Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MARC COHEN
model.According
I'll call this alternativeto the cleanmodelthe superclean
to it, to define'sophistry'or'the sophist'is to enumerateall thoseForms
Fsuch that:
(i) theextensionof 'sophist'is includedin theextensionof d and
(ii) the extensionof F is includedin the extensionof the originaldivi-
dendForm, in thiscase,the Form technE.
(tt may be that the supercleanmodel is merelya more precisearticula-
tion of the crude model - I don't flnd the crude model in cornford clear
enoughto tell.)
Mr, X might be a sophist; but what we are accountingfor is not Mr. X and his cohorts,
but the art of sophistry, of which they partake.... [Wel name properties of the art of
sophistry, and not properties of individuals. E.g., sophistry is an acquisitive art - ac-
cording to some of the divisions - but Mr. X is clearly not; he partakesof an art which
in turn is acquisitive.Neither predication, nor Plato's participation relation are transi-
tive, starting with particulars.
In favor of the supercleanmodel is the fact that in it, unlike the clean
model, there is no confusionbetweenclassmembershipand classin-
clusion.Recallthat on the cleanmodel,eachdivisionyieldsa subclass of
the dividendclass,until we reachthe final division,which yieldsa member
of the dividendclass.(AcquisitiveArt is a classof arts; Sophistryis not a
classof arts, but an art.). So 'part', on the cleanmodel, has to cover
both the notion of class-inclusion and the notion of class-membership.
But on the supercleanmodel, parts are alwayssubclasses. The extension
of Art (: the classof artists)is divided into subclasses, one of which
would be, e.g.,the extensionof AcquisitiveArt (:the classof acquisitive
184 S. MARC COHEN
The method aims at giving the /ogosof some eidos,i.e., some abstract sin-
gular description of the eidosin terms of the parts of some suitably broad
genos.The method requiresthe following procedures:
( l ) It makes senseof the notion that Forms are divided into parts.
PLATO'S METHOD OF DIVISION 189
'animal'. If we want
a model which makesgoodliteral senseof thepart of
relation, we may have to go back to a model which givesus classesto
divide and is henceat leastpartly extensional.Here the cleanand super-
cleanmodelsrecommendthemselves;of the two, I preferthe latter.
University of Washington
NOTES
r I will adopt the practice of writing the names of Forms in italics, capitalizing the
initial letters.
2 At Soph,257C-258C, the Stranger offers the Not-Beautiful and,the Not-Tall as €xam-
ples of the parts of Dffirmce. If theseare Forms (which is controversial) they might
be thought of as Forms which specifyways of being different (e.g.,being 'different from
the nature of the Beautiful' (257D) is a way of being different). In this case, these
'negative' Forms
would be parts'(in the intended sense)of Dffirence.