History of Philosophy Commons^™

Platonic Agonism: A Dialogical Addendum To Plato’S Sophist, Bennett Foster

Sophia and Philosophia

The following addendum to Plato’s Sophist was fabricated as a kind of experimental answer to a specific contextual question: What is the relation of Plato’s conception of philosophy to the practice of the agōn in Ancient Greece? For the “contest-system,”[1] to adopt Gouldner's phrase, has long been recognized as one of the salient features of Greek culture in the centuries leading up to Plato’s time.[2] Yet in the dialogues Plato never gives an explicit critique of the agōn the way he does other cultural phenomena, such as politics, poetry, rhetoric, education, etc. Many scholars have therefore concluded that Plato is …