Relativity plays an important role in the skeptical outlooks of the Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus and of his predecessor Aenesidemus. But in the evidence concerning the earliest phase of Pyrrhonism, that of Pyrrho himself and his disciple Timon, there is no explicit mention of relativity. Nevertheless, there is good reason to suppose that it played an important role in their thinking. This is suggested both by the remarks at the opening of Diogenes Laertius’ life of Pyrrho, and by the summary by the Peripatetic Aristocles of an account by Timon of the early Pyrrhonist outlook. There is much about both these texts that is in dispute: whether they express a metaphysical view or epistemological reservations, whether the view applies only to questions of value or is global in character, and, on the Aristocles passage, how much of it represents Pyrrho’s ideas and how much just Timon’s. But on any plausible reading of these passages, there is a clearly implied emphasis on the variable ways in which things strike us, and this suggests a fundamental interest in relativity, even if it never surfaces explicitly.

This chapter discusses the importance of the phenomenon of epistemic relativity for Plato’s metaphysics and conception of truth. The argument from epistemic relativity, applied to attributes in the phenomenal world, is Plato’s favored strategy to highlight the need for a separate ontological domain of intelligible essences exempt from relativity. It is also a starting point for his metaphysical conception of truth. After a general discussion of the Platonic perspective on relative attributes, I introduce a set of terminological distinctions that help to categorize his various uses of the truth terminology. I then turn to the Phaedo, as it is the first dialogue to provide a broad exposition of Plato’s new metaphysical vision. I trace the various characteristic aspects of his truth terminology, as they emerge throughout this dialogue, and link them to his idea of philosophy and the underlying metaphysical conception. The last section discusses how a passage in the final proof of immortality qualifies the stark metaphysical dichotomy of truth and appearance by pointing to the possibility of certain kinds of determinate truth pertaining to objects in the phenomenal world.

This chapter investigates the underappreciated influence of the Sophist on Plutarch’s cosmology. By analyzing various Plutarchean works (including De animae procreatione in Timaeo, De Iside et Osiride, De defectu oraculorum, and Adversus Colotem), it argues that Plutarch describes the ontological structure of the World-Soul in the Timaeus as an ‘imitation’ of the structure of intelligible being constituted by the Greatest Kinds in the Sophist. This reading positions the Sophist as a key text for understanding Plutarch’s Platonic metaphysics of the soul and, more broadly, some of the basic assumptions of Plutarch’s Platonism.

In this paper Centrone shows how traces of the tension between the unitary character of the Platonic eidos and the multiple one of the logos referred to it can be found in the Theaetetus’ ‘doctrine of the dream’. The thesis about the asymmetry of knowledge present in the doctrine of the dream, according to which while the elements of a compound are not knowable, the compounds are knowable, does indeed entail an objective difficulty also for the Platonic doctrine of Forms. Centrone argues that Plato allusively indicates the solution to this problem in the notion of holon, namely in a unitary entity endowed with multiple parts but articulated as an organic complex. Although the confutation of the doctrine of the dream is based on the indistinction between the notion of holon and that of pan, Centrone argues that Plato admits such an indistinction in the Theaetetus only for dialectical aims. As can be easily inferred from both other texts of the Platonic corpus and some passages in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in fact there are several reasons to believe that Plato had a notion of ‘whole’ distinct from that of ‘all’.

The paper focuses on the opposition between pathos and ousia in the Euthyphro and in the Hippias Major. It argues that in the Euthyphro Plato conceives the pathos as a predicate that cannot be the ousia of what it belongs to, because (however true, universal, or necessary it may be) it is linked to the domain of genesis. Concerning the Hippias Major, the paper shows that the notion of paschein einai introduces what can be considered the first formulation of the distinction between different senses of being and of the copula. Further, it maintains that, still in this dialogue, a predicate that can be attributed to a pair of subjects but not to its members taken individually is labelled as a pathos and distinguished from the ousia (which, by contrast, cannot be predicated of several subjects without also being predicated of each individually). More generally, the paper shows that the Euthyphro and the Hippias Major document the birth of the notion of accidental predication.

This chapter analyzes Plotinus’ connection of dialectic to grasping Intellect’s holistic unity. It examines how Ennead III 7 links the dialectical method to the unity of the Greatest Kinds, and how Ennead VI 7 redefines the roles of Sameness and Otherness within Intellect’s life. Plotinus presents Intellect as self-same yet generating internal otherness through division, offering an ‘inverted’ interpretation of the Sophist’s interweaving (συμπλοκή) of kinds.

This chapter argues for the Sophist’s background role in the genesis of the Stoic lekton. It shows the Stoics engaged critically with the ‘gigantomachy’, siding with the Giants by making bodies the sole beings, while introducing ‘something’ (τι) as a supreme genus. The chapter then explores how the Sophist’s question about sentence signification (261d–262e) likely prompted the Stoic reply that a sentence signifies an incorporeal axiōma, a proposition that subsists but may not hold.

By analysing surviving testimonies on the existence of a possible Commentary on the Sophist and some passages from Damascius’ Commentary on the Parmenides and Problems and Solutions, this chapter explores Damascius’ reading of the Sophist on not-being. It argues that Damascius, drawing on the Sophist, distinguishes not just two types of non-being but two types of nothingness. This nuanced interpretation, grounded in a close reading of the text, allows Damascius to offer a fresh interpretation of the ‘parricide’ of Parmenides, advancing the Neoplatonic discussion on nothingness.

This chapter shows that Aristotle’s discussion of being as truth and not-being as falsehood in Metaphysics Δ, E, and Θ is a sustained reflection on the Sophist’s account of falsehood and its analysis of categorial sentences; and that the Metaphysics responds to the Sophist on whether Motion-Itself and Knowledge-Itself exist among separate intelligibles, a point on which Plotinus would later defend the Platonic position against Aristotle.

Plotinus’ treatise 6.2 offers a metaphysical interpretation of the five greatest genera of Plato’s Sophist – being, motion, rest, sameness, and otherness – as fundamental constituents of the intelligible realm. This chapter connects Plotinus’ arguments to ancient debates on division. Plotinus holds that the greatest genera are both genera and causative principles within Intellect, while higher and lower levels of reality are homonymous and cannot be subsumed under a common genus. This view explains his focus on the Sophist, a dialogue concerned with both the division of beings (as in the Philebus) and the status of Forms as living beings (as in the Timaeus). The chapter further argues that Plotinus’ discussion likely influenced Porphyry’s lost commentary on the Sophist. Passages from the Isagoge and other works suggest that Porphyry adopted Plotinus’ idea of the genera as both genera and principles but extended it to higher and lower levels of the hierarchy. Thus, the greatest genera become principles not only of partial Forms but also of lower entities, a view later echoed by Simplicius in In Phys. 405.10–17.

Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato’s Sophist centers on the “greatest kinds”: Being, Motion, Rest, Identity, and Difference. Within his metaphysics of Intellect and intelligible Being, these kinds play a privileged role in expressing the unity of subject and object characteristic of the second hypostasis. This chapter examines Plotinus’ exegesis of the greatest kinds in On the Genera of Being (Enneads VI 1–3), focusing especially on VI 2, where the Platonic kinds are established as intelligible genera. Yet the entire tripartite treatise may be read as an interpretation of the ontological section of the Sophist. The critiques of Aristotelian and Stoic categories in VI 1 develop Plato’s rejection of pluralists and monists, while the principle that Being is both one and many reflects Plato’s search for an ontology avoiding both extremes. Plotinus’ derivation of the genera from the life and thought of Intellect, and his view of them as structural moments of self-thinking activity, rests on the claim that ‘Being in the full sense’ must possess life and thought. This principle underlies both Plotinus’ reading of the Sophist and his broader interpretation of Platonic metaphysics.

This introduction explains the intellectual project underlying the volume and the reasons for gathering this selection of papers by Bruno Centrone in English.

This chapter examines how Plutarch, in the De E apud Delphos, integrates the Sophist’s ontological distinction between true being and appearances with the Timaeus’ cosmology. It argues Plutarch that uses the Timaeus to answer the Sophist’s unresolved question about the ontological status of images, identifying the Sophist’s ‘that which perfectly is’ with the Demiurge. Thus, the dialogues are mutually illuminating and a genuine Platonic doctrine of the causes must take into account both.

Several aspects of Aristotle’s distinction of four types of opposites remain unclear, despite the familiarity of the distinction itself. This chapter sketches a story about some of those aspects as the result of Aristotle’s implicit but systematic engagement with Plato’s Sophist. The first section focuses on a passage from Metaph. XIV.2, which seems to refer to the Sophist and the way in which Plato discusses non-being there. I suggest, among other things, that the Sophist was read by Aristotle as embedding the ‘archaic’ mindset that eventually misled people into thinking of the opposition between being and non-being as a sort of categorial distinction between term-like items. The second section turns to illustrating how a series of remarks Aristotle drops at different places about negation, otherness, and the different types of opposites can be read as reactions to some of the things Plato writes in the Sophist. While the first section illustrates Aristotle’s take on the Sophist with respect to some basic metaphysical questions, the second section shows that points of detail in Aristotle’s account of the opposites can be taken as responses to the Sophist.

This chapter contrasts Porphyry’s and Iamblichus’ interpretations of the Sophist. Despite shared exegetical principles, they reached conflicting conclusions. Porphyry read the dialogue primarily logically, understanding division within that framework. Iamblichus offered a metaphysical reading, interpreting division as an imitation of procession from the One. Their disagreement over the statue-making example (φάντασμα) further reflects their divergent views on theurgy.

This chapter reassesses the evidence for connecting Xenocrates’ account of the World-Soul with the Greatest Kinds of the Sophist. It argues there are no solid grounds to attribute this exegetical strategy to Xenocrates, countering a tradition initiated by Plutarch. The findings support the view that the Early Academy primarily employed the Sophist for debates on classification, division, and genus–species relations, not in other contexts, including cosmological.

This chapter raises and answers the question of what Aquinas thinks the subject of metaphysics is. Formally, he thinks it is whatever can be known through natural, strictly immaterial principles. Materially, he thinks it is common being – that is, the analogical community of actual substance with what is accidental and what is potential. Adequately (for neither the formal nor the material account is adequate on its own – something that has not been sufficiently appreciated in the secondary literature), Aquinas thinks the subject of metaphysics is common being insofar as it can be known through natural, strictly immaterial principles.