The Rhetorical Determination of Being

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the ontology of utopian discourse in Plato’s Republic.Plato defines the possibility of the philosopher ruler against the «sightlovers» and the «men of action».All these other kinds of men, that belong to the circles of the sophistic and rhetorical movement, are in fact described by Plato as «philodóxoi». This means that the demarcation of the true philosopher is founded against rhetoric in a theory of the art of government based on epistēmē and on a normative conception of being. Among the different senses of being in Platonic ontology, existential, predicative and veridical, Plato’s project of the art of government is founded in a normative conception of being,whose essential perfection is not based on mere existence but on the identity and unity of the form.Plato’s ontology, so defined and highly determined by his discussion with rhetoric, becomes the foundation of the paradigm for the construction of the ideal city, whose validity is not determined by the empirical existence of things.