Imitators of Truth

This chapter illuminates how, in the Sophist dialogue, Plato finally completes his theory of logos by developing his rhetorical theories of onoma and rhêma. Plato’s novel use of these terms defines them not as they typically but erroneously translated, as noun and verb, but as single word and longer phrase, the combination of which forms a complete logos. Plato formulates his theory of the statement by emphasizing the archaic meaning of the term onoma, which originally referred exclusively to the proper names of persons. By shifting the meaning of onoma from proper names to individual words, and then redefining rhêma as a longer combination of words and logos as a complete combination of phrases, Plato transfers the denominative properties of onoma to all logos. Thus logos denominates things in the material world in the same way that proper names do. By combining this theory of logos with the theory of mimêsis, explicitly referenced in the Sophist, Plato defines false speech as speech that provides a false representation of the things as they seem but not as they are. This birth of logos-as-statement would lay the template for the distinction between seeming and being in Western metaphysics.

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