Categories, Being and Not-Being: The Sophist in the Early Academy

This chapter argues that the Sophist prompted the reflection of the Early Academics on at least two main fronts: (1) the elaboration of binary divisions of entities (Xenocrates, Hermodorus, divisiones aristoteleae, Aristotle’s On the Good); and (2) the critical reaction to Eleatic monism, as it emerges especially from Aristotle’s Metaphysics N 2. In doing so, this essay also brings out ways in which this can shed light on aspects of the background of Aristotle’s ontology and theory of predication. Further, it re-discussed the problem, recently brought to scholarly attention, of the Early Academic composition of a textual canon functional to a work of systematization of Platonism.