Delosis of the Cosmos. The Semantics of Hieros Logos in Ancient Platonism

Abstract

The present paper opens with some remarks on John Lyons’ groundbreaking work Structural Semantics and aims at discussing some crucial features of Plato’s philosophy of language, with a focus on his semantics and the many challenges we are presented with when reading Plato’s dialogues, the Cratylus in particular. Indeed, the Cratylus offers a number of arguments both in favour of linguistic naturalism and linguistic conventionalism; I argue that the first and the third portions of the dialogue are not sufficient in order to explain the complexity of the Platonic notion of logos. The paper also argues that we need to explain and challenge Plato’s understanding of the notion of hieros logos in the Cratylus and beyond.