ABSTRACT
Before opening the Theaetetus, we should consider what doing philosophy with Plato is like. No one has had more philosophical progeny, major and minor: Aristotle – himself the master of legion Aristotelians – the Academic sceptics, the Stoics, Middle and Neo-Platonists, Schopenhauer (to name just one post-antique philosopher), all in their own very different ways are heirs to his legacy. And artists from Michelangelo to Shelley and Baron Corvo have drawn inspiration from his ideas. How can this be, when, for example, Aristotle in many writings takes Plato to task, or the sceptical Academy’s methodology of commitment-free argument could hardly be more different from the baroque edifice of Neo-Platonic metaphysics? Sometimes, even when a later philosopher works for the wholesale rejection of a predecessor’s (ostensible) conclusions, the questions which were raised remain in place, so that the predecessor’s perceived agenda is carried forward. Thus Aristotle does much of his philosophy within a Platonic matrix. In the Sophist, there is an argument directed against ‘Giants’, who believe that nothing but bodies exist. The Stoics are extreme materialists, who contend that the soul and the
virtues are bodies (in the Sophist, it was that very contention which served as a reductio ad absurdum of materialism), so how can they be located in the Platonic line of descent? The Sophist also formulates a criterion for saying that something exists, that it is such to act or be acted upon. Stoic causal theory argues that only bodies can enter causal relations;1 thus they take advantage of one part of the dialogue to discard another. The possibility of following Plato into either scepticism or grand metaphysics arises not so much from which portion of a dialogue or dialogues one accepts to the exclusion of others, as from divergent global attitudes to what the dialogues are, and how they should be read.
