily accept all of the doctrines of Plato. Platonism had a profound effect on Western thought. Platonism at least affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism." Philosophers who affirm the existence of abstract objects are sometimes called platonists; those who deny their existence are sometimes called nominalists. The terms "platonism" and "nominalism" have established senses in the history of philosophy, where they denote positions that have little to do with the modern notion of an abstract object. In this connection, it is essential to bear in mind that modern platonists (with a small 'p') need not accept any of the doctrines of Plato, just as modern nominalists need not accept ...
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Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum and the wider Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology, and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in th ...
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Categories (Aristotle)
The ''Categories'' (Greek Κατηγορίαι ''Katēgoriai''; Latin ''Categoriae'' or ''Praedicamenta'') is a text from Aristotle's ''Organon'' that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are "perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions". The work is brief enough to be divided, not into books as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters. The ''Categories'' places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to medieval writers as the Latin term ''praedicamenta''). Aristotle intended them to enumerate everything that can be expressed without composition or structure, thus anything that can be either the subject or the predicate of a proposition. The text The antepraedicamenta The text begins with an explication of what Aristotle means by "synonymous", or univocal words, what is meant by "homonymous", or equivocal words, and what is mean ...
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Techne
In philosophy, techne (; , ) is a term that refers to making or doing, which in turn is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root "Teks-" meaning "to weave," also "to fabricate". As an activity, ''technē'' is concrete, variable, and context-dependent. The term resembles the concept of '' epistēmē'' in the implication of knowledge of principles, in that "both words are names for knowledge in the widest sense." However, the two are distinct. As a system of knowledge The term resembles the concept of '' epistēmē'' in the implication of knowledge of principles. Martin Heidegger maintains that the concept, for the ancient Greeks, goes together with ''episteme'', particularly citing Plato as using the two terms interchangeably. The idea is that technē and episteme simply mean knowing and "both words are names for knowledge in the widest sense." However, Aristotle distinguishes clearly between the two, and even Plato seems to draw a distinction between them in some of his dialogues ...
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Zeno Of Elea
Zeno of Elea (; grc, Ζήνων ὁ Ἐλεᾱ́της; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of Magna Graecia and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic. He is best known for his paradoxes, which Bertrand Russell described as "immeasurably subtle and profound". Life Little is known for certain about Zeno's life. Although written nearly a century after Zeno's death, the primary source of biographical information about Zeno is Plato's ''Parmenides'' and he is also mentioned in Aristotle's ''Physics''. In the dialogue of ''Parmenides'', Plato describes a visit to Athens by Zeno and Parmenides, at a time when Parmenides is "about 65", Zeno is "nearly 40", and Socrates is "a very young man".Plato, ''Parmenides'127b–e (at footnote n. 2) Assuming an age for Socrates of around 20 and taking the date of Socrates' birth as 469 BC gives an approximate date of birth for Zeno of 490 BC. Plato says that Zeno was "tall ...
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Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea (; grc-gre, Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia. Parmenides was born in the Greek colony of Elea, from a wealthy and illustrious family. His dates are uncertain; according to doxographer Diogenes Laërtius, he flourished just before 500 BC, which would put his year of birth near 540 BC, but in the dialogue '' Parmenides'' Plato has him visiting Athens at the age of 65, when Socrates was a young man, c. 450 BC, which, if true, suggests a year of birth of c. 515 BC. He is thought to have been in his prime (or "floruit") around 475 BC. The single known work by Parmenides is a poem whose original title is unknown but which is often referred to as ''On Nature.'' Only fragments of it survive. In his poem, Parmenides prescribes two views of reality. The first, the Way of "Alethia" or truth, describes how all reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless and uniform. The s ...
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Velia
, alternate_name = Hyele, Ele, Elea , image = Velia Excavation and Tower.jpg , alt = , caption = View of the excavations and the tower at Velia , map_type = Italy , map_alt = , map_size = , relief = , coordinates = , location = Velia, Province of Salerno, Campania, Italy , region = Magna Graecia , type = Settlement , part_of = , length = , width = , area = , height = , builder = Settlers from Phocaea , material = , built = Between 538 and 535 BC , abandoned = , epochs = , cultures = , dependency_of = , occupants = Parmenides, Zeno, Statius , event = , excavations = , archaeologists = , condition = , ownership = , management = Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Salerno, Avellino, Benevento e Caserta , public_access = , website Parco archeologico di Elea-Velia , notes = Velia was the Roman name of an ancient city of Magna Graecia on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was founded by Greeks from Phocaea as Hyele ( ...
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Theaetetus (mathematician)
Theaetetus of Athens (; grc-gre, Θεαίτητος; c. 417 – c. 369 BC), possibly the son of Euphronius of the Athenian deme Sunium, was a Greek mathematician. His principal contributions were on irrational lengths, which was included in Book X of Euclid's ''Elements'' and proving that there are precisely five regular convex polyhedra. A friend of Socrates and Plato, he is the central character in Plato's eponymous Socratic dialogue. Theaetetus, like Plato, was a student of the Greek mathematician Theodorus of Cyrene. Cyrene was a prosperous Greek colony on the coast of North Africa, in what is now Libya, on the eastern end of the Gulf of Sidra. Theodorus had explored the theory of incommensurable quantities, and Theaetetus continued those studies with great enthusiasm; specifically, he classified various forms of irrational numbers according to the way they are expressed as square roots. This theory is presented in great detail in Book X of Euclid's ''Elements''. Theae ...
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Theodorus Of Cyrene
Theodorus of Cyrene ( el, Θεόδωρος ὁ Κυρηναῖος) was an ancient Greek mathematician who lived during the 5th century BC. The only first-hand accounts of him that survive are in three of Plato's dialogues: the '' Theaetetus'', the ''Sophist'', and the ''Statesman''. In the former dialogue, he posits a mathematical theorem now known as the Spiral of Theodorus. Life Little is known as Theodorus' biography beyond what can be inferred from Plato's dialogues. He was born in the northern African colony of Cyrene, and apparently taught both there and in Athens. He complains of old age in the ''Theaetetus'', the dramatic date of 399 BC of which suggests his period of flourishing to have occurred in the mid-5th century. The text also associates him with the sophist Protagoras, with whom he claims to have studied before turning to geometry. A dubious tradition repeated among ancient biographers like Diogenes Laërtius held that Plato later studied with him in Cyrene, Libya ...
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Ancient Athens
Athens is one of the oldest named cities in the world, having been continuously inhabited for perhaps 5,000 years. Situated in southern Europe, Athens became the leading city of Ancient Greece in the first millennium BC, and its cultural achievements during the 5th century BC laid the foundations of Western civilization. During the early Middle Ages, the city experienced a decline, then recovered under the later Byzantine Empire and was relatively prosperous during the period of the Crusades (12th and 13th centuries), benefiting from Italian trade. Following a period of sharp decline under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Athens in the 19th century as the capital of the independent and self-governing Greek state. Name The name of Athens, connected to the name of its patron goddess Athena, originates from an earlier Pre-Greek language. The origin myth explaining how Athens acquired this name through the legendary contest between Poseidon and Athena was described by Herodotus,Hero ...
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