Location: 451 College St. B04 Seminar room
Phantasia in Plato’s Sophist
Abstract
In this paper I argue that Plato recognises two kinds of appearances, phantasiai, in the Sophist. On the one hand are the objective appearances of things, accessible to us either through direct perception of the thing, or an imitation of it, and on the other hand are the cognitive states that arise in us through one or the other of these experiences. The things the sophist produces, word-images, are mimetic and are categorised as semblances, phantasmata. These, I argue, are defined as images that are crafted only with a view to the appearance of the subject they depict for the audience, and in complete disregard of the way the subject really is, independently from appearances. Like the semblances produced by the visual and plastic arts, then, they are epistemically unreliable, and may be true or false in relation to the subject depicted. The sophist’s word-images, however, are especially likely to be false, since the sophist’s statements and arguments are unconstrained by any pre-existing knowledge of their audience, and they are willing to controvert about everything, being as prepared to assert P as not-P (for any claim). Cognitive phantasiai arise passively via perception: perceived beliefs. They count as beliefs in having a propositional structure whereby some property or quality is asserted or denied of some subject, and so are truth-apt. Among the phantasiai that arise from experience of semblances (as opposed to faithful likenesses), cognitive agents are particularly doxastically vulnerable to the semblances produced by sophists, which are not only epistemically unreliable but in a majority of cases, false.
