The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in The Sophist. In that dialogue Plato introduced the idea of statements as being either true or false, where the distinction between falsity and truth rests on a deeper discrepancy between appearance and reality, or seeming and being.<\/p>\n
Robin Reames\u2019s Seeming & Being in Plato\u2019s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato\u2019s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship\u2014the rise and subsequent marginalization of \u201corality and literacy theory,\u201d Heidegger\u2019s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues\u2014Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato\u2019s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"