One of the many fascinating ideas explored in Plato’s Sophist is the Stranger’s explanation of being relative-to through his account of the kinds being and difference in conjunction with the notions of capacity and combination, as well as what he invokes as the “forms” “itself by virtue of itself” and “relative to.” The discussion is remarkable in its clever use of an array of characters including Parmenides, the Pluralists, the Earthborn materialists, the Friends of the Forms, and the Late-learners to sort through a variety of challenging philosophical concerns, retaining what works while leaving behind what does not. The Stranger understands being as an intrinsic functional and structural dimension of all beings that makes them beings. Being just is capacity and the concurrent active “realizing” of capacity in “combinings” of forms with themselves and perceptibles. In lieu of an ontology of relations, there is an ontology of realizations of capacity relative to something. I show how this innovative account of a dynamic constellation of interwoven kinds and forms, where being and difference “go through all and each other,” provides a foundation for meaning, truth, and falsehood.

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.

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.

The introduction provides some material data on the reception of the Sophist (including an overview of all the skopoi it was assigned and all the ancient commentaries on the dialogue the sources give us notice of), and a bird’s-eye view of some of the main themes and arguments featured in the dialogue, with the prospect of highlighting the main threads of its ancient fortune and providing a synopsis of the fourteen chapters constituting the volume

This chapter argues that the Sophist prompted the reflection of the Early Academics on at least two main fronts: (1) the elaboration of binary divisions of entities (Xenocrates, Hermodorus, divisiones aristoteleae, Aristotle’s On the Good); and (2) the critical reaction to Eleatic monism, as it emerges especially from Aristotle’s Metaphysics N 2. In doing so, the chapter also brings out ways in which this can shed light on aspects of the background of Aristotle’s ontology and theory of predication. It also discusses the problem, recently brought to scholarly attention, of the Early Academic composition of a textual canon functional to a work of systematization of Platonism.

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.

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 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.

This chapter overturns the longstanding consensus that Aquinas identified the transcendentals of De veritate q. 1, art. 1 – that is, thing, one, something, true, and good – as the properties of being. Instead, they should be identified with disjunctive pairs like necessary or contingent, universal or particular, prior or posterior, one or many, and actual or potential. This radical revision in how we think of Aquinas’s account of the properties of being brings with it a corresponding reorientation of Thomistic metaphysics – for if what is primarily “at issue” in Aquinas’s metaphysics is the demonstrability of these disjunctive properties, then Thomistic metaphysics will place a far higher premium on themes like the diversity of being and ontological degree than is typically presented.

This chapter focusses on Aquinas’s philosophical arguments for the existence of God. It begins by noting where he offers such arguments. Then it notes his general strategy in presenting them. Unlike many philosophers, Aquinas argues that the claim that we can only know that God exists by means of demonstrative arguments from certain facts about the universe to the conclusion that God must exist as cause of these facts. This chapter explains what that view amounts to for Aquinas and compares and contrasts it with other philosophical approaches to the question ‘How can we know that God exists’. The chapter then turns in detail to Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence in his De Ente et Essentia (4) and his Summa Theologiae, 1a, 2, 3. The chapter explains how these arguments run and comments on what can be said for and against them.

This chapter provides an account of Aquinas’s life and works. It then explains his intellectual perspectives as an author while noting how he distinguishes between faith and reason. It notes what he means by ‘divine revelation’ and why he thinks that to be important. It also explains what he has to say about ‘sacra doctrina, ‘articles of faith’, and ‘preambles of faith. The chapter then explains why Aquinas can be thought to be an advocate of ‘natural theology’ and why he takes it to be important. Finally, it provides an introduction to some key terms which recur in his philosophy of God, including ‘ens’, ‘ens per se’, ‘ens per accidens ‘form’, ‘substantial form’, ‘accidental form’, ‘matter’, ‘substance’, ‘accident’, ‘cause’, ‘efficient cause’, ‘final cause’, ‘formal cause’, ‘material cause’, ‘effect’, ‘essence’, ‘nature’, ‘substantial change’, ‘accidental change’, ‘sensation’, ‘individuation’, and ‘being’ (esse).

This chapter explores the role of poetics in theorizing blackness. That is, if the question of being is an abiding issue in black studies and if that question figures through discourses about black writing, how does poetics contribute to this study? Rather than engage blackness as a content in poems, the chapter considers poetry as an intervention in language. This attentiveness to language characterizes a kind of thinking that is manifest in poetics and that generates possibilities for engaging the philosophical relationship between expressiveness and blackness.

Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

Chapter 7 is a critical analysis of Platonic ontology as interpreted by Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. In light of philosophy’s finitude revealed through the philosopher’s philosophical journey, how can we think of Platonic Forms after Heidegger? I argue that Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger articulate interpretations of Platonic metaphysics that concludes that, for Plato, Being remains fundamentally elusive. Strauss does so via a zetetic interpretation of Forms as questions coeval with the human mind: Being remains a mystery, a riddle. Gadamer achieves this through a somewhat technical account of Forms in light of an arithmetic interpretation of our linguistic access to them. Krüger originally puts at the center of his account the erotic tension between discursive thinking and non-discursive insight. I contend that Krüger’s Platonic argument for the elusiveness of Being is superior to those of Strauss and Gadamer in two respects: (1) it is more faithful to Plato’s own writings on the difference between dianoia and noêsis, and (2) it proves a better response to Heidegger’s critique of Platonic metaphysics.

Is mind a proper topic of investigation in Aristotle’s science of nature? The question is surprisingly vexed. Although some evidence suggests that mind should be studied by natural philosophy as well as first philosophy (metaphysics), Parts of Animals I.1 (641a32−b23) presents a series of arguments often construed as decisive evidence that he excludes mind from natural philosophy. This chapter goes through the relevant text and argues that Aristotle presents three arguments to exclude mind from nature but all in the voice of an opponent. Then in a final argument (641b23−642a1) he responds directly to the third argument, with indirect implications for the second argument as well.

While the rest of the book takes the form of a constitutional law text largely based on discussion of theory and court precedent, the prologue provides the lived, empirical day-to-day context out of which the project arose by sharing the stories of the ordinary people on whom the topics discussed have primary bearing. Moreover, given the grounded, ethnographic method from which the prologue’s scene-setting stories draw and the ‘constitutional ethnography’ to be applied more broadly as a methodology throughout the book, the prologue draws inspiration from qualitative scholarship’s emphasis on the need for researchers to state their positionality vis-à-vis the research. The prologue therefore describes the global transdisciplinary approach adopted in and through the book project which primarily builds upon critical Black, Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship developed in the Global South and by marginalised communities in the Global North.