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Platonic Puzzles and Meinongian Tools

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  • Renato Semaniuc Valvassori ,
  • Bárbara Helena de Oliveira Santos
Renato Semaniuc Valvassori
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil.
Bárbara Helena de Oliveira Santos
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1286

Published 2026-07-07

Keywords

  • No ser,
  • Metaontología,
  • Platón,
  • Sofista,
  • Meinongianismo
  • Non-Being,
  • Metaontology,
  • Plato,
  • Sophist,
  • Meinongianism
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate that contemporary Meinongian tools and theories can be employed to address the Platonic puzzles of non-being presented in the Sophist. First, we will (i) reconstruct the three aporias regarding non-being, focusing on how the Eleatic Visitor introduces and explores these problems, particularly the challenge of expressing what is not; secondly, (ii) we will briefly present what the three main neo-Meinongian trends are — the Nuclear, the Dual-Copula, and the Modal Meinongian trends; then, (iii) we will show how these three Meinongian perspectives can answer the Platonic aporias; and finally (iv), we will see which lessons we can learn from what we argued for, specifically in terms of the role of working on history of philosophy if you are an analytic philosopher.

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