The Ambiguity of 'Partaking' in Plato's Sophist

The Ambiguity of 'Partaking' in Plato's Sophist JAMES KOSTMAN IN THE CENTRALSECTION of the Sophist (25o-259), as Gregory Vlastos has shown,' statements about Forms or Kinds are subject to a certain structural ambiguity: 'The F is G' may be either an 'ordinary' or a 'Pauline' predication, in Vlastos' terminology; that is, it may either attribute being G to the F itself or assert that necessarily whatever is F is G. For example, 'Being is at rest' may assert either that the Form Being itself is at rest, in which case it is an ordinary predication, or that necessarily whatever is is at rest, in which case it is a Pauline predication." A few scholars have quibbled with Vlastos' interpretations of some of the passages on which he bases the claim that the ambiguity exists, but I find it surprising that, in the decade and a half since its publication, Vlastos' central thesis---that Plato was "utterly unaware" of the ambiguity--has never been directly challenged. After summarizing the evidence for the existence of the ambiguity in section 1 of this paper, I shall show in section 2 that the argument by which Vlastos concludes that there is "positive evidence" for his thesis is fundamentally incoherent. In the rest of this paper, I offer an argument, based on my analysis of two important passages (~,55c-e and 25oa-e ) and the relationship between them, that there is additional circumstantial evidence that Plato was not only aware of the ambiguity but allowed it to play a significant, though indirect, role in the overall argument of Soph. 25o-259 . To show this, I will first modify the terms of the problem. Statements about Forms in Soph. 25o-259 are analyzed in terms of certain relations between Forms expressed primarily by three verbs and their derivatives, which I ' Gregory Vlastos, "An Ambiguity in the Sophist," in his Platonic Studies, 270-322. This article will be referred to as 'AS'; all references to it and other papers in Platonic Studies are to the first edition. The name 'Pauline predication' was derived by Vlastos from the saying of St. Paul: "Charity suffereth long and is kind." [343] 344 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:3 JULY I98 9 shall refer to collectively as 'partaking-terms': metechein(which I translate as 'partaking of'); kointnein and its compounds with epi- and pros- ('combining with'); and metalambanein('participating in').3 Partaking-terms are interchangeable with each other (grammatical form aside) within any one context; but, from one context to another, they are subject to an ambiguity strictly parallel to that of the statements they are used to analyze. That is, partaking-terms, on any single occurrence of their use, may signify either one of two distinct relations. I call these relations 'partaking,' and 'partaking/. Thus, 'A partakes, of B' may be seen as Plato's analysis of the Pauline predication 'A is B', and 'A partakes, of B' may be seen as Plato's analysis of the ordinarypredication 'A is B.'4 Virtually every Pauline or ordinary predication in Soph.25~ 259 isaccompanied by an analysis in terms of partaking, or partaking,---either directly or through association with a directly analyzed statement falling on the same side of the Pauline-ordinary distinction. In addition, all those partaking-terms not occurring in analyses of particular statements may nevertheless be determined, with at least some degree of confidence, either to signify partaking, or to signify partaking,. Thus, the question of Plato's awareness of the crucial ambiguity depends on the evidence provided by all of the relevant occurrences of partaking-terms in Soph. 250-259. My study of this evidence shows that the relation signified by these terms switches from partaking, to partaking~ at a definite point in the text. I shall be arguing that this fact cannot be adequately explained without supposing that Plato was aware of the ambiguity. I. I offer first a brief summary of the evidence establishing the ambiguity of partaking-terms in Soph. 25o-259 . Partaking, is put to work primarily in 255e8-257al 2, where Plato considers pairs of true statements about Change (one of his five 'greatest Kinds', along with Rest...