The Ethics and Social Justice Center is pleased to host Dr. Evanthia Speliotis this Thursday, Nov. 18 at 11am in GBCH 230. Dr. Speliotis is giving a talk titled, "Being and becoming in Plato’s Sophist." Abstract: Plato is widely understood to have believed in two distinct realms: the realm of forms and being, on the one hand, and the realm of natural objects and artifacts and becoming, on the other. In the Sophist, he challenges the traditional metaphysics typically ascribed to him through a debate between what he calls the “body people”—those natural scientists and physicists who believe that all that is real is bodily and material—and those he calls “the friends of the Forms”—who draw a sharp divide between being and becoming and claim that true being stands apart from and is independent of the world of becoming. Is the world just an endless "sea of becoming," ever changing, nothing fixed? Or, while there is obviously a world of becoming--the world of our everyday experience--is there also a realm of absolutes--in Plato's language, "forms" or "ideas"? The scientific approach to understanding the world, in Plato's day as in our ours, prefers the first approach. The second option is typically identified as a kind of idealism. Plato, however, challenges both views, on the grounds that neither accounts for thinking. (Can either the person who says "all that is is body" account for their own being and speaking? And can the person who draws a sharp divide between the realm of sense perception and experience, and the realm of fixed forms and ideas, account for thinking and learning, which seem to dwell in between and traverse the "space" from becoming to being?) For the purposes of this talk, I would like to examine Plato's challenge to and proposed reform of each of the two camps--the "body people" and the "friends of the forms"--and see what this reform highlights about the nature and activity of thinking and the being that thinks, and what is left unexplained or unaccounted for by either option by itself. For students of Plato, this challenges the standard understanding of his metaphysics. For those steeped in the modern world of science and social science, this invites questions about the extent and limit of materialism and physical processes to explain human thinking and action. Please join us! The event is free and open to the public. Masks required. Please direct all inquiries to Dr. Kate Johnson at kjohnson@bellarmine.edu.