Dialogue On The Sophist, Session 2: The Forms Whole And One

Is there relevance today, 2,400 years after Plato raised it in The Sophist, to the question of what “that which is” is? Participants from the Toronto Philosophy and Calgary Philosophy Meetup groups began with this question when they met on March 20, 2022 to discuss the second part of The Sophist, from 235(e) to 254(b), and pointed to the confusion that can now arise when for example technology is used to create “deep fake” images of events that never occurred. In Plato’s dialogue, the Visitor from Elea distinguishes “being” from “becoming” – the former is in an eternal, changeless realm accessible only to our minds’ reasoning, while the latter is the continuously changing physical world that our bodies and senses occupy. The Visitor defines “that which is” as having “capacity” or potential, in the context of which we revisited Socrates’ proposition in The Phaedo that all things come to be in opposites such that “that which is not” is an unspeakable, unthinkable logical contradiction to existence. We imagined the shape of opposites with reference to circles and triangles, and our dialogue proceeded to address the combination of the “Whole” containing parts with the “characteristic of being one” as a basis for reality according to Parmenides who was quoted by the Visitor. This led to a discussion of Plato’s theory of Forms and “that which is” as a third thing that arises between opposites, being therefore neither and having the capacity of either. We will explore the Forms in more depth as we reach the conclusion of The Sophist in our next episode, keeping in mind the Visitor’s presentation of the Forms as a harmony of their own mixture in which some Forms can exclude others, some are common to all, and some always cause division.