Volume 39, Issue 1 -

Euthydemus is included neither in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker by Diels–Kranz nor in Sofisti. Testimonianze e frammenti by Untersteiner nor in Early Greek Philosophy by Laks and Most. Likewise, the great twentieth century works on the Sophists do not give space to him, at best mentioning him briefly. Yet Euthydemus is the author of a fragment, which was quoted by Plato in his Cratylus , and on which again there is no modern study. This paper sets out to study this fragment in depth, to review and discuss the various translations, both existing and possible, to study the context of Plato’s quotation, to clarify the exact meaning and the theoretical scope of this important fragment, and lastly to place Euthydemus in the Protagorean tradition, of which he is a notable product.

In Hippias Minor , Plato does not merely condemn Homer as a reference in ethical matters. He opposes two uses of poetry when it comes to referring to and giving meaning to it: poetry as a source of knowledge admitted and frozen by tradition, ethically normative, and poetry as a source of philosophical questions, conducive to ethical reflection. The debate shows that Socrates’ view of Homer, as well as his Homeric point of view, allow us to ask good and often paradoxical questions about the link between truth, falsity, knowledge and calculation, which are essential for those who want to build solid ethics. The dialogue then shows how the philosopher enriches the meaning of the Homeric text.

In Soph . 237b7–239a11 Plato lays out a sequence of arguments that are generally considered homogenous. An analysis of each argument can shed light on the need to differentiate their respective nature. Firstly, it will be shown that the arguments do not work only at the linguistic level, contrary to the way these passages are interpreted by most of commentators. The meta–linguistic nature of the third argument will be particularly emphasised. Secondly, it will be argued that the three arguments follow each other according to a crescendo . The implications of this argumentative structure will be specifically appreciated. Both these results of the analysis induce to attribute a crucial importance to the notion of medamos on : the arguments do not aim to definitively exclude the possibility of a Parmenidean non–being; they play a positive role within the inquiry of the Stranger of Elea, inasmuch the thematisation of Parmenidean non–being is seriously taken into account and embraced at this stage of the dialogue. In fact it is only through this dialectical step that the Stranger gains the chance to proceed in the direction of a relational ontology and a new concept of non–being. The positive role played by the medamos on presupposes that this expression and the equivalent ones are not mere absurdities and can find place in the Platonic use of language; this implies that the notion of medamos on must have a justification in the framework of Platonic relational ontology and conception of language. The consideration of this aspect eventually gives the opportunity to return to the three arguments and present an explanation of their positioning in that stage of the dialogue.

This paper focuses on the relation between version α of the seventh book of Aristotle’s Physics and the two byzantine families which shape the transmission lineage of most Aristotelian texts. To this end, it establishes a stemma codicum of all known manuscripts of version α. The first step reexamines Simplicius’ testimony in order to overcome the stemmatic problem arising from it: Simplicius’ statement that there was a version β for chapters 4 and 5 seems to be mere speculation on his part. This allows for the more plausible assumption that only the first three chapters of book VII were transmitted in two versions. The paper then deals with the witnesses of version α, which either transmit version α as a whole (e.g. Paris . 1859 – b, and Vind . 64 – J a ) or a mixture of the two versions (e.g. Vat . 1027 – H, and Vat . 241 – I, among Ross’s manuscripts). H and I are shown to stem from the same manuscript ι. ι was used by E 2 , who famously annotated Paris . 1853 and copied in its margins scholia derived from Philoponus’ commentary as well as κεφάλαια of book VII, both of which also feature in manuscripts close to H and I. Though ι is the source of both a version α (α ι ) and a version β (β ι ), the original version of manuscript ι was β ι . Therefore, version α cannot be associated with certainty to either of the two byzantine families of Aristotle’s natural works. Although version α may come from a now extinct third family, there is no trace of such a family in either Paris . 1859 (b) or Vind . 64 (J a ), which both got the text of book VII from the same manuscript φ. In any case, the evidence points to all direct witnesses of version α coming from only two sources: ι and φ.