Plato on the Metaphysical Foundation of Meaning and Truth

Blake E. Hestir's examination of Plato's conception of truth challenges a long tradition of interpretation in ancient scholarship.

Blake E. Hestir (Author)

9781107132320, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 April 2016

286 pages
23.7 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.56 kg

'Blake E. Hestir's scholarship has consistently encouraged readers of Plato and Aristotle to pay closer attention to the rich, sometimes unexpected details of their conceptions of truth and falsity. This book is an accomplished, welcome extension of Hestir's efforts to date. I especially appreciated the impressive engagement with the Sophist's metaphysics and the patient accounting of Plato's conception of truth. For students of Plato's semantics and metaphysics more generally, Hestir's book offers lots of food for thought. I highly recommend it.' Christine J. Thomas, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

What is the nature of truth? Blake E. Hestir offers an investigation into Plato's developing metaphysical views, and examines Plato's conception of being, meaning, and truth in the Sophist, as well as passages from several other later dialogues including the Cratylus, Parmenides, and Theaetetus, where Plato begins to focus more directly on semantics rather than only on metaphysical and epistemological puzzles. Hestir's interpretation challenges both classical and contemporary interpretations of Plato's metaphysics and conception of truth, and highlights new parallels between Plato and Aristotle, as well as clarifying issues surrounding Plato's approach to semantics and thought. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of ancient Greek philosophy, metaphysics, contemporary truth theory, linguistics, and philosophy of language.

1. Introduction
Part I. Stability: 2. Strong Platonism, restricted Platonism, and stability
3. Concerns about stability in the Cratylus
4. Flux and language in the Theaetetus
5. The foundation exposed: Parmenides 135bc
Part II. Combination: 6. Being as capacity and combination: a challenge for the friends of the forms
7. The problem of predication: the challenge of the late-learners
Part III. Truth: 8. Predication, meaning, and truth in the Sophist
9. Plato's conception of truth
10. Truth as being and a substantive property.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology [HPJ], Philosophy [HP]