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This chapter investigates the so-called method of division, purportedly used in the dialogue Sophist to give the essence of the sophist, i.e., of the sophistic art or expertise. The dialogue's enigma is that it offers not one but seven different definitions, all of them satirical or whimsical, and each purporting to be the account of what sophistry is. The chapter rejects readings on which each of these ‘definitions’, or just the final one — the sophist as a producer of images — is meant seriously as an account of what sophistry is. It argues that the initial assumption — that there is a definable expertise (technē) of sophistry — is one Plato can hardly have shared, given his criteria for what counts as a technē. The chapter concludes that in the Sophist Plato shows both how close sophistry and true philosophy are, and also how they differ — all this without intending the reader to assume that the method of division has revealed any essence of sophistry, since there can be no such thing.

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Questions about learning and discovery have fascinated philosophers from Plato onwards. Does the mind bring innate resources of its own to the process of learning or does it rely wholly upon experience? Plato was the first philosopher to give an innatist response to this question and in doing so was to provoke the other major philosophers of ancient Greece to give their own rival explanations of learning. This book examines these theories of learning in relation to each other. It presents an entirely different interpretation of the theory of recollection which also changes the way we understand the development of ancient philosophy after Plato. The final section of the book compares ancient theories of learning with the seventeenth-century debate about innate ideas, and finds that the relation between the two periods is far more interesting and complete than is usually supposed.