Abstract
This paper considers the use that Plato makes of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) in his engagements with eristic refutations. By examining Plato’s use of the principle in his most detailed engagements with eristic—in the Sophist, the discussion of “agonistic” argumentation in the Theaetetus, and especially the Euthydemus—I aim to show that the pressure exerted on Plato by eristic refutations played a crucial role in his development of the PNC, and that the principle provided him with a much more sophisticated means of demarcating philosophical argumentation from eristic than he is generally thought to have. In particular, I argue that Plato’s qualified formulation of the PNC restricts the class of genuine contradictions in such a way that reveals the contradictions that eristics produce through their refutations to be merely apparent and that Plato consistently appeals to his qualified conception of genuine contradiction in his encounters with eristics in order to demonstrate that their refutations are merely apparent. The paper concludes by suggesting that the conception of genuine contradiction afforded by the PNC did not just provide Plato with a way of demarcating genuine from eristic refutations, but also with an answer to substantive philosophical challenges that eristics raised through their refutations.
Acknowledgments
This paper draws on material that was presented, in various different forms, to audiences at Princeton University, The University of Chicago, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Groningen, and The University of Crete. I am very grateful to audiences at these conferences for their helpful feedback. For feedback on earlier drafts of this paper I would like to thank Jonathan Beere, David Ebrey, Ronja Hildebrandt, Alexander Nehamas, Johanna Schmitt, Timothy Stoll, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. I owe special thanks to Hendrik Lorenz, who advised the dissertation from which some of this material is drawn, for reading numerous drafts, and for helping me develop these ideas. To Stephen Menn, for sharing with me his unpublished typescript “Aristotle and the Sophists,” from which I have learned considerably, and which has helped me to appreciate the significance of the concessions that Plato makes about eristic argumentation in texts like T7. And to Gabriel Shapiro for numerous helpful conversations about Plato’s resolution of apparent contradictions in the middle part of the Sophist, and elsewhere.
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