Dr. Ann Ward discussed Plato’s “idea of being” at CPSA

Political science professor Ann Ward presented her paper “The unfolding of being in Plato’s Sophist” during the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). The conference was held from rom June 12 to June 14, 2024 at McGill University in Montreal.

In her paper, Dr. Ward questions the scholarly consensus regarding the Platonic understanding of being, which views it as unchanging. She points to his dialogue the Sophist, in which Plato considers whether being can in fact change or is in motion. According to the Eleatic Stranger, the main interlocutor of the dialogue, who defines being as the power to act or to be acted upon, when the being of things such as justice is thought, it is moved. Thus, as Dr. Ward argued in the paper, not only do the beings of things such as justice unfold to the human mind over time, but as the human mind thinks the beings over time it contributes to what they are. 

The paper presented at CPSA is part of Dr. Ann Ward’s larger project in which she will explore whether the understanding of being as unfolding and changing developed by the Stranger in the Sophist is more suited to democracy, as it gives freedom to the thinker to participate in the creation of meaning.