Mentalities

Finished Cratylus

It was an interesting and semi-long dialogue. I guess you could say it’s “underrated,” only because I can’t really recall EVER hearing about it from someone else in any lecture or conversation. It certainly would have little chance of landing in a compilation of Plato’s Greatest Hits.

Cratylus basically explores the question of naming things. What is the relationship of a name to that which is named? Is there such a thing as true and false naming? What role does convention play, etc, etc. APORIA, one of the words explained, is also what we are left with at the end.

(Though when you get to the center of things, this work strives to show that certain concepts like “good” and “beautiful” are unchanging— you know, the Platonic forms. There are several references to Heraclitus here, and Socrates, who rarely (if ever) takes definitive stances, kind of wants to tell us the former is wrong.)