Abstract

In the Sophist Plato singles out Being (on, ousia) as just one among the Kinds or Forms. I argue that the exploration of one main implication of Plato’s isolation of a Kind Being enables us to question aspects of an entrenched scholarly consensus about Plato’s conception of being, namely that for Plato ‘to be is always to be something’. By scrutinizing various passages from the second half of the Sophist, starting from 250a8-d3, I defend the view that when Plato metaphysically analyses ‘X is’ in terms of X’s participation in or combination with the Kind or Form of Being, he does not mean that X is something, or is itself, or is variously characterized (or similar), but that it exists.