MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | HYPERBOLE: SENSE, SENSATION, SPECTACLE

Plato on the Possibility of a Reality-Based Community

March 25 @ 6 P.M.
Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

If false speech were impossible, then every claim about the world would be permitted. But how is it possible to speak about what is not? Famously, Plato solves this problem in the Sophist by defining the nature of not-being as the form of difference. This talk brings that problem and its solution into connection with some other startling metaphysical views argued for in the Sophist: that the forms are interwoven with each other as part of a “community” (koinonia), that it is due to this interweaving of forms that speech is possible, and that the forms must be said to experience change. In what sense can a set of abstract and timeless objects be said to experience change? Why is it important to Plato that they do so? And how does he think our practices of truth-telling and truth-seeking depend on this fact? This talk offers some provisional answers.