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Sophist (dialogue)
The ''Sophist'' (; Henri 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 distinguished by a particular form of knowl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 was also responsible for the first printed Latin translation of the works of Sextus Empiricus in 1562, which scholars credit for the diffusion of Pyrrhonian skepticism in early modern Europe and its adoption by highly influential skeptical philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne. Estie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette (; 7 June 1930 – 11 May 2018) was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and with figures such 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, f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Right Opinion
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary Platonists do not necessarily accept all doctrines of Plato. Platonism has had a profound effect on Western thought. At the most fundamental level, Platonism 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 nominalis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aristotle
Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum (classical), Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelianism, Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science. Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira (ancient city), Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical Greece, Classical period. His father, Nicomachus (father of Aristotle), Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At around eighteen years old, he joined Plato's Platonic Academy, Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty seven (). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Categories (Aristotle)
The ''Categories'' (; or ) 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 ). 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 meant by " paronymous", or denominative (sometimes translated "derivative") words. It then divi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Techne
In Ancient Greek philosophy, techne (; , ) is a philosophical concept that refers to making or doing. Today, while the Ancient Greek definition of techne is similar to the modern definition and use of " practical knowledge", techne can include various fields such as mathematics, geometry, medicine, shoemaking, rhetoric, philosophy, music, and astronomy. One of the definitions of techne led by Aristotle, for example, is "a state involving true reason concerned with production". History of the term Many Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, had difficulty coming up with a single definition for techne and there is differentiation between the ways that these philosophers used the term. The word techne comes from the Greek word for art, skill, craft, and technique. The modern-day English word technology comes from the prefix techne and the suffix ology; both words are of Greek origin combined to mean "the practical application of knowledge". Techne i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zeno Of Elea
Zeno of Elea (; ; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea, in Southern Italy (Magna Graecia). He was a student of Parmenides and one of the Eleatics. Zeno defended his instructor's belief in monism, the idea that only one single entity exists that makes up all of reality. He rejected the existence of space, time, and motion. To disprove these concepts, he developed a series of paradoxes to demonstrate why they are impossible. Though his original writings are lost, subsequent descriptions by Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, and Simplicius of Cilicia have allowed study of his ideas. Zeno's arguments are divided into two different types: his arguments against plurality, or the existence of multiple objects, and his arguments against motion. Those against plurality suggest that for anything to exist, it must be divisible infinitely, meaning it would necessarily have both infinite mass and no mass simultaneously. Those against motion invoke the idea that distance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea (; ; fl. late sixth or early fifth century BC) was a Pre-Socratic philosophy, pre-Socratic ancient Greece, Greek philosopher from Velia, Elea in Magna Graecia (Southern Italy). Parmenides was born in the Greek colony of Velia, Elea to a wealthy and illustrious family. The exact date of his birth is not known with certainty; on the one hand, according to the Doxography, doxographer Diogenes Laërtius, Parmenides flourished in the period immediately preceding 500 BC, which would place his year of birth around 540 BC; on the other hand, in the dialogue ''Parmenides (dialogue), Parmenides'' Plato portrays him as visiting Athens at the age of 65, when Socrates was a young man, , which, if true, suggests a potential year of birth of . Parmenides is thought to have been in his prime (or "floruit") around 475 BC. The single known work by Parmenides is a philosophical poem in dactylic hexameter verse whose original title is unknown but which is often referred to as '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Velia
Velia was the Roman name of an ancient city on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is located near the modern village of Novi Velia near Ascea in the Province of Salerno, Italy. It was founded by Greeks from Phocaea as Hyele () around 538–535 BC. The name later changed to Ele and then Elea (; ) before it became known by its current Latin and Italian name during the Roman era. The city was known for being the home of the philosophers Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, as well as the Eleatic school of which they were a part. Geography The site of the acropolis of ancient Elea was once a promontory called Castello a Mare, meaning "castle on the sea" in Italian. It now lies inland and was renamed Castellammare della Bruca in the Middle Ages. The city later developed on the coastal plain below. History According to Herodotus, in 545 BC Ionian Greeks fled Phocaea, in modern Turkey, which was being besieged by the Persians. After some wanderings (8 to 10 years) at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theaetetus (mathematician)
Theaetetus of Athens (; ''Theaítētos''; c. 417 – c. 369 BCE), possibly the son of Euphronius of the Athenian deme Sunium, was a Greece, Greek mathematician. His principal contributions were on irrational number, irrational lengths, which was included in Book X of Euclid's Elements, Euclid's ''Elements'' and proving that there are precisely five Platonic solid, regular convex polyhedra. A friend of Socrates and Plato, he is the central character in Plato's Theaetetus (dialogue), 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theodorus Of Cyrene
Theodorus of Cyrene (; 450 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician. 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 first dialogue, he posits a mathematical construction 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. This eminent mathematician Theodorus was, along with Alcibiades ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Athens
Athens is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, 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 world, Western civilization. The earliest evidence for human habitation in Athens dates back to the Neolithic period. The Acropolis of Athens, Acropolis served as a fortified center during the Mycenaean Greece, Mycenaean era. By the 8th century BC, Athens had evolved into a prominent city-state, or Polis, ''polis'', within the region of Attica. The 7th and 6th centuries BC saw the establishment of legal codes, such as those by Draco (legislator), Draco, Solon and Cleisthenes, which aimed to address social inequalities and set the stage for the development of democracy. In the early 5th century BC, Athens played a central role in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
