Un dibattito antico sulle strategie argomentative: Platone e la διαίρεσις come Begriffsspaltung

This contribution aims to offer an analysis of the literary form of the διαίρεσις in Plato’s Sophist, beginning with a reconstruction of the reflection that, in 5th- and 4th-Century Athens, Plato develops on argumentative strategies against the backdrop of the ancient debate on the modes of transmission of παιδεία. In the Book V of the Republic, Plato recalls the technique of antilogies and the form of argumentation conducted solely κατ’ αὐτὸ τὸ ὄνομα, referring here, as scholarship has recognized, to sophistry, to Protagoras and Prodicus, and to the reflection of other Socratic pupils, in particular Antisthenes. This discussion allows Plato to propose the διαίρεσις as an argumentative form suited to dialectic, in connection with the praxis of the division of the concepts (in Italian dialettizzazione dei concetti, in German Begriffsspaltung) that characterizes the philosophical and literary reflection in Hesiod’s Erga. The analysis of the seventh διαίρεσις of the Sophist, in the first and last sections of the dialogue, makes it possible to observe its relation to the reflection in Book V of the Republic and to the practice of Begriffsspaltung, with the adjectivization of the Begriff and figures of repetition. In the frame of the background of the ancient debate on argumentative strategies that emerges between the Republic and the Sophist, Plato thus composes the διαίρεσις as the form of the inquiry in common appropriate to the διαλέγεσθαι, never dogmatic, in harmony with Archaic poetry: it is the argumentative strategy, as the Eleatic Stranger states in the Sophist, that belongs to the philosopher’s ἐπιστήμη.