The aporia of Plato’s Cratylus dialogue

This short article does not intend to disagree with the philosophical tradition, which states that the Cratylus is an ‘aporetic’ dialogue. The aim of this paper is to raise the possibility that the Cratylus’s true aporia is not the excluding antagonism of conventional view by Hermógenes and naturalistic theory by Cratylus, but the question of the relationship between language and knowledge. Like Plato asks: can you know things without the aid of language? For this question that matter he does not have an answer in Cratylus. Thus, the aporia is configured. To find an answer to it we must use other Platonic dialogues, such as Fedun, Tiimaeus and Sophist.