[Outside the Potts residence. JEREMY, JEMIMA, SOCRATES]

SOCRATES: Good day, young friends. May I inquire whether your father is at home?

JEMIMA: I’m sorry, Daddy is out.

JEREMY: He’s trying to sell an invention.

JEMIMA: Can we help you, Mr…?

SOCRATES: Socrates. My unworthy name is Socrates.

JEREMY: The Socrates?

JEMIMA: The one who appears in Cratylus?

JEREMY: Daddy’s been reading it to us at bedtime for the last week.

SOCRATES: Has he indeed! And what did you all think of it?

JEMIMA: He said you had som

Cratylus is one of Plato’s early-middle dialogues. It is somewhat puzzling for the modern reader, since much of the dialogue is taken up with fanciful folk etymologies of Greek words. Socrates is investigating whether the names of the Gods, heroes, citizens, or natural elements are meaningful, and in the process spins off etymology after etymology, each one more implausible than the next. The intention seems to be mockery; just as Plato earlier reveals the faulty logic of the sophists, so he exp ...more

Socrates is also satirizing the endless fertility of the human mind in spinning arguments out of nothing, and employing the most trifling and fanciful analogies in support of a theory.

So is the introduction to Cratylus dialogue. Socrates goes on a lengthy monologue as expected about the origins of words and their meanings. Essentially it's a satire on etymologists. Plato underhandedly accepts influences of foreign language (like Sanskrit) on Greek but doesn't explore in detail.

A bit lengthy for

The topic of Cratylus is the correctness of names – and hence the criteria that should determine the correct choice of name. On one side, Cratylus argues that there is a “correctness of name for each thing, one that belongs to it by nature”; on the other, Hermogenes stance is that the correctness of names is determined only by convention and agreement.
I do not believe that the same names could have been attached to quite different object and the same objects given quite different names (extreme ...more

On the importance of names and use of the right words and names

Plato's Crátilo is well-known for being philosophy's first foray into the field of linguistics. Only based on that, it should be required reading for anyone interested in the topic. I'd argue that additionally it should be read because, as most of Plato's early writing is really good at messing with your head. Here, our hero Socrates toys with the ideas of the titular character and a confused youngster named Hermogenes.

They discuss the origin of words, more precisely the nature of "naming". The

Socrates gives Hermogenes a brief lesson on mythological etymology.

A heavily satirical dialogue. Socrates argues language is historical, not arbitrary or metaphysical. Can we enjoy it as mocking deconstruction before the letter?

This will be my final Plato for the foreseeable future: I wanted familiarity with his major works, and I have that now. Cratylus is weird to modern readers because it considers a problem people haven't thought about in a long time and it honestly appears absurd to us today: the nature of naming, if people are named according to their nature or simply by convention? Most of us would pick the latter, and rightly so. The obvious problem with taking the former perspective is that naming a child by i ...more

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Ending arguments redeem the very boring extended parody of etymologists that comprises 60% of the book

On naming. Main arguments: proper naming method = closely resembling the thing being named; naming has element of convention, which allow bad names to persist.

On the proper naming of things.

MQ: Does correctness of names (ὀρθότης ὀνόματος) come from convention and agreement (συνθήκη καὶ ὁμολογία) or does it come from nature (φύσις)? Is there an innate/inherent connection between names and their referents (and if so, by what criteria were these names found/made)? Is it more accurate to think of a name as an instrument or as a likeness? If a name is an instrument, what is that instrument used for, and how is the instrument suited to its task? What is the role of language in platonic d ...more

“For as his name, so also is his nature” [Plato 395]

Cratylism throughout this narrative is an extreme naturalism: sign and signifier are so alike as to erase the gap between them. Hermogenes’ position is more relativist: the consequence is language cannot be language and so the LOGOS cannot disclose the thing.

Socrates and Hermogenes discuss whether names are identical to the thing named. The original “Cratylian” view is names are “fit” to the named. This leads Socrates into an extended genealogy

I've reached the conclusion that you can't actually go wrong with one of the Dialogues. With that in mind, Cratylus has, I think, lost some of its charm with age. A great deal of the fanciful etymologies (and more than likely, at least a little satirical) are, of course, related to Classical Greek. Without a deep knowledge of Classical Greek, a lot of the humour is gone.

Nonetheless, there is still a lot that's fun here. The general poking at etymology can be enjoyed for its own sake and a clear

I think that this book is highly relevant for Americans in 2019, even though this was written by a Greek living a long time ago, given the current kinds of cultural and political debates in America that center on language use (such as the merits of political correctness, gender pronouns, etc.). I think that the exploration of the uses and values of language in this book can help one better think through the current American arguments about the uses and values of language.

There wasn't as much philosophy as I would've expected here, and it seemed that most of the dialogue was etymology in prose. I'm sure a lot of the impact is lost through translation, and the poor translator kept having to provide transliterations. I found it a little interesting at just how many words Socrates was able to find a meaningful root for, especially the names of the gods, and I wondered how many of his educated guesses were actually right. I was even surprised when he was finally stum ...more

Naturally, and somewhat ironically considering the content of the dialogue, this would be a much more mind-blowing read if one spoke Greek. However, considering how much of the English language comes from the Greek routes, it is 100% worth it to wade through Socrates' etymological flexing. Anyway, all of that is less important than the spectacular discussion concerning the meaning of language, the difference between the sign and the signified, the possibility of truly knowing a thing, and the qu ...more

How do some strings of noise come to have meaning while others do not?
To tackle this problem is to understand the fundamental workings and structure of language, and from there grasp meaning itself. The most popular theory is that we choose a specific sound and agree upon a meaning, one we share for a given subject.

Plato considers this in the Cratylus, named after a radical follower of Heraclitus who famously said that because of constant flux we can't even step into the same river once. The tw

It is a difficult work, but I really enjoyed reading it.

During my investigation of the rule-following section of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigation, I came across one paper by Paul Livingston saying that Plato's Cratylus anticipates the Wittgensteinian discussion. Of course, there is a difference between an earlier work anticipating another later work in philosopher, and an earlier work being relevant to the contemporary discussion. I picked up this book and realised that there are indee

The first part can't all be gibberish. There are some things Socrates mentions in passing, without further investigation but as premises for the absurd etymologies, which are "Platonic common sense": that desire is a shackle, that the soul separated from the body is more susceptible to desiring virtue, that the good man is a daimonic man etc. Of these, some which might be worth investigating are the ones similar – including in phrasing – to things said in the Phaedrus: the soul as prime mover an ...more

I hate that I actually ended up liking this book a lot. A was debating giving it 4 stars instead of 3, but I just found the middle chunk of this book so boring and tedious. There was just WAY too much time spent explaining various word origins. I would think that Socrates would finally be done explaining word origins and then Hermogenes would go: "But Socrates, what about these other ten words???" Ugh.... the whole middle of this book was a complete drag. If you want to read 50 pages dedicated t ...more

Fascinating philological dialogue focusing on the deities, philosophical and scientific terms. Socrates' analogy of the use of hand gestures to communicate the "essence" of a word was especially helpful toward understanding verbal development since my wife is a sign language interpreter. Some ASL signs obviously represent a recognizable quality of an object or action, whereas others seem to have no such qualitative relationship. Also, in the dialogue, there's some epistemology of the primary ess ...more

Cratylus is about the process of naming things, and the manner of setting about doing this. As always, Plato's style is compelling, but he lived in a time and a culture where the meaning of personal names was reflected in the names themselves. This is not often the case today, and so the logic of his argument loses some of its force. However, the idea that knowing the name of something gives us power over the thing is an old idea with a long and fascinating history, and Plato's book speaks to th ...more