Names, Reference, and Correctness in Plato's Cratylus

Names, Reference, and Correctness in Plato's Cratylus
Author: Michael D. Palmer
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1989
Genre: Language and languages
ISBN:

The Cratylus unfolds as a confrontation between competing theses on the question of the correctness of names. Since Plato levels criticism against both theses, we are led to wonder whether Plato himself takes a position on the main issue. Dr. Palmer argues that we can discern in the Cratylus a positive statement of Plato's own views. Plato, unlike many contemporary theorists who follow Frege, does not presuppose that intensional entities such as concepts or meanings mediate the relation between a name and its nominatum. Plato believes that reality divides into discrete, natural units and that names are established, in part, to mark these non-conventional units. Plato holds (or at least assumes) that a name is correct if it successfully (and directly) picks out a real unit or entity, and if it aptly describes its nominatum.

The Cratylus of Plato

The Cratylus of Plato
Author: Francesco Ademollo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 559
Release: 2011-02-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139494694

The Cratylus, one of Plato's most difficult and intriguing dialogues, explores the relations between a name and the thing it names. The questions that arise lead the characters to face a number of major issues: truth and falsehood, relativism, etymology, the possibility of a perfect language, the relation between the investigation of names and that of reality, the Heraclitean flux theory and the Theory of Forms. This full-scale commentary on the Cratylus offers a definitive interpretation of the dialogue. It contains translations of the passages discussed and a line-by-line analysis which deals with textual matters and unravels Plato's dense and subtle arguments, reaching a novel interpretation of some of the dialogue's main themes as well as of many individual passages. The book is intended primarily for graduate students and scholars, in both philosophy and classics, but presupposes no previous acquaintance with the subject and is accessible to undergraduates.

Names and Nature in Plato's Cratylus

Names and Nature in Plato's Cratylus
Author: Rachel Barney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2001-08-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1135575703

This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the Cratylus. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method.

Plato's Cratylus

Plato's Cratylus
Author: Vladimír Mikeš
Publisher: Brill's Plato Studies
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2021-12-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9789004473010

"This volume is a collection of papers originally presented at the Eleventh Symposium Platonicum Pragense, held in Prague in November 9th and 10th, 2017. Some dialogues in the corpus of Plato's works have a straightforward importance, position and overall role. The Cratylus is not one of them. In this dialogue Plato touches on questions of longstanding importance to him - as we can conclude from other dialogues - and raises new questions which, given the space dedicated to them, should be worth asking when one is dealing with "correctness of names". And yet there has been wide disagreement about the dialogue's meaning"--

Theophrastus of Eresus: Life, writings, various reports, logic, physics, metaphysics, theology, mathematics

Theophrastus of Eresus: Life, writings, various reports, logic, physics, metaphysics, theology, mathematics
Author: Theophrastus
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1998
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9789004111301

This volume forms part of the large international Theophrastus project started by Brill in 1992 and edited by W.W. Fortenbaugh, R.W. Sharples and D. Gutas . Together with volumes comprising the texts and translations, the commentary volumes provide a new generation of classicists with an up-to-date collection of the fragments and testimonia relating to Theophrastus (c. 370-288/5 B.C), Aristotle's pupil and successor as head of the Lyceum. In the present volume, the focus is on natural philosophy, apart from the study of living things. Topics covered include the principles of scientific enquiry, place, time, motion, the heavens, the sublunary world, meteorology and the study of materials.

Plato's Cratylus

Plato's Cratylus
Author: Michael W. Riley
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9042018755

This book explains how the Cratylus, Plato's apparently meandering and comical dialogue on the correctness of names, makes serious philosophical progress by its notorious etymological digressions. While still a wild ride through a Heraclitean flood of etymologies which threatens to swamp language altogether, the Cratylus emerges as an astonishingly organized evaluation of the power of words.

Proclus' Commentary on the Cratylus in Context

Proclus' Commentary on the Cratylus in Context
Author: Robbert Maarten van den Berg
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2008
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004163794

This book explores the various views on language and its relation to philosophy in the Platonic tradition by examening the reception of Plato's Cratylus in antiquity in general, and the commentary of the Neoplatonist Proclus in particular.

Plato's Cratylus

Plato's Cratylus
Author: David Sedley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2003-11-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139439197

Plato's Cratylus is a brilliant but enigmatic dialogue. It bears on a topic, the relation of language to knowledge, which has never ceased to be of central philosophical importance, but tackles it in ways which at times look alien to us. In this reappraisal of the dialogue, Professor Sedley argues that the etymologies which take up well over half of it are not an embarrassing lapse or semi-private joke on Plato's part. On the contrary, if taken seriously as they should be, they are the key to understanding both the dialogue itself and Plato's linguistic philosophy more broadly. The book's main argument is so formulated as to be intelligible to readers with no knowledge of Greek, and will have a significant impact both on the study of Plato and on the history of linguistic thought.

Plato's Cratylus

Plato's Cratylus
Author: Georgios Anagnostopoulos
Publisher:
Total Pages: 736
Release: 1972
Genre: Language and languages
ISBN:

The Cratylus

The Cratylus
Author: Timothy M. S. Baxter
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1992
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9789004095977

This detailed discussion of the "Cratylus" aims to explain the function of the long etymological section within the dialogue as a whole, arguing that it represents a Platonic critique of common Greek ideas about names.