Sophistry

Abstract

This chapter takes up Heidegger's lecture course on Plato's Sophist (G 19). It first addresses Heidegger's complex reading of Aristotle and Plato. Heidegger believes that Aristotle made advances over Plato in terms of ontological research and in terms of his understanding of language. But Heidegger also thought that Plato had a more original relationship to Being and to language than we do today. Thus, this chapter looks closely at the dimension of speaking within Platonic dialectic before then taking up the essential relationship between human existence and speaking. Heidegger rethinks our understanding of language from analyses of propositions to the disclosure of meaningful contexts in factical human life. The function of logos, therefore, is to disclose (deloun) through a context or manifold of words, the ways that factical human Dasein is in the world.