The Seal of the Author: Paradigm, Logos and Myth in Plato's 'Sophist' and 'Statesman'

Recent trends in scholarship on Plato’s philosophy have shifted emphasis from an almost exclusive focus on inductive and deductive logical techniques, and even ethics, to the treatment of image, myth and the literary dimension, above all in the work of scholars such as Kahn, Rowe and Gonzalez. In keeping with this trend, recent scholars, like Gill, Notomi and Collobert, have postulated the need for a philosophical image on the basis of a reading of the Sophist and Statesman. This thesis examines the unique significance given to the term ‘paradigm’ in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman. Paradigm is Plato’s term for image. A close reading of these dialogues shows, however, that such an image is “philosophical” or dialectical only insofar as it leads to a proportionate grasp of higher, invisible, ethical realities. This is the connection the specialist work on image in the Sophist and Statesman bears to wider scholarship on the literary dimension of Plato. Plato provides, in the Sophist and Statesman, three ways of making use of paradigms: (1) the use of an analogy, like the city and the soul and the weaving analogy, which is functionally equivalent to the analogy of the city and the soul, (2) an inductively defined universal essence, for example, the universal essence of a human being, like Socrates, and (3) an ethical character, like the Socrates Plato presents in his dramatic composition, or other characters presented in myth. The distancing effect Plato uses in the Sophist and Statesman suggests that Plato, himself, is the philosophical artist or image-maker. This is an important topic for one unifying reason. The question of a philosophical image in Plato remains unanswered or inadequately answered. Although the Sophist and Statesman treat this question, the exceeding technicality of these dialogues has lead commentators, unanimously, to treat the exploration of image and essence in these Eleatic dialogues, as a kind of island, separated from Plato’s work. My study, by leading readers of Plato to a greater awareness of the importance of these works for Plato on image and Plato as artist, turns this island into a peninsula