The Late-Learners of the School of Names: Sph. 251a8-c6: ὁ ἀγαθὸς ἄνθρωπος (the good man) and 白馬 (white horse)

Marion, Florian
(2024) Plato’s Sophist. Selected Papers of the Thirteenth Symposium Platonicum — ISBN: [978-3-495-99135-0], p. 227-236, published

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The focus of this contribution is on the ‘late-learners’ digression. In Sph. 251a8-c6, the Eleatic Stranger briefly discusses the view of some ‘young and old late-learners’ who hold that, from a logico-metaphysical point of view, unlike ‘a man is a man’ or ‘a good is good’, the statement ‘a man is good’ is neither a well-formed nor a grammatical sentence. Usually, modern commentators devote little energy to interpreting this passage since they are content to note that it suffic-es to discriminate identity and predication to avoid the sophism. The aim of this paper is to show that the position of the ‘late-learners’ is in fact more sub-tle than it seems, since it is widely open to many readings, and that the chosen reading of the digression has a direct impact on the general interpretation of the rest of the dialogue (communication of kinds, semantic distinction between names and verbs, etc.). To this end, the view of the ‘late-learners’ will be com-pared with a similar position discussed in a quite different philosophical ecosys-tem: the White-Horse Paradox forged by Gōngsūn Lóng, a dialectician of the ‘School of Names’. This paradox states that the sentence ‘a white horse is not a horse’ is true. Many readings of the White-Horse Paradox have been offered: some of these readings are the same as those suggested for the ‘late-learners’ view, but others are absent from the scholarly literature, although they provide interesting insights into the interpretation of Sph. 251a8-c6.
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Marion, F. (2024). The Late-Learners of the School of Names: Sph. 251a8-c6: ὁ ἀγαθὸς ἄνθρωπος (the good man) and 白馬 (white horse). In Luc Brisson; Edward Halper; Richard Perry (ed.), Plato’s Sophist. Selected Papers of the Thirteenth Symposium Platonicum (Verlag Karl Alber, p. p. 227-236). Verlag Karl Alber. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495991367-227